Maxxim Consulting has announced a number of senior level staffing appointments in a continued period of growth for the business.

Following the recent liquidation of 7days Limited, the London-based consultancy has hired three senior consultants from their former competitor.

Ian Hunter, 48, who was an Associate Director at 7days, will be joining Maxxim Consulting as a Partner focusing on organisation design, employee engagement, corporate restructuring and HR, finance and IT transformation.

Andy Nice, 34, who held the position of Principal Consultant for several years at 7days, will be joining Maxxim as Senior Engagement Manager, looking to develop organisation design, strategic change and cost reduction opportunities in media, retail and telco sectors.

Matt Keen, 36, who was a senior consultant at 7days, is an expert in retail, media, financial services and corporate restructuring. Matt is joining to support Maxxim’s change, organisation design and HR practices.

Anna Simpson, 27, worked as a consultant at 7days, is joining Maxxim to focus on organisation design and development, organisational change, and employee engagement.

The new signings will join the existing team to work across a client portfolio including The Royal Mail, Meggitt, Smiths Group, the Cabinet Office, Wolseley, the Prudential and Lancaster University.

These latest appointments follow the hiring of Tim Ringo, former Vice President and Global Leader of IBM’s human capital management consulting practice, who joined the consultancy as a partner earlier in the year.

Co-founder of Maxxim Consulting Claire Arnold says: “I am delighted that such a strong team from one of our competitor organisations have decided to join Maxxim. Together they bring deep expertise that will both build on our own capabilities and provide an opportunity to break into new markets.”

Hunter says: “Maxxim is a strong and trusted brand. The professionalism and seniority of its team make it an attractive partner for those on the boards of major public and private sector institutions who are tasked with delivering excellent results in these turbulent times. I and my colleagues are delighted to have joined.”

Source:  www.top-consultant.com

Claire Arnold, Co Founder of Maxxim Consulting looks at how organisations can cut costs whilst maintaining the quality of their products and services.

Over the last three years, since the first wave of the recession hit the UK, CEOs across the country have been under intense pressure to save money and manage their expenses. At the same time, however, there is pressure on businesses to continue providing the same quality of services and products that they always have, and not let their standards drop even if their budget has been dramatically cut.

Cuts in the public sector have been particularly debated in recent weeks following the riots which took place across the UK as people question whether the police are able to accommodate the proposed dramatic cuts to their budget without reducing numbers on the streets. Similarly, questions are being asked as to how the NHS can cut their already stretched budget even further without sacrificing the standard of patient care.

It is not just the public sector that is being stretched however, but the private sector is equally under pressure to manage and justify its costs. With simultaneous pressures to manage costs and provide quality services it seems like businesses have to fight a losing battle, but in my opinion, it is possible to do both.

At Maxxim, we have worked with a number of businesses who have been trying to manage their costs without reducing their services. Meggit, for example, a global aerospace manufacturing company, actually grew and entered the FTSE 100 for the first time whilst simultaneously reducing costs across the organisation by 10%. Similarly, another of our clients, Royal Mail managed to save over 22% of management costs across the corporate centre.

When a company asks us to help them manage their expenses, the first thing we do is calculate how much it costs to run the business as it stands. It is all too easy for businesses to grossly underestimate their daily running costs and indeed when we calculate what it actually costs to run a business, the senior staff tend to be shocked. CEOs and even Finance Directors can to view their business in parts rather than as a whole and as a result when you pull together the true financial baseline, and all the costs across finance, HR, sales and marketing it can be quite surprising.

The second step in investigating expense management is investigating what is important to the company. It is vital to remember, that money does not only come in the form of a budget but, to use the age-odd cliché, time is money. For this reason at Maxxim we run a series of workshops to find out how much time employees spend on each area. It is essential to match up how long a process takes, and how important that process is to the company’s customers – ensuring that time and costs match with the value added. For example, if a company finds an employee is spending 25% of his time on X, and only 5% of time on Y, and you find a client is more interested in Y than in X, you have to consider whether X is really a necessary process.

Once a company has investigated their expenses and where their money goes, it can start looking at ways to save money. At Maxxim, we believe there are four golden rules of how to save money.

The first rule is to work methodically. When a company is undergoing cost cutting reviews it is all too easy to get overexcited and try to take on too much. Just like an individual shouldn’t try to move house, train for a marathon and start a new job all in the same week, a company needs to be able to prioritise their cost cutting, and ensure they work effectively and systematically in one area, rather than trying to do too much at once.

Secondly, when cutting costs, senior staff members need to work with their teams to put processes into practice. Cutting costs is an exercise you do with your team, not to them. When cutting costs, CEOs and Financial Directors must be careful not to be seen pulling rank, and ordering staff to make changes without making changes themselves; otherwise this results in frustrated, miserable employees who are not dedicated to ensuring the financial future of the company.

Although it is essential for senior staff members to work with their staff to put processes into practice, they also have to ensure staff are truly implementing the changes. Senior staff must ensure they stamp their authority and that staff are actively using the new, improved methods to create real, significant improvements.

The final golden rule of cost cutting is not being afraid to change your mind as the process progresses. In order to successfully change procedures, it is essential to be fluid and adaptable. A process may not be perfect the first time and will naturally suffer from teething problems, but you can either spend time on a process that doesn’t work, or be flexible and adjust it to a process that does work. This involves listening to feedback from staff at every stage. Rather than wasting valuable time and resources on processes that don’t work, you may be better off spending time looking for a new process that does.

