Advancing Business Capability Drives Transformational Success
North Highland has a one-team concept with a commitment to deepening relationships.
Overview
North Highland is a global employee-owned consulting firm headquartered in the US serving a client base that includes the world’s largest organizations in business, government and non-profit. North Highland employs over 5,000 consultants across the globe in more than 65+ offices. Improving the success rate of large-scale digital transformations led North Highland to closely examine the root cause and obstacles hindering success.
North Highland
Industry: Consulting
Location: Global
Size: Over 5,000 Employees
Company Bio
North Highland makes change happen, helping businesses transform by placing people at the heart of every decision. It’s how lasting progress is made. With our blend of workforce, customer and operational expertise, we’re the world’s leading transformation consultancy. We break new ground today, so tomorrow is easier to navigate.
Business Challenges
Looking ahead at future fit experience, North Highland focuses on supporting its business analysis professionals of the future. By cultivating and educating their talent North Highland ensures employees are continuously learning and developing their skills. Through IIBA corporate membership North Highland team members have participated in study groups in preparation for multiple business analysis certifications. North Highland’s talent development focuses on people enablement, sales enablement, and people engagement. Since joining IIBA’s corporate program to support their BA practice and business analysts, North Highland has experienced increased employee engagement and has seen a substantial increase in business analysis upskilling and certification preparation.
North Highland’s sales enablement represents a bias for action – their business analysts listen first to deliver results to build client trust. Their BA practice builds capability but not consulting dependency. They embed skill development and knowledge transfer into their work to bring sustainable success. A successful practice considering over 90% of their clients are return business.
As an employee-owned firm, North Highland has a one-team concept with a commitment to deepening relationships. Ninety-one percent of clients say they feel like the BAs are part of their team. North Highland is ranked number two globally by Source Global Research in “Prompting Action.”
The consulting firm built their BA practice using IIBA’s framework to provide guidelines from vision to implementation. From ideas to dollars or concept to commercialization, business analysis has a direct relationship with all areas of expertise within the firm. North Highland’s BA practice has changed the model of how a consultancy services its clients.
The Solution
Knowing that over 70 percent of organizations fail at transformation, North Highland conducted a survey of senior executives at organizations with $1 billion or higher in revenues to better understand how to improve that number. Based on their findings, North Highland took an agile approach modeling new ways of how a consultancy serves its clients. Driven by innovation and aligned with the International Institute of Business Analysis (IIBA) global best practices framework they established a Business Analysis Capability team with leads based in the US and UK. This empowered the BA Capability leads to offer strong solutions and transformation value for their clients.
The Approach
Upon examining the results of their transformation survey, North Highland noticed some common barriers included an unclear vision for the future, lack of buy-in at all levels, poor execution and planning, weak technical infrastructure to support the solution, and weak measures of success. Their Business Capability practice skills and capabilities were designed with value to help their clients make key decisions around how to recognize, formalize, and implement change.
The Results
Combining resource-based skills with analytics tools and data to drive sustainable results consistently, creatively, and accurately North Highland’s Business Analysis practice offers innovative solutions and transformation for their clients. Since joining IIBA’s corporate program to support their BA practice and business analysts, North Highland has experienced an 18% improvement in employee engagement and has seen a 45% increase in business analysis upskilling and certification preparation. North Highland benchmarks their performance with external analysts and for the last three years has been ranked as a top 10 provider in areas of analysis. They embed skill development and knowledge transfer into their work to bring sustainable success. A successful practice considering over 90% of their clients are return business.
