3-year strategic plan in digital education
For a leading international digital education platform, supported a new leadership team to develop a successful 3-year strategy.
Working closely with the CEO and his teams, we rapidly defined the strategy and supporting initiatives to deliver it, engaging throughout the business to ensure a shift to close alignment with a mission that combined commercial impetus with a strong educational purpose. The client has gone on to successfully implement the first stage of the plans and is ahead of target on a host of initiatives.
Context
The newly appointed CEO of a leading international digital education platform had a mandate to set a clear strategy for the organisation after taking the reigns from an interim CEO. With a mostly-new executive team, and just weeks to prepare the strategy for communication to staff and the market, the CEO needed support to develop a 3-year strategy.
This was to require a highly collaborative process that would foster alignment across the business. Strongly motivated by its educational mission, the organisation had historically not aligned behind the commercial impetus necessary to the business’ survival. Now was the moment to win their support.
Approach
Working hand in hand with the CEO, we began by defining the strategic ambition, assessing the business’ existing capabilities and weaknesses, and providing in-depth analysis to fill gaps in the strategic fact base. Then, through extensive engagement and workshopping with internal teams, with leaders tasked to define elements of the plans themselves, we developed the strategy and supporting initiatives, resulting in widespread buy-in and alignment.
We provided continued ‘light touch’ support for a further c.3 months, bringing structure, rigour and challenge to the development of an operating plan and its implementation.
Impact
Our client is successfully implementing the operational plan, with highlights including the launch of a new product, and ahead-of-target progress on a host of initiatives including updates to the business model, content strategy, and pricing approach.