Objective: Defend Scotia’s marketplace position and increase the alignment among Scotia’s Indirect Lending marketplace position, customer needs, and employee experience.

Key Statistics: Scotia Bank dominates the Canadian Indirect Lending market. Even though it has the dominant market share, Scotia Indirect Lending seeks to ensure that its position is maintained and strengthened. It desires even greater alignment between its strategy, its customers and its employees’ experiences.

Approach Overview: The right strategy, the right customer priorities, the right employee behaviors and the right organization drive success. But, it is not enough for all these to be “right.” Each must be right and aligned with the others. The following methodology successfully drove higher leadership effectiveness, customer capture, employee engagement and competitive sustainability within Scotia Indirect Lending.

1. Define Marketplace Position—The approach began with leadership answering marketplace position questions, such as:
   
   a. Ideally, customers choose us over competitors because . . . ?
   b. What is the ideal priority of the customers’ decision criteria?
   c. What trade-offs are inherent to our strategy?
   d. What do we choose not to do?
   e. What activities drive our ability to differentiate ourselves from competitors?
   f. How does our organization sustain its competitiveness?
   g. What are the other foundational elements to our strategy?
   
   To answer these questions, the Scotia Indirect leadership team met to consider the implications and trade-offs of their strategy. The leadership team also developed change management implications, deployment tasks and communication plans for the next steps in the approach.
   
   
2. Understand Customer Priorities—The next step consisted of capturing directly from customers their decision criteria and their feedback about Scotia’s ability to deliver on its intended strategy. One-hundred customers were asked to force rank customer-supplier decision criteria (e.g., speed of service, relationship, cost, industry knowledge, etc.) and provide insight as to how they experience Scotia Indirect Lending on those criteria.
   
   
3. Employee—The third step was to interview individual employees and focus-groups of employees to ask them about what they believe the customers’ decision criteria are. Leadership’s work around strategy was shared with them, and they commented on the degree of congruence and incongruence among organization practices and intended outcomes.
   
   
4. Organization—From the previous three steps, AlignOrg Solutions provided a perspective, using our organization design model, on how well Scotia’s practices both aligned with and didn’t align with leaders’, customers’, and employees’ perceptions. The categories of organizing choices that were analyzed included work, structure, decision making, information, people, rewards, and continuous improvement. Viewing these three perspectives in the context of strategy and trade-offs provided frame-breaking insights for Scotia’s management and employees.

Team Composition: The head of Indirect Lending served as executive sponsor for the initiative with the entire senior leadership team involved in driving the success of the project. Each department in the organization had the opportunity to review the outcomes of the project and participate in action planning to address the findings and implications that followed.

Project Outcomes: Resourcing priorities, headcount placement and focus became more apparent to the organization. The process was also a means for establishing greater unity among the different layers of the organization. Furthermore, as information cascaded into the organization, employee engagement measurably increased. And most importantly, revenue in the Western Canada region grew by 30% as a direct result of the work.

Additionally, many employees stopped complaining about management priorities because they now understood the strategic trade-offs Scotia was making. For example, employees understood why management would ignore certain complaints about the back-end of a customer transaction (i.e., processing a transaction after the customer has signed the contract) while providing focus and resources to the front-end (i.e., sales and support up to the point the customer signs the contract). Employees reported that they were able to better focus their energies after the initiative and that they witnessed improved congruity among management’s actions and decisions.

Objective: Gather marketplace data to inform the process of developing a value offering for the perioperative services organization.

Key Statistics: Competition from well-funded, research hospitals in the region have caused SVMC to explore what aspects of their perioperative (surgical) service offerings can differentiate it going forward. A recent marketing effort to advertise for SVMC’s perioperative services stalled when it was concluded that SVMC’s perioperative services had no differentiating factors to highlight. As a moderately-sized hospital in Vermont, SVMC recognizes that it does not have the same resources or research facilities that some of its competitors do. Yet, despite these disadvantages, it has been and continues to be a viable option for patients in the region having elective surgical procedures.

Approach Overview: The director quality and safety partnered with AlignOrg Solutions to lead a two phase initiative to one, gather the requirements and feedback of customer and non-customers and two, facilitate a cross-functional team in establishing a differentiating strategy for its perioperative services.

1. Requirements Gathering—AlignOrg Solutions worked with SVMC to establish an approach for gathering requirements from actual patients of its hospital. While there are a variety of surveys conducted on a regular basis, it was determined that a more in depth and informative data gathering process was desirable. After identifying the specific demographic groups that we wanted to survey, AlignOrg Solutions conducted several focus groups with current, past and non-SVMC patients, surgeons, and referring primary care physicians. The information gathered from this marketplace study surfaced several key strategic questions; these questions created the launching pad for phase two.
    

2. Value Offering Development—Using the data gathered and analysis performed in phase one, a cross functional group of surgeons, nurses, anesthesiologists, and administrators worked to develop a differentiating value offering for SVMC’s perioperative services. A value offering suggests the value your organization offers to its targeted customers (in this case patients). It is the reason customers choose your organization over competitors or other options, and it also includes the reason they will continue to choose you. The success of any organization depends on its ability to offer superior value to those it serves. Since high-performing organizations tend to align their resources and capabilities to their value proposition better than their competitors, clarity of the value proposition must be a critical variable for organizational design.

Project Outcomes: SVMC has successfully completed its value offering, which is being used to drive marketing efforts, organization design choices, resource allocation decisions, and prioritization. Because a cross-section of organization stakeholders was involved in its developed, it has been a galvanizing initiative in helping focus the perioperative services around what really makes the difference in patients’ minds.