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Published on June 30, 2025
This expert advice has been written in collaboration with Maxine Tétreault-Robert, Senior Director – Business Process Transformation Consulting
Could your organization be more efficient? Can it adapt to economic and societal fluctuations? The following steps are key to moving forward.
Since our economic environment changes rapidly, businesses must constantly strive to optimize their operations in order to remain competitive. A proactive and carefully considered approach is key to:
- refocusing strategic objectives;
- simplifying processes;
- boosting productivity;
- ensuring value creation.
Where do you begin? Which steps should you take to move in the right direction and achieve meaningful change?
1 – Reassess your service offer
You should start out by defining your organization’s identity. Take a step back and review every element of your service offer. The next step involves focusing on your core products and services or on emerging market trends. This process involves:
- An internal analysis to define your organization’s identity, market positioning, environment, organizational structure, resources and processes;
- Refocusing your mission after determining a core mission and the most promising opportunities. Then you can adapt your service offer to meet customer needs;
- Assessing your product range and inventory as a priority to focus your resources on the most profitable and strategic elements. For example, municipalities could refocus their efforts on providing essential public services.
2 – Develop a coherent strategic plan
Your strategic plan maps the direction to take and the steps involved in implementing your reassessed service offer. This is a key lever for success. This process demonstrates clear direction and well-defined objectives and includes performance indicators to track results.
Our social context and economic reality change quickly. Consider reviewing your strategic plan on a shorter-term basis (every year or two) to effectively adapt to change.
This process involves:
- integrating your defined service offer;
- creating a planning monitoring committee;
- taking a more integrated approach to planning within the organization;
- using a shared dashboard;
- effective communication with employees.
3 – Optimize your organization’s management
In order to boost your organization’s productivity, you should consider all aspects of your activities from strategy to operations. This process should be structured. As a result, you will ensure consistency between the company’s strategic orientations, previous improvements and operational practices in the field.
The main areas where you can take action are:
- Organizational – enhance cross-functional coordination between departments and divisions;
- Functional – optimize the service offers of various departments such as the finance function, human resources, purchasing, marketing, communications and operations;
- Processes – review and enhance your operational procedures to boost efficiency;
- Work organization – reassess work methods and task allocation within your teams.
4 – Clarify roles and responsibilities
You should also ensure that employees fully understand their responsibilities, added value and how their work fits into your organization’s overall objectives. This clarity paves the way for fewer misunderstandings and better alignment of expectations and prevents conflict.
- Promote efficient task completion by ensuring that your employees have the required skills for their role. When combined with a certain level of flexibility, this approach will allow you to adapt roles and responsibilities to reflect changing organizational needs.
- Foster collaboration with a view to:
- contributing to a positive work environment;
- strengthening a sense of belonging;
- rallying more team members around shared objectives.
- Lastly, consider introducing open, transparent and effective communication methods to improve understanding throughout the organization, which is a key component of cohesion and group performance.
5 – Improve data management
Effective data management is an essential element of informed decision-making at every level of your organization. An over-reliance on Excel files often reveals a lack of system integration that can weaken operational consistency and reliability of analyses.
To remedy this situation and facilitate analysis, you should ensure that your organization’s data is accessible, relevant and structured.
Where information is missing, it should be generated by digitizing operations, automating data collection or using data capture tools. Your data will help you to anticipate needs and optimize business processes.
The introduction of robust data management systems also sets the stage for integrating advanced technologies such as artificial intelligence and robotization. Moreover, you could apply for several government grants to support your digital transformation process.
6 – Take a continuous improvement approach
Boosting your productivity is an ongoing process based on a structured, productive and people-focused approach.
However, you don’t have to change everything at once. Your changes can be gradual and regularly assessed to measure their effects on your organization’s overall performance.
When you embrace this dynamic, you can optimize your company’s operations, boost its efficiency and consolidate its competitive position. By aligning your organization’s actions at every level, you’ll create a solid framework which will increase agility, support growth and foster innovation.
Embarking on this process is the first step towards an organization that is more efficient, more resilient and forward-looking. Don’t hesitate to call on a skilled external consultant to support you during this process.