Organizational Assessments
Leadership teams are rarely short of opinions about what’s wrong. What’s usually missing is a measurement everyone can agree on. These assessments produce one — about your culture, your strategy, your processes, and the knowledge that walks out of the door when someone resigns.
Five ways to find out where you actually are
Most engagements start with one of these and widen from there. Which one depends on what’s already visibly not working.
Organizational Culture Assessment (OCAI)
Culture influences performance, innovation, agility, engagement, and competitiveness. The research is unusually blunt about the size of the effect: a toxic culture decreases productivity by 40%, an effective culture increases it by 20%, and a positive culture by 30–40%.
The Organizational Culture Assessment Instrument (OCAI, © Kim Cameron) is a validated tool developed by Robert Quinn and Kim Cameron at the University of Michigan, built on the Competing Values Framework — one of the most used and useful frameworks in business, applied at over 10,000 companies across 30 years. The online OCAI takes about 15 minutes.
We also use the Organizational Culture Inventory and Organizational Effectiveness Inventory. Applied across your organization, these give people at every level an understanding of how they’re currently expected to approach their work and interact with one another — and whether the existing norms support or interfere with getting anything done.
Strategic Roadmap Assessment
Take your operational plans and turn them into a strategic roadmap, so you can build both short- and long-term strategies that hold in good conditions and bad.
The questions this assessment exists to answer:
- Does your organization have a strategic roadmap at all?
- Do your OKRs roll up to your strategy?
- Are your OKRs and KPIs correctly defined and aligned to it?
- Does your organization have a strategic playbook for all your teams?
The output is a plan you can act on: validate the current strategy or formulate a new one, build measures that keep focus on it, improve organizational performance, align operations to the roadmap, improve how vision and strategy get communicated, and prioritize your strategic initiatives.
Business Workflow Automation Assessment
As a leader, are you aware of the redundant processes in your organization? They cost you people, time, and — most expensively — the efficiency and effectiveness of your operations.
This assessment identifies those redundancies and gaps, then produces a roadmap for re-engineering the processes underneath them. It’s the necessary first step before automation: as pressure grows to align with centres of excellence, the useful question isn’t what you could automate but which processes are actually right for it — and which ones shouldn’t be automated at all.
Knowledge Management Assessment
What happens when the person who knows how it works leaves? This audit analyses your current knowledge management practices and knowledge preservation for critical-function roles, and identifies the gaps and risks that creates for business continuity.
It helps you design or enhance a plan to retain people, inventory and document their skill sets, and identify the key business process documentation you don’t have. The goal is a knowledge base that preserves the historical and the current, and positions the future one for growth and continuity.
Financial Management Assessment
A series of questions that evaluate your current requirements, validate your accounting and financial practices, and surface ideas for optimizing — and in some cases automating — your accounting workflows, based on your actual transactions and operational needs.
Where a financial statement audit is what you need, that’s an engagement performed by an independent Certified Public Accountant to give assurance that your statements are reported in accordance with U.S. GAAP. Each audit is customized to the organization.
Comprehensive Organizational Risk Management Audit
A four-to-six month engagement that runs all of our assessments and produces a single detailed report of risk across the whole enterprise — governance, compliance, legal, human resources, technology, facilities, financial, brand and communication, intellectual property, disaster recovery and business continuity, vendors, and your change management processes.
Our consultants work from established frameworks rather than inventing one: FISMA, COSO, and ISO 31000.
The FISMA approach in particular gives an effective framework for selecting the security controls a system needs to protect operations, individuals, and organizational assets — combining risk management activity and security across the system’s whole lifespan, rather than bolting it on at the end.
What the audit covers
- Governance, compliance, and legal
- Human resources and change management
- Technology and facilities
- Financial and intellectual property
- Brand and communication
- Disaster recovery and business continuity
- Vendor risk
Measuring the organization, then the people in it
SDI Training
Culture is what a group of people do together. SDI shows you the relationships underneath the culture you just measured.
SDI trainingLeadership & Manager Assessments
Leadership Impact, Manager Impact, MEPS, ACUMEN, and HR audit — the individual level of the same picture.
Leadership assessmentsC'S|3 Assessments platform
Where results live afterwards, so C-level directors and managers can track assessments across the organization over time.
The platformStart with what’s visibly not working
Tell us what you’re seeing. In 30 minutes we’ll tell you which assessment would actually explain it — and whether it’s worth measuring at all, or whether you already know the answer.
- A straight answer on which assessment fits, and why
- No charge, and no obligation to engage us
- You talk to a senior consultant, not an account rep
- Prefer to talk now? 719-204-3101