Although it is difficult for a company to cut costs whilst simultaneously maintaining the standard of service it provides, with careful expense management and cost cutting measures reducing costs doesn’t have to have a negative impact on performance. Although the future is unclear for the NHS and Police, cost cutting measures can have a real and significant benefit to a company whilst maintaining their standard of service.

Source:  www.top-consultant.com

I often express here the view that consultancy—and its client base—is crying out for more innovation. But I do worry that after 20 years of writing about the sector, I may have turned into one of those journalists who think they have seen it all when in fact they haven’t.

So I was relieved the other day when talking to Tim Ringo, a partner in corporate restructuring and redesign specialists Maxxim Consulting, to hear a consulting proposition I genuinely hadn’t heard before.

Maxim’s “angle”, Ringo explained, was to ask “What is the role of the business centre with regard to the business units?” This immediately struck me as a great position for a consultancy to take. Often consultants either get only a partial or silo view of an organisation or are locked into an enterprise-wide transformation that can only be dealt with by deploying hundreds of bodies. The holy grail for consultants is to find a point where maximum visibility of the organisation is combined with the opportunity for a small number of consultants to make a difference—and this often overlooked relationship seems like just such a point.

“We think it’s a great question to ask,” says Ringo. “Any CEO should be asking that question all the time—and there isn’t any right answer to that.”

However, most organisations tend to fall into one of two very polarised camps: either the centre is very small and weak, or very powerful and drives everything.

“Those that are between these two polar ends are very few and far between,” says Ringo. Using a four quadrant model Maxxim helps clients work out where they are and take a more nuanced approach to where their organisation should sit.

“The trick is, how do you assess the value of moving from where you are to where you should be,” says Ringo. “It starts from an intuitive standpoint but there does need to be a business case, so we have tools and methods to figure out what the value is. People welcome the idea once they understand it, but the organisation has to explain the why’s and the wherefore’s.”

Getting people aligned to these changes is vital if new organisational structures and process are to work.

“In my experience the majority of change programmes relate to large SAP or Oracle implementations,” says Ringo. “I’m not a fan of driving change that way. The system becomes the change and sucks up all the oxygen. People get lost in the weeds of the ERP system, and HR, finance and supply chain end up being dictated to by the CIO.”

Maxxim has been going since 2001, but Ringo has only joined this year with a remit to strengthen the human capital side of the offering. His interest in the field goes back to 1992 when he was with Accenture and helped found its talent optimisation practice. After five years he moved to a similar role at IBM as global leader of its human capital practice.

“I decided I’d had enough of big IT corporations and all the travel,” he says. “I wanted to be more of a specialist—the big consultancies seemed to be getting more and more specific, whereas I wanted to be more specific.”

By contrast Maxxim is small—25 fee earners and roughly as many associates—but growing rapidly and working mainly with CEOs. It stretches across sectors and functions in a way that Ringo believes means it should not be considered as a niche player.

“There’s a gap in the market—companies are restructuring but how to get people aligned is often seen as an afterthought, whereas we see it as critical,” he says. There’s also a new point of entry—HR directors who are experiencing in miniature Maxxim’s core proposition, as they try to figure out the role of their unit.

Ringo believes that human capital is the “last bastion” where any real quantum change can be achieved in organisations.

“HR is changing to be more advisory, and we see that continuing in the future but with the addition of data analytics,” he says. “Whether it likes it or not HR has to be able to back up its reasoning the way a head of supply or a CFO can do. If you talk to the top companies, their HR directors can sit in the boardroom and talk data and costs rather than just ‘this feels right.’”

To help companies set up that capability and mindset, Ringo has written a book on workforce analytics, which is called Calculating Success and comes out later this year.

In the meantime Maxxim is looking to continue its double digit growth by exploiting the human angle.

“We are hiring, we are look for interesting people with deep talent management expertise,” says Ringo. “We’re very deep in it, not only with our own people but our associates, many of who are former HR directors or heads of talent management.”

This strikes me as an intriguing way for a consultancy to expand—making its offering deeper and more resonant at a time when many consultancies are spreading themselves more and more thinly as they seek to “leverage” themselves over more functions and sectors. Will that human angle become a more dominant force in consultancy? I wouldn’t bet against it.

Source:  Top-Consultant

London-based consultancy Maxxim Consulting appointed Tim Ringo, former Vice President and Global Leader of IBM’s Human Capital Management consulting practice, as partner.

Ringo has more than twenty years experience in helping clients with organizational change and workforce performance through the implementation of effective talent management strategy, processes and technology.

Prior to working with IBM, Ringo spent 16 years at Accenture where he was Executive Partner in Accenture’s Human Performance Service Line.

Claire Arnold, managing partner at Maxxim Consulting, commented on the appointment: “We are delighted to welcome Tim to the Maxxim team. He brings a wealth of expertise and knowledge in how to engage and align an organisation’s people to corporate centre strategy and objectives. Combining his deep expertise with our successful track record of helping our clients align the structure of their business to achieve strategic goals, will add enormous value to Maxxim’s team and to our clients.”

Commenting on his appointment, Ringo said: “I am immensely excited about joining Maxxim. This is a dynamic and fast growing consultancy with a superb team and an excellent reputation for delivering the highest quality service to all its clients; which include some of the UK’s leading institutions, such as the Royal Mail Group and Oxford University. I’m very much looking forward to playing my part in building on the firm’s great track record.”

Source:  Top-Consultant