The Challenge

Deluxe Corporation is a $1.3 Billion company whose legacy core market, check printing, is in a state of market contraction. As a result, the corporation is in the midst of a major transformation, from a manufacturing based printing company, to a global e-commerce provider of products & services for small business.

When new CIO, Malcolm McRoberts, joined Deluxe in mid 2008, he found an IT organization in need of transformation. Every aspect of the organization, from its systems & processes, to its e-commerce platform, organization structure and culture needed to be evolved to meet the requirements of a fast-paced B2B model.

The Solution

After a rapid evaluation and prioritization effort focused on the IT organization, Malcolm quickly restructured his organization and organized his new management team. His next objective was to create rapid alignment of his team to a strategic agenda while establishing a culture of accountability to support the transformation efforts. Having worked with ParCon previously, he saw a good fit between his requirements and ParCon's agile approach to strategic planning and execution.

ParCon recommended a Strategic Management Assessment (SMA) to provide a comprehensive view of the capabilities and barriers to change. Then the leadership team was engaged in a rapid process of articulating and aligning around a new strategy. The strategic plan was divided into actionable components using the Strategy Mapping and Horizon Planning™ framework.

The Results

Despite initial resistance, the leadership team succeeded in aligning around an actionable and measurable strategic plan which linked executive's individual objectives and goals to successful strategy execution. The roll-out of the strategy to all IT managers represented a major turning point where, over a 3-day period, managers absorbed in all aspects of the IT transformation effort and the change agenda resulting in far higher levels of engagement and buy in than expected. To insure long-term success, a PMO was established to track and report on initiative management and strategic performance.