Capabilities and Services

Our approach to Strategic Reviews, Baseline Reviews are also known by some in the public sector as a Policy, Capability and Funding Review. This service, which we have successfully used in both public and private sector settings determines the best possible future for an organisation to deliver on strategy and within funding and policy or other constraints.  

Public Sector
In the Public Sector, this is done in the context of a ‘triple constraint’:

1. Policy settings
2. Level of capability to deliver
3. Funding level to make it work.

Ultimately, this is a positive approach to balancing government departmental budgets and transforming Public Services.

Business Sector 
In a business context these reviews can tackle the whole of the organisation or a single business unit or division.

The aim remains the same.  To help you determine all of the options to deliver on organisational strategy, at quite a granular level.  Using our processes you can then collectively optimise what the organisation does and does not do based on value for money and whatever the critical constraint is, be it dollars, people, or some organisational capacity constraint.

Typically called Project Portfolio Prioritisation or Portfolio Prioritisation, this service is about selecting the best value for money portfolio of projects, initiatives or interventions withina funding, resourcing or other organisational constraint (such as capacity for change).

This work is often answering the question, ‘given our constraints what should we do as an organisation and what should we not do, and why?’

We help you think about what creates value for you and your stakeholders and use that as the basis for evaluating the portfolio that will deliver the greatest value.

Our approach not only provides a solution but enables you to update the portfolio as often as you need when new options need to be considered or for example when costs change.

When looking at a capital or other investment, Departments, Agencies or Teams are often asked to prepare a Business Case regarding the Investment. This service is about determining and completing an Options Analysis for your Business Case.

In this way, we provide research, information and support for organisations and individuals preparing a Business Case.  Our written reporting will include material that contains material that can be included into your Business Case, including graphics and information to support your authoring of your Business Case and make your Business Case a more robust one.

This service is offered when you have a complex problem. This is what we would call Options Analysis – Speciality. This is more than providing materials for Business Case, whilst that happens here, in this Assessment we’ll often be helping you work out even how you would create a range of credible options in a challenging problem.

Via this service, we help clients use robust decision-making processes to determine 1) which option to pick when there are a number of options to choose from, 2) be clear on why it is preferred and 3) have all stakeholders committed to the decision.

Our approach also allows the client to understand the options, which often helps determine what an even better option would look like (based on knowledge of what caused the various options to perform well and not so well)

This is about determining the best possible systems configuration or solution within a particular constraint. This is typically a one-off problem or challenge and constraints can be financial, space, weight, people resources or multi-faceted. For example, what options are you going to put into a ship given the space, weight and power limitations and what are the tradeoffs involved?

Leading and supporting decision-making in the decommissioning space. This service is about determining the best option for a final solution as infrastructure is decommissioned, typically in the Oil & Gassector.  However, the same approach can be used in other sectors decommissioning. This is an area that Catalyze APAC and particularly Paul Gordon, Technical Director & CEO, is becoming a re-known expert having experience with Shell Corporation and authoring a White Paper in 2018 on the subject titled: Rigorous Decommissioning Decision Making with Strong Stakeholder Engagement using Comparative Assessment, to be published in May 2019 by the Australian Petroleum Production and Exploration Association (APPEA).

Sometimes clients get great benefit from help in standing back and getting clarity and confidence on which approach to take.  In this instance, clients use Catalyze to help structure their thinking on the challenges or problems they face and what the decisions involved might look like and how they could be made. A good process or plan can be a good portion of the challenge resolved.

In our advisory services, our focus is to leverage our expertise in decision science