In Ireland, the past months have been characterised by much uncertainty and a number of stops and starts in the construction industry. In particular since January 2022, there has been significant construction cost inflation resulting in increases and uncertainty in forecast development costs for projects due to these escalating costs. Decision makers need to have a range of tools available to decide which projects to prioritise, particularly when delays occur and assumptions change as they have done in the past 12 months. Q4 is always a good time to review projects and reset priorates for the next year.
 
With significant changes in project assumptions on account of global market political and economic uncertainty, not least changes in timing, costs and revenues, there may be possible knock-on impact on other projects. You need to be able to consider how to prioritise projects in a portfolio. This paper (download here) illustrates an approach to prioritisation of a portfolio of projects with a case study on a residential development.

Recently on a turnaround project we had to develop a way to bring a remotely based   existing team together to complete a project in the middle of Lockdown 3.0. With Covid having delayed the project significantly the team needed to relaunch and start to put in place high performing behaviours to complete the project.

​Using the team canvas an online workshop was developed and using MS Teams and Miro the workshop was delivered online using the approach (keo_consult_team_canvas_workshop.pdf) outlined above.

Project now underway again and the team looking forward to getting boots and hard hats on again onsite. ​

With many employees currently working remotely from home, and with some projects paused, it could be time for many small businesses to look at a number of areas that usually are long term projects but can easily be run remotely.

One such area is your website. Whether a light wipe or a deep clean a periodic review of your website should be part of scheduled activities in your firm.

This checklist gives an step by step approach to a review of your website. Hope it is helpful.

​keo_consult_website_review_checklist.pdf

Our previous article about developing a social media approach may also prove useful at this time

www.keoconsult.com/knowledge/developing-and-delivering-a-social-media-strategy-for-professional-services-firms 

Ireland as we know is experiencing an ongoing chronic housing shortage which is contributing significantly to the homelessness crisis in Ireland – the critical issue needs an innovative approach to develop a solution. How can elements of the lean startup approach used in the entrepreneurial world be used to analyse a public problem and start to develop solutions? In particular, how can a lean concept such as the Business Model Canvas (BMC) be used to start to think about what a solution might look like and how it logically might fit together?
 
The Business Model Canvas is a strategic management and lean startup template for developing new or documenting existing business models. It is a visual chart with elements describing a firm's or product's value proposition, infrastructure, customers, and finances.
 
The Business Model Canvas has given a good framework to start to think about building businesses where generally the aim is to earn more money than you spend. What if you’re local or central government, a public body or part of the not-for profit sector? In these cases, you don’t earn money (all the time!), but you mobilise resources and a budget to solve a particular problem and create value for a given group (e.g. HSE – service recipients, GPA – players, SEAI – households & companies, Arts Council – the general public, NTA – drivers on the countries roads, etc.).
 
With a focus on benefits delivered over revenue and profitability the Business Model Canvas needs four tweaks to make is a useful tool in this sector:

• Customer Segments is changed to Beneficiaries
  
• Cost Structure is changed to Programme Costs/Budget
  
• Channel is changed to Programme Deployment Route
  
• Customer Relationships is changed to Buy-In
  

Taking the current housing crisis as a case study the attached article explains the how and why of these changes to the original Business Model Canvas to make it more useful for the Public and Not-for-Profit sectors and illustrates how it could be used.

business_model_canvas_in_not_for_profits.pdf