By rendering operations across four axes of work, we allow you to see more deeply into your business, understand your workforce, reimagine technology, and transform data.
Business processes are often portrayed in an overly simplified and linear manner. Yet work is multilateral, defined by distinct, and equally important, operational axes.
The best business operations are driven by a careful orchestration of the most important aspects of the work event. Such careful orchestration often requires the alignment of a variety of disparate voices, from executives to technologists to product teams and beyond. To harmonize these disparate voices, our consultants drive collaboration through operation models that render a singular, synergistic vision of the best possible business operation.
The greatest untapped source of operational insight lies in the human context of work. Yet the workforce has been viewed as the greatest source of risk to business' operational strategies and tactics. Leveraging direct, scientific observation, we incorporate a new understanding of the workforce into the decisions that drive how business is executed, transforming the experience of employees and, in turn, customers.
Technology’s place within the business operation must pay equal regard to business objectives, the worker, and the role of data within the work event. Our consultants do exactly this, seeing every business system as an opportunity to define how technology will serve the operation. As a result, adoption risks are mitigated, transformation costs decrease, and promised operational impacts are guaranteed.
Data is no longer the static record of business, the tea leaves from which the future is predicted. Machine learning, large language models, and generative AI make data a real-time actor affecting the execution of business. Given data’s newfound status within the organization, we approach its integration from a human perspective as much as we do from a business, policy, or procedural perspective.
Our Expertise
Risk Management
From regulatory compliance to policy implementation, people are often seen as the greatest risk to operational success. We uncover how and why workers perform as they do and leverage these insights to develop compliant, efficient, and effective transformations that a workforce wants to adopt.
Business Transformation
If human insight informs strategies and tactics, regulation and policy can lead to more than compliance. Our insights on culture, skills, and tendencies provide direction that can make regulatory compliance a transformational windfall.
Cost Savings
Noncompliance fines and penalties carry significant costs. By combining regulation and policy best practice with a human perspective, we develop new ways of working that propel compliance, because to the worker, the new mode is clearly better than before.
Operational Excellence
People want to perform well at their jobs. People can also be resistant to change, inventing ways of working that, from their perspective, seem more effective, even when, observed holistically, they are not. By understanding people and their work, we infuse processes and tools with a robust picture of the human context, driving faster and more effective adoption.
Process Innovation & Efficiency
Innovation and efficiency turn on an organization’s workforce. By ignoring the people who compose a company, strategies and tactics don’t just fall short of expectations, they fail to leverage the most valuable source of insight, discovery, and invention. We don’t sell “best practices.” We unpack the unique human complexity of our client’s operations.
Business Transformation
At ZENDA, we call Excel the “duct tape” of the knowledge worker. We often observe workers using it as a workaround to get things done, despite existing processes and systems. This discovery is a view into a worker’s needs, the organization’s culture, and an invention’s opportunity for benefitting the whole operation.
Cost Savings
Our observation of work as it transpires provides an accurate view of what is happening, explaining pain points, revealing unknowns, and challenging hypotheses. This perspective enables more effective technology selection and faster deployments. Systems are configured with human sensitivity so that training and change management costs are reduced or eliminated.
Operational Excellence
Our human insights deliver a robust level of efficiency and productivity. Unlike basic workflow diagrams, our operation models are alive with human detail, driving greater results by uncovering the why and not just the what.
Corporate Restructuring and Acquisitions
Corporate restructuring and acquisition efforts align around the rationalization of assets and processes, with human capital often assessed in spreadsheets and org charts. People, however, are key to the past successes of the respective businesses and the promised success of the blended future. Our human insights make this promised success a reality.
Business Transformation
In M&A events, a “best of both worlds” outcome is often imagined and rarely achieved. Our human-centered, ground-up view of operations enables a transformation that is truly better than the sum of the merger’s parts.
Cost Savings
Spreadsheets are a handy abstraction of the parts within a restructuring event — inventories of tools, processes, departments, and roles. But rows and columns ignore the realities of how work has historically been successful and how to leverage the talent responsible for this success in the new, transformed environment. We illuminate this reality, providing the roadmap to reduce redundancy, enhance satisfaction, and maximize capabilities.
Operational Excellence
In M&A events, the potential for a more efficient and productive future state is often left unassessed, ignoring the risk that lies in the human context. Old habits die hard, but when people can clearly envision their future value and impact, new behaviors are adopted quickly. Our depictions of the future state provide exactly that, a means for people to see themselves in a future more productive than the past.
Enterprise Resource Planning
Coordinating actions and resources across an organization goes beyond the dashboard of any enterprise resource planning solution. It requires a balanced understanding and orchestration of the organization’s people, policy, tools, and data. As experts in observing organizations in their entirety, we provide this balanced understanding. As experts in visualizing operations across all dimensions of the enterprise, we provide the roadmap for orchestration.
Business Transformation
Given a robust understanding of the human context of work, implementing an ERP system offers the opportunity for transformation across the organization. Our expertise in the human context ensures that adopting new ERP tools prompts the transformation an organization actually needs.
Cost Savings
In theory, an ERP system reduces costs, integrating and centralizing previously siloed systems. In practice, this cost reduction requires the buy-in of an organization’s workforce. Our human insights allow business operators to meet their workforce where they are, putting theory into practice.
Operational Excellence
ERP systems promise more efficient operations. Multi-step processes of the past are said to become one, automation seamlessly connecting what once was a motley assortment of tasks. Yet without clear, cross-functional vision into those tasks and their connections, automation is only a promise. Our thorough observation of work gives business operators the clear vision ERP automation requires.
Our Results
Our Insights
Our Voices
Wrench in The System
“Harold Hambrose's book pointed out, in plain language and with concrete examples, why business software generally doesn't work and how to fix it. I am well acquainted with the literature that covers design of technology systems, and Hambrose's text is the only one that adequately tackles software product design issues in a practical and accessible manner."
“Together with thought leaders like Edward Tufte, Harold Hambrose reminds us that great design can change the world."
Let's do something meaningful.
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