Customer Story:

How we helped Blue Cross to build their strategy and drive impact

About Blue Cross

Blue Cross is a registered animal welfare charity in the United Kingdom, founded in 1897 as Our Dumb Friends League, to care for working horses on the streets of the British capital. It opened the first animal hospital in Victoria in May 1906 and they helped care for the pets of members of the Armed Forces, as well as the general public, through two world wars.

Overview

We worked with Iain Heaton (Deputy CEO & CFO) to redesign the strategy and then use a data driven framework to design initiatives, programmes and projects there the outcome could be directly linked to the benefits for pets and their owners. We then used StrategyWorks to help manage the strategy using data and reduce overheads.

The approach

We helped the Blue Cross leadership team to redesign their strategy and then we implemented the new strategy in our strategy management and acceleration platform StrategyWorks. We then used the framework to help build maturity and capability to execute the strategy across Blue Cross supporting the strategic planning team to improve performance management and progress management over the course of 2 years.

Testimonials

“Working with Shapecast has been a huge help to us. It has allowed us to realise the gaps we had in our approach to strategic planning and execution. Will and the team at Shapecast have helped to enable us to fill those gaps and have always been incredibly helpful and supportive.

Putting the whole strategy on to the StrategyWorks system has allowed us to have an overview of all the different parts of it and enables us to run different reports to see progress of the different elements or areas like risks across the portfolio. The system allows us to link the outputs from individual projects through to our overarching KPI’s and objectives so we will be able to see how each project is contributing to our desired objectives.

Though we know we still have work to do to achieve complete maturity in our strategic planning and execution, we feel that the work we have done with Shapecast has really helped us take some big strides forwards and we look forwards to the rest of the journey with optimism.”

Iain Heaton, Deputy CEO & CFO Blue Cross.

Key outcomes

Redesigned objectives, strategy and supporting implementation plan linked to the impact on pets.

Increased execution maturity across the whole organisation which is now driven through clear data

The ability to measure impact from investments in strategic initiatives.