Our professional services team, led by Ascent’s managing director, Matt Collier, provides robust, practical, and innovative solutions to meet your business challenges. The outcomes we deliver help produce superior operating performance.
Business Transformation
In a rapidly changing world, businesses must adapt to survive. Organisations that are equipped to anticipate change and become industry leaders will outperform their competitors.
We understand change and the impacts of undergoing a transformation on your people, processes and technology. Our consultants are leaders and experts in planning and implementing business transformation using Agile, Design-Thinking, or traditional Waterfall methods.
Benefits of our business transformation capability
Where there is a complex business change agenda, change programmes under duress, or where you need increased capability and experience, our transition and mobilisation specialists implement:
- Increased adoption for cloud and digital services.
- Lowered delivery risk – we reduce the risk of transformation failure by having some of the most experienced transformation management consultants in New Zealand running the programme.
- Increased customer satisfaction.
- Reduced operational costs – our holistic view of the transformation takes the full picture into account. This enables us to identify and implement the most cost-effective solution.
We enable key business stakeholders to focus on running their business while we implement the transformation. Our team’s expertise in business case and commercial bid management through to ICT sourcing and procurement management provides peace of mind to management.
Our services in action
Banking on a successful transformation
Ascent was retained by a New Zealand banking institution to provide professional services for their business strategy division. Led by Matt Collier, Ascent provided capability to build and then operate the bank’s lead transformation programme and project management office. We then provided additional resources, via an MSA, to scale up the programme.
Key strategic role with insurer
Ascent has been working with one of New Zealand’s largest private insurers since 2013, delivering a number of its key strategic initiatives. This has included assisting the insurer through several major acquisitions, simplifying the business and reducing operational costs, and delivering high-priority regulatory and compliance initiatives. Ascent has played a key role with these initiatives, building delivery capabilities and adopting practical approaches that make commercial sense. The success of these initiatives has seen us form a long-term partnership with our client, where we continue to provide consulting services.
Our services in action
Customer delivery model augmented
A large global telecommunications company asked Ascent to set up and then lead a customer delivery framework to meet the demands of Telecommunications as a Service (TaaS). We delivered the capability to augment the existing TaaS customer delivery operating model, including transition experts, programme delivery, architecture, contact centre, and security expertise. This enabled concurrent TaaS services to be delivered on time and with no interruption to business continuity. Ascent continues to provide ITSM expertise for the client around security.
Your IT assets are used to make your business more productive. In large businesses there may be numerous IT assets, and any adverse changes to the environment can lead to significant negative business impacts. We can eliminate this risk from your business.
We use a process-led Information Technology Infrastructure Library (ITIL) framework approach that allows our clients to effectively integrate their business needs with the IT infrastructure. Our ITIL Master-qualified consultants are experienced in delivering simple support models to large government and commercial organisations. This results in substantial returns on investment for our clients over a short period of time. We’ll audit and baseline your current capability, then design and implement an Information Technology Service Management (ITSM) strategy to ensure that your company’s assets are adequately protected.
What you gain from our IT service management expertise
- Reduced risk of disruption to IT infrastructure and environments through the use of proven service management best practices and processes.
- Building and implementing service transition frameworks and providing service transition capability as a service.
Facilitating and managing strategic organisational change initiatives using both Six Sigma and ITIL to drive greater operational efficiencies and dramatically reduce operating costs.
Other professional services we offer
We’ll help your organisation make the most of its resources and maximise its potential for growth in a complex and often challenging business and regulatory environment.
The results we achieve for our clients include developing solutions to lift organisational performance, build better leadership, improve decision making, and deal with the complexities of compliance.
We’ll help you grow by identifying pathways to innovate through technology, people, data, and projects.
Businesses are facing ongoing strategic challenges in securing human capital resources to drive their performance.
Many change projects fail because people, organisational, cultural, and social capital issues are not addressed. We help to identify, design, and execute programmes critical to enhancing your organisation’s performance, productivity, and profitability in the area of human capital.
These include business-driven HR, and innovative talent, leadership, organisational, and change initiatives. We use research, analytics, and industry insights to meet your business priorities.
Our experts deliver transaction advisory services for business mergers, acquisitions, sales, and fundraising ventures.
Whether you want to grow your business through an acquisition, or sell it for the highest possible value, we can guide you through the challenges of these transactions, and help you build a foundation for long-term success following the completion of the deal.
We’ll help your organisation understand what your business, assets and shares are worth, and what the drivers are for that value.
Our practical insights into the commercial and technical aspects of transactions will assist you to determine and prioritise your strategic options.
Ascent provides support and advisory services for divestments, private equity funds, investment opportunities, joint ventures, strategic relationships, and capital raisings.
We’ll provide insights, services, and advice to support you to transform your business, innovate and grow, reduce costs, leverage talent, and gain a competitive advantage.
Our expertise in the provision of tailored consulting services includes for strategy planning, aligning costs, reconceptualising human capital, optimising technology, managing digital change, and refining operations and systems.
We are experts in getting large, complex, or high-risk programmes that are failing to deliver back on their feet.
Our experienced consultants can quickly and thoroughly assess your ailing project, diagnose the problems, and determine whether a turnaround is feasible and justifiable.
Recovering a major programme that is failing can involve significant changes in related areas of the business.
We provide expert management support during a recovery initiative, or we can take full responsibility for managing the turnaround within our team.
We work across organisations at all levels, from portfolio to individual projects, providing expert advice and specialist resources in programme, portfolio and project management (P3M).
From defining governance and assessing resource requirements, managing enterprise risk, planning and scheduling to controlling project delivery, we ensure a successful outcome.
We create a consistent process for managing projects, for managing similar projects holistically as a programme, and for modelling, analysing, selecting, and managing portfolios to help you prioritise initiatives strategically.
Risk can be a driver for gaining a competitive edge. Through the effective management of risk, we can help you grow to your full potential and create sustainable value for your stakeholders.
Any fresh opportunity or use of new technologies is accompanied by risks that need to be understood and effectively managed. Cyber capabilities enable organisations to grow, to become more efficient, and provide services that are more customer-focused, secure, and robust.
We provide insights on risk that help organisations make sound strategic choices, and respond to disturbances in ways that protect or enhance their reputation.
The regulatory environment is ever-changing. We help organisations anticipate and adapt to this volatile setting, and build programmes and controls to address regulatory risk. We work with clients and regulators to find effective remedies for adverse compliance events.
We provide assistance for organisations across the complete lifecycle of financial transactions. From governance to technology and reporting, our risk advisory services enhance transparency, efficiency, compliance, and financial robustness.
We help organisations transform how they leverage people, relationships, technology, data, business processes, and controls to manage operational risks and lift their business performance.
