BACKGROUND

Our client was a financial services company. The work we did was with the senior management team of the Company.

What experience does Obsidian have in this sector?

Obsidian has worked extensively in the financial services industry over many years with companies such as Norwich Union, Friends Provident, Gan Life & Pensions, Prudential, and M & G.. Our managing consultant is a Chartered Accountant, has extensive management experience in senior financial roles in the private sector, and has been a Director of an Investment Management company for over ten years.

Nature of client's problem

Our client was concerned that the senior management team was neglecting their personal development and not making good use of resources available to them via the internet. They wished to provide them with short, stimulating “bulletins” on relevant management and leadership issues and encourage them to explore the wealth of information available on the internet. The client chose Obsidian because of our experience in providing similar bulletins for other clients as well as for our understanding of the financial services sector.

Obsidian's experience in this problem area

Obsidian has considerable experience of working with senior management teams in developing/reviewing business strategies and business plans. Our consultants have worked with models such as the Balanced Scorecard, Business Excellence, IiP etc in both line management and consultancy situations. Since all our consultants have had senior management experience in industry or commerce we have a sound understanding of the practical, as well as the theoretical, aspects of this broad subject.

As consultants, we need to keep our knowledge of management theory up to date and are continually developing new approaches and models to use with our clients. This means that we already had a considerable “information bank” to draw on in creating these bespoke bulletins.

The bulletins were produced by the Obsidian Knowledge Management expert who has many years experience of working on knowledge-related problems.

Objectives of Product/service offered by Obsidian

The objectives were to

• Create a punchy monthly bulletin that would be interesting to read and no more than 4 pages long.
• Incorporate a wealth of links to resources on the internet that would encourage the executives to make more use of the medium.

How the assignment was carried out

A series of bulletins were produced covering topics such as:

• Leadership
• Strategic knowledge management
• Partnerships and relationships
• Motivation

Each bulletin was e-mailed to the client who in turn e-mailed it to the senior executive team on a monthly basis.

Benefits for the client

There were two main benefits to the client

• Senior managers were given the opportunity to review a range of management thinking and “refresh” areas which they hadn’t thought about for some time.
• Senior managers became more familiar and confident in their use of the internet.