Agricultural Consultancy Case Study - From Stables to Tables

“The course was an enormous success, we were very impressed with the quality and style of lecturing Steria provided. Their experience and professionalism were very apparent to all throughout the duration of the course. All the delegates benefited from attending.” Managing Director of Agricultural Consulting Organisation.

Challenge

The BSE crisis dramatically underlined the importance of establishing a comprehensive and reliable register of animals within the European community in order to re-establish stability in the beef and beef products market. In the UK, cattle passports were made compulsory with effect from 1 July 1996 but the devastating, and highly publicised, effects of BSE made the EU resolute in their decision to ensure that such a crisis never happens again.

Response

Steria worked with a number of Eastern European countries to develop a strategy and highlevel plan to introduce animal registration and tracking systems. Steria provided a two-week, tailored seminar and workshop programme to enable 40 delegates from 14 Eastern European countries to create concrete, practical plans for selecting an appropriate supplier of an animal registration and tracking system and implementing the chosen system. This exercise included creating individual business cases and likely expenditure for each country - the plans and business cases were to be presented to the home nation governments on the delegates’ return. In addition, Steria consultants provided some enhanced knowledge and insight into managing such a project. Delegates included very senior vets, IT specialists and senior Government officials. Either a vet, IT specialist or both were represented from each country.

Outcome

Working with such a diverse group of people was always going to be demanding; in addition to the cultural and political differences, there were also language barriers — eased by the use of interpreters. However, the course ran incredibly smoothly.

Consultancy Services

Steria's range of Consultancy services makes a lasting difference to our clients. Change is only effective when it has direction. Change is not straightforward. Only through thorough analysis, assessment and planning can the change process hope to meet its objectives. When providing consultancy services we know that it is important for organisations to address both internal and external factors as well as getting employees to own and commit to the change process. Steria realises that barriers to change may exist in a business due to culture or technology. To combat these factors, we emphasise the promotion of understanding, ownership and commitment to the change process by our clients' employees. Real value is delivered through the transfer of our capabilities to clients and their staff resulting in a lasting performance improvement. Examples of our range of services include:

  • Coaching and Mentoring
  • Interim Resourcing
  • Health Checks


Coaching & Mentoring

A specialist range of coaching and mentoring services are available through one-to-one, telephone and on-line support methods. Our programmes cover all roles from the Chief Executive, through to Programme and Project Managers, Project Support Officers, Operations Managers and Service Managers. Coaching is also available for examination preparation and post examination support Interim Resourcing. Our consultants have a long history of providing interim resources to support clients in a number of programme, project and service management roles.

Health Checks

Best practice will always call for some form of project review. Many organisations used to limit these to 'Post Implementation Reviews'. All too often these degenerated into witch-hunts, despite frequent claims to the contrary. There is nothing wrong with the concept of a post implementation review. Ideally, it should be the last of several reviews. By undertaking reviews during the life of the project, it is possible to apply any learning towards improving the outcome of the project, rather than 'learning valuable lessons from the failure of the project'. These are health checks, as they are geared towards detecting problems, and taking corrective action. The number of health checks and the scope of them will depend on a number of variables including the following project attributes:

  • Size
  • Criticality
  • Nature / functions
  • Duration
  • Budget

At the very least, health checks determine if the project is complying with standards and procedures including the project methodology. They can also compare projects to 'best practice' or 'common practice' and look for common problems. Health checks need to be done by experienced people who are conversant with current project management techniques. Their experience will be essential in looking for common project problems, and working within standard methodologies. We suggest using staff from your project office, project managers who are not currently assigned, or specialist consultants such as Steria.

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