Welcome to the Fivenines website.  We are delighted to announce that Fivenines Consulting is now part of Cornerstone Integral. 

Cornerstone Integral is a boutique consulting group with over 10 years of experience in the organisation and leadership development industry.  The Fivenines team brings a wealth of experience and capability that broadens Cornerstone Integral’s suite of services and provides a wider knowledge and delivery base. Both the Cornerstone Integral and  Fivenines teams are tremendously excited by the possibilities and opportunities that this combination brings to both organisations.

The turbulence of the last couple of years has given rise to both threats and opportunities for all of us in organisational life. To leverage these opportunities, we recognise that as clients' needs for support and advice change, we are adapting too. This means expanding our capabilities. Fivenine enhances the Cornerstone Integral current offering across the Integral Framework quadrants, particularly in strategy development,  business systems, and process optimisation.

Importantly, Fivenines Consulting works with clients to make and implement key business decisions involving people, products, information technology and finance.

What We Do

Strategy 

Clients sometimes wonder where business strategy fits. Some of the most successful businesses are opportunist, and some of the best crafted strategies lead to disaster. “Fail to plan, or plan to succeed” is just too glib. 

As practitioners, with experience in strategy and plan development for large and small organisations, Fivenines challenges conventional wisdoms.  Fivenines practical advice includes:

·       Flexibility is the key to corporate planning. Business contexts change continually and the place of a plan is to give the business foundations, not shackles. Resist the urge to constrain strategic planning to the three-year cycle.

·       A plan that isn’t owned by staff, isn’t used. So Fivenines encourages an approach to plan development that brings together the decision makers, and the people who know the business at the coal face. Think about how it will be communicated, shared, and used while it is being built. 

·       Ever thought about how business plans are bound? Do they look pretty on the shelf? Or are they designed to be used. Maybe one page is better than one hundred? If the plan is worth making, make it part of the way the business does business, not a shelf filler.  

·       Sometimes the process is more important than the plan. Getting consultation, thinking and analysis happening in the organisation often aligns thinking in a far more entrenched way than any document ever can. Either way, only plan if your team will really live the plan. Commitment matters, however you get it. 

No two plans are the same. Leaders and corporate groups use them in so many ways that we start with checklists, not recipes. We add value through the richness of our skills and experience. 

Facilitation 

Do you bring people together for workshops or meetings? Do you always get the outcomes you want? Or do they take a direction of their own? 

Getting a group of people to debate and reach a conclusion isn’t simple. Getting them to think independently yet reach a shared conclusion is even more complex. 

If this is ever your problem, Fivenines has vast experience in conducting workshops, meetings, and strategy development. Fivenines has been asked to facilitate a multitude of meetings and workshops covering a range of organisational issues. Accordingly Fivenines adds rich experience to the already powerful Cornerstone  

Process and business reform

Businesses have always had processes. Managers have been trying to improve processes and make their businesses more effective and efficient for hundreds of years. Often when business changes, processes that used to be ideal need to be revisited. 

In the late 1980’s Business Process Re-engineering offered a significant and dramatic response to the changes that came from computerisation. “Lean”, “Design Thinking” and other techniques have followed. 

The global consultancies developed formal and prescriptive methodologies. The IT industry bolted ‘business analysis’ onto their systems analysis approaches. Battle hardened senior managers grabbed the jargon to camouflage old fashioned downsizing. 

Nothing has changed about the need to get business processes right. To do this, some design thinking needs to be done, otherwise either random change or adhoc improvement will be the best we can get. 

Sound processes help to get other things right. For instance, fixing something as small as the sequence of entering data can reduce the number of data entry mistakes and hence enhance data quality. The flow on benefits have a compounding effect. 

Process has profile. Everyone has a view on how the task should be done – staff, customers and even managers. Harnessing those views takes a precious mix of rigour and passion

For many of our competitors, process design requires a recipe where predetermined ingredients produce a guaranteed feast. Our experience is that the feast is usually half-baked. 

Systems and data 

Fivenines connects technology, information, and business. These three are intimately interconnected but usually dealt with by specialists in one area who don’t really understand the two or the connections.

Fivenines has developed deep expertise in assessing where technology is needed to support or enable a business, identify how it might be organised and then explain this in documents or in person.

Part of this is fitting information into business processes and connecting it back to what technologies can do and business leaders (and staff) need it to do. The Fivenines approach is pragmatic yet effective, cutting through the jargon to design workable solutions and translating between experts. Fivenines draws on the expertise of experienced project managers, data experts and architects as needed.

Problem solving approaches 

Every client, every situation, every process is different. Fivenines looks afresh at the ingredients. Fivenines thinks carefully about what is being created. The team builds on their extensive experience and uses all of this to create a unique recipe that can apply to your organisation. 

 At Cornerstone we believe that Fivenines adds significant value to what we offer our clients. To find out more about how Fivenines and Cornerstone Integral can work with your organisation to enhance its performance click  here and one of our consultants will contact you today.

Contact

Fivenines Consulting

5/1 Norfolk Place

Malvern Vic 3144

Telephone: 1300 133 550

Email: connect@cornerstoneintegral.com