Category: career

Here are some of the areas of experience where I’ve help clients’ organisations increase their effectiveness through better business alignment and outcomes. Contact me (dean@latchana.co.uk) explore how these experiences could help you, your team and organisation.

Read more about how I can help, my approach and check out my CV.

Executive Coaching

Dean Latchana’s executive coaching experience has helped leaders transform their organisation to deliver better business outcomes, create high-performing teams and increase business agility.

For example, for a global insurer, Dean coached executives to adopt an approach to better align their vision with their organisation’s strategies and activities. For a UK telecom company, he worked with the CTO to design an executive training workshop.

For a financial services firm, he provided comprehensive support for their leaders to adopt a continuous improvement mindset to kick-start their organisation’s transformation.

Portfolio Coaching

Dean Latchana has extensive experience supporting clients create a high-level portfolio of their organisation’s strategies, goals and activities.

For example, for a multinational engineering company, Dean created a unified view of initiatives, which allows their teams to increase their awareness of the impact of their project choices.

Using a lean portfolio management framework, he helped leaders of a global consultancy better articulate their strategic choices and understand where gaps may exist. For a financial services company, he helped product owners & managers create a nested portfolio for product innovation and strategic improvements.

Team Coaching

For many clients, across a range of sectors, Dean Latchana has provided context-specific team coaching, which has allowed teams to continuously improve their ways of working and tie their activities to customer need.

For example, for a financial services client, Dean helped set up, train and guide the maturity of several teams so that they become business outcome-focused and learn through frequent stakeholder feedback.

For a British luxury fashion house, he worked with teams and leaders to understand where pain-points exist and help teams gain greater autonomy resulting in rapid decision-making and lighter-weight governance.

Client-specific outcomes measures

Dean Latchana has helped several clients create a means to judge and prioritise decisions based on client-specific outcome measures. This has allowed teams to determine whether to persevere, pivot or discontinue initiatives based on their value towards strategic objectives.

For a financial services client, Dean helped product owners use client-specific measures to prioritise and balance backlog outcomes; this enabled teams to better articulate the worthiness of their output.

For a multi-national engineering company, he helped individuals map the spread of their activities using client-specific measures thus enabling them to gain an improved understanding of their team’s value creation.

OKR shaping experiences

The OKR support Dean Latchana has provided clients has enabled them to better tie once disparate and poorly understood initiatives to a wider body of strategic need, thus allowing individuals to better articulate their contributions.

For example, using OKRs, for a financial services client, Dean helped a security champion reframe his approach to expressing security concerns, thus enabling him to present a more coherent business case to his leaders.

Using OKRs, Dean has helped a global insurer start their journey to test the strategic credibility of their portfolio items. This was built on an OKR framework that would improve the link between output, outcome and business impact, and make use of leading and lagging indicators of success.

Change management (ways of working culture-shaping)

Through team coaching, leadership support and rapid test-and-learn principles, Dean Latchana has helped organisations modernise their approach to change management. This has helped leaders create an environment where teams can co-create ways of working which promotes collaboration, alignment and synchronisation.

Dean has helped leaders and teams co-create change principles such as action before perfection and invite don’t impose to help create a healthier culture that will drive greater business outcomes and satisfaction.

For example, starting with training, then with embedded coaching within a department, he helped a financial services client create change that has attracted other departments and leaders to modernise their change management approach.

Organisation design (value stream) experience

Many clients have turned to Dean Latchana to help them adapt to external market changes and address internal organisation challenges. The change Dean has helped clients create range from continuous improvement of existing operations to a radical shift in mindset, expectations and customer focus. To achieve either, organisation design is an essential aspect, as is the guidance he provides to improve their value streams.

He has used value stream mapping to help a multinational engineering company recognise the interconnected relationships of upstream and downstream activities; this enabled teams to understand where delays exist and re-organise their ways of working to meet customer need more rapidly.

This one-pager summarises how I can help organisations increase their effectiveness through better business alignment and outcomes.

Read more about my approach, my experience and check out my CV.

1. Close the gap between strategic goals and execution

Where I’ve done this: FTSE 100 company transformation programme
What I did: With the leadership team, we co-created vision statements, which we mapped to strategies and KPIs. Set-up execution teams, with backlogs faithful to leaders’ direction. I helped ensure strategies were continuously assessed to deliver innovations and breakthrough ideas.

2. Create a high-level portfolio view of an organisation’s or department’s strategies and activities

Where I’ve done this: UK Newspaper department
What I did: I facilitated a quarterly portfolio process which prioritised goals and dependencies. I used this as a mechanism to update the leadership team (including CIO), and involved them in guiding the execution teams’ alignment and trade-off decisions.

3. Evolve mindsets and ways of working to help deliver business outcomes

Where I’ve done this: FTSE 100 senior managers and teams
What I did: Often starting with training, I described the impediments typical of a traditional organisation which hampers innovation and competitiveness. I coached individuals to develop a business outcome focus. I introduced principles and ways of working based on agility.

4. Reduce the delay between alignment effort, execution and return-on-investment

Where I’ve done this: FTSE 100 senior managers and team leads
What I did: I highlighted where the lack of buy-in resulted in delayed execution and delayed ROI. I created forums which allowed stakeholders to understand where they could remove impediments to increase execution and competitiveness.

5. Co-evolve governance process that promotes innovation and execution

Where I’ve done this: FTSE 100 transformation department
What I did: I co-created a governance structure that ensured individuals were constantly aligned, with collaboration and synchronisation across the department. Teams had the necessary authority to make decisions that promoted learning and execution.

6. Kick-start aligned and autonomous product teams

Where I’ve done this: FTSE 100 transformation department
What I did: I worked with leaders to set-up cross-functional teams. Teams had the right skills and autonomy to ensure the least amount of delay. Other disciplines and processes were re-orientated to support the teams, such as governance for small frequent budget cycles.

Some of the organisations I’ve supported.

Elevator Pitch

In today’s rapidly changing world, organisations face increasing uncertainty, and greater potential to excel. In this context, to ensure organisations outlearn and out-compete the competition, I advise and support leaders to execute potentially fundamental improvements to their organisation.

As a Business Agility Consultant and Agile Coach, I support leaders and departments to ensure the right investments help their organisation continuously adapt to changing customer demand.

In order to capitalise on market changes, I help leaders and teams determine and implement the right balance of activities, strategies and the best ways of executing. This enables new innovations, and it enables improvements to current operations, products & services.

Business Agility is an enterprise-wide approach to rapidly sense and respond with the right business initiatives to benefit the organisation and its customers.

Dean Latchana

My ideal client

• Household name organisation
• In a competitive market
• The leadership team has recognised the need to change, are willing to explore new opportunities and ways of working, and need my support to execute them
• Opportunity to support business agility across the organisation, not exclusively technology
• UK or global engagements
• Competitive contract position or consultancy engagement