objective
noun: something worked toward or striven for; a goal.
adjective: uninfluenced by emotions or personal prejudices; based on observable phenomena; presented factually.
designer
noun: a person who draws up original sketches or plans from which things are made.
"We succeed only as we identify in life, or in war, or in anything else,
a single overriding objective,
and make all other considerations bend to that one objective.
Dwight D. Eisenhower
"Perfection of means
and confusion of ends
seems to characterise our age."
Albert Einstein
"In most peoples vocabularies, design means veneer.
It's interior decorating. Its the fabric of the curtains and sofa.
But to me, nothing could be further from the meaning of design.
Design is the fundamental soul of a man-made creation that ends up expressing itself in successive outer layers of the product or service."
Steve Jobs, Apple
Design can be art.
Design can be aesthetics.
Design is so simple,
that's why it is so complicated!
Paul Rand
Benefits of Our Approach
At the end of an engagement, our clients have told us that our interventions have helped them to achieve some of the following benefits:
Our Main Purpose
Objective Designers is a specialist strategy and marketing consultancy whose primary purpose is to help software, technology and specialist service providers to market and sell their services and solutions more quickly and effectively into the European market. We specialise in helping our clients to design and launch new services in the emerging markets of social networking, smartphones, high-speed broadband access, cloud computing and local news-gathering.
Method with
No Name?
We are developing a new approach to Business Consulting - gathering the best methods from various disciplines under a new method. For more information, press the "Approach" tab above.
Are You Making These Mistakes?
Our MD, Lorne Mitchell, has just been interviewed on the seven biggest mistakes that software and technology companies make selling to Telecoms and Media Companies. Please click the button below to download.
Contact Us
If you would like to contact us for any reason, please click on the "Contact" tab above and and fill in the form.
THE SEVEN BIGGEST MISTAKES THAT SOFTWARE & TECHNOLOGY COMPANIES MAKE SELLING TO TELECOMS AND MEDIA COMPANIES
Our Designers
Objective Designers has about 12 associaates who we call designers.
Our designers come from a wide range of backgrounds from consulting, operations, marketing, sales, finance and IT. They are all used to designing processes and systems to meet short-term objectives. Each associate works with Objective Designers on a project-by-project basis - although Objective Designers remains responsible for the overall quality of the work as well as being and is the main point of contact for all contractual matters throughout the project.
Method with No Name
For the past few years, Objective Designers has been collecting a set of methods and tools from various wide-ranging disciplines including Systems Thinking, Neuro-Linguistic Programming, Enterprise Architecture, Agile Development, Goal Directed Project Management, Graphic Design and Psychology.
You won't find this eclectic set of methods in any other consulting company. Because we have taken, in our view, "the best of the best", we cannot really label the methods under any specific name - which is why we call our methodology "The Method with No Name"!
Constant Drumbeat
Although we have collected the various methods and tools under our "Method with No Name" (see left hand column), we have also thought long and hard about HOW methods and improvements are most effectively implemented. Here we have created the idea of a constant drumbeat - which needs to be in any effective organisation. We have taken ideas from drumming, the Agile Movement and other sources to help our clients implement 13-week business cycles that are broken down into various "sprint cycles" with one week for recovery - depending on what is needed.
Business Planning & Objective Design
One of the key disciplines in any business is for the leadership to set the direction of the business and encourage everyone else to follow it.
At Objective Designers, we believe that this process is critical to the success of our client's businesses - and specialise in designing objectives so that they can be easily understood, easily implemented and then easily adapted, as business needs change.
The initial design normally takes two or three days to complete with ongoing support as necessary.
Campaign Acceleration
Once our clients are clear on their marketing and sales objectives, we help the Marketing and Sales groups design effective campaigns. Each campaign is unique to a specific target market or account and is also tuned for a specific service or solution. Campaign design normally takes two or three days. We then use our extensive network of industry connections to qualify leads and ideas early on. We include an optional day for reviewing and refreshing the campaign after four to six weeks.
Service Optimisation
At Objective Designers we do not believe in the majority of IT-led transformation approaches. For our more established clients, there is normally enough IT to do the job - and for start-ups, or smaller businesses, then Web 2.0 is normally the answer. We haved helped some of our clients to achieve 10-15% improvements in costs without touching any IT - by making the purpose and objectives clearer and the work flow better. Only then do we recommend IT - and it is normally infill rather than full-scale rip and replace.
Bespoke Events
We realise that our clients are unique and that they often require services that are not necessarily found "off-the-shelf".
Objective Designers is always pleased to discuss special requirements to see if we can bring some of our design flare and new ways of thinking to address problems and gather experts and influencers together in bespoke events. Please contact us to discuss your requirements.
Business Architecture Assessment
Underpinning any business are a set of ways of working, people, processes and systems that define the way that particular organisation works.
At Objective Designers, we believe that all organisations need take a top-down view of the business so that the needs are properly balanced to achieve the overall purpose of that organisation
We help our clients create a blueprint of where the organisation with an "as-is" and "to-be" . This normally takes us three to five days to complete.
Executive Coaching & Training
Our executive coaching programme is geared specifically towards Executives and senior managers in the European Telecoms and Media industries - though we will take on other clients if they feel that we can help them develop themselves and their businesses. Our coaching programme lasts 13 or 26 weeks and involves an up-front face-to-face session followed by 12 follow-on sessions on a weekly basis.
Leading Applications Provider
In October 2009, a leading provider of applications management software wanted to accelerate its penetration into the UK and European telecoms markets. Objective Designers was retained to help tune the proposition for the target operators and then to help set up the necessary qualification meetings with key buyers and influencers within the target accounts. In addition to these activities, the client became interested in gathering case study material on video and we are now helping to create this material for release later in 2010.
Software-as-a-Service Video Company
In February 2009, Objective Designers was asked to create a sales campaign for a start-up Software-as-a-Service company providing Video Messaging Services. Objective Designers helped to create several marketing campaigns based on some original market research. We were then asked to sell into a particularly difficult market. Here we created enough “pull” with one of the operational units to get a successful proof of concept agreed without asking too much permission from the gatekeepers that often block such programmes.
UK's Leading Press Club
In September 2008, Objective Designers was engaged by one of the UK's leading press clubs to streamline its activities and to help reduce its costs by 10-15%. We ran a half-day workshop with the leadership team to identify the key activities within the business and then coached the CEO over the remaining year to put a new organisation in place that could deliver more professionally the services that he wanted to offer. A year on, costs had been reduced by 20%. We are now entering a second phase to help the company grow by 10-15%.
Leading Billing Software House
In July 2009, a US-based software house wanted to accelerate its business development efforts into a Tier 1 UK telecoms operator where they already had a significant amount of business. Objective Designers was asked to help shape the campaign with the account team and to coach individual members for various customer meetings and to act as a sounding board for the final presentation. The end-result was a successful executive briefing when a shared vision was bought-into by several executives in our client's customer.
Telecoms Executive Network
Lorne Mitchell, the Managing Director of Objective Designers is a regular moderator at the Telecoms Executive Network's quarterly evening and one-day events. Over the past years he has built up a reputation of leading energetic and insightful debates about customer experience, Web 2.0 and next generation networks. He will be moderating a number of bespoke dinner debates in 2010 with TEN to provide deeper insights on market, service and technology trends.
Large Global Mobile Phone Operator
In 2008, one of the world's largest global mobile phone operator wanted help in defining its business architecture to set up a new division that was focusing on the global enterprise market.
We conducted a four-week engagement where we interviewed each of the key executives in the new division and came up with a blueprint and gap analysis of capabilities required to achieve their one-year and three-year plans.
The recommendations were accepted and many were put into action immediately.
© Objective Designers Limited 2008-2010
