Improve Your Business
Knowing what to do
is more important than knowing how to do it...
“Anyone can learn how to do something…
…it’s knowing what to do first that really counts!”
– Ainsley Bilton, Creator of ESF
The Entity Stage Framework platform and methodology provides everything you need to map, understand and improve your business in line with your strategic objectives. Scroll down to find out what it’s all about.
Do you want to start your digital transformation programme? find out where your carbon footprint is the highest? understand where your biggest risks are? pinpoint where your most expensive processes are? identify where the complexity lies within your business? understand the people and systems that make your business work?
Get to know your business...
Make Sure You Know Where You Are
Entity Stage Framework, or simply ESF, will help you understand your business in ways you never imagined! It provides a context specific framework that allows you to overlay key questions about your business to gain insight into where to start improving it.
Stop wondering about what to do next...
Find a Direction For Your Business to Follow
Identify and target the parts of your business that require attention using a combination of data driven insights and your own strategic objectives. Create your own, or use one of the many pre-defined Question Sets to help you understand what your business needs.
Three Simple Steps to Success
How Does ESF Work?
Entity Stage Framework is a context framework designed to provide a simple model against which all business data, knowledge and insight can be analysed. ESF provides data-driven insight into every part of your business and enables you to identify areas you should be focusing on to reach your goals and objectives.
Step One
DEFINE
Define your entities, stages and associated systems and people to form the foundations of your change programmes.
Step Two
ANALYSE
Gain an understanding of the relationships between business knowledge and strategy.
Step Three
CHANGE
Target identified weaknesses within your business to meet your strategic objectives.
Streamline Your Process
Implement ESF With GRASP
Getting started with ESF isn’t hard as long as you know which systems to look at, which people to involve and which questions to ask. The GRASP methodology was designed to help you streamline the ESF implementation process.
It is, quite simply, a set of steps you need to follow in order to ensure you’re getting accurate insights from your business knowledge to facilitate targeted change.
First things first, you need to build a solid foundation for your investigation by identifying and gathering the people and the systems associated with each of the entity lifecycles you’re looking into.
You will need to gain a deep understanding of the roles they play, the impact they have on the entity lifecycle and the relationships they have with each other. This will help you identify the questions you need to ask in order to obtain meaningful responses.
Whether you’re making good use of the pre-defined question sets or you have come up with your own, this step is all about capturing business knowledge.
Make sure the subjects of your questions understand why you are requesting these and what is expected of them. The cleaner the answers, the higher the chances of drawing accurate conclusions when carrying out your analysis.
Once you have collected enough responses, it’s time to analyse them in line with your objectives. Assuming that you asked the right questions, you should start seeing areas of weakness within your business related to your strategic objectives.
Make sure you collect enough data to make your results significant and reliable. Consider using a professional to carry out the analysis and prepare reports.
If you can’t measure it, you can’t change it!
Taking a snapshot of your starting point will provide a benchmark for later comparison and allow you to understand how much you are improving.
It is very important to include all the information you will need later on, leave no stone unturned. At the same time, only focus on things that can be measured and compared.
Now that you have a baseline, the ESF recommendation report will provide you with the details of what needs to change, what systems are involved and who to engage with.
Use this report to plan your workload to address the issues you have identified. Never lose track of your objectives, you have to remain focused and disciplined.
Work with other stakeholders, communicate your plans clearly and request feedback. Regular consultations will help you ensure that your implementation plan is rock-solid and covers every possible angle.
Need Help
Implementing
ESF?
Of course, you can take the do-it-yourself approach if you wish.
If you want guaranteed quality, you can hire a certified partner to help take you through the process to ensure it all goes well. You decide the extent to which you need their help.
An Answer to Every Question
What Question Sets Are Available?
There are a number of curated context-specific question sets to allow you to focus on what really matters to you. Select specific or mix and match questions from one or more sets to create a bespoke question set that targets your strategic objectives.
Financial Performance Set
Learn where your money is going and how to reduce costs.
Process Performance Set
Identify where your processes are slow and improve overall performance.
Portfolio Management Set
Learn what your teams are working on, how well the work is being managed and target areas of improvement.
Governance & Compliance Set
Find out where your corporate standards, policies and governance is being applied and target areas of improvement.
Business Value Set
Find out which parts of your business provide the most value and target low value areas for improvement.
Business Capability Set
Build up and understand your core business capabilities.
Equalities Set
Understand your BAME workforce and levels of equality throughout your business.
Environmental Set
Discover the environmental impact parts of your business has and identify areas of improvement.
Information Governance Set
Understand where your data is being governed well, your GDPR responsibilities and identify areas of improvement.
Data Architecture Set
Understand your data architecture, models, taxonomy and other artefacts and identify areas for improvement.
Data Quality Set
Poor quality data costs 10x more to manage than good quality data! Find out where your poor quality data is and identify areas for improvement.
Wellbeing Set
Understand how well your workforce is feeling and identify ways in which you can improve their wellbeing.
As you can see, there are plenty of question sets to get you started. The question sets can be purchased individually or as a bundle. Once you have the question sets, you can create your own custom sets by cherry picking relevant questions from different sets in order to carry out bespoke analysis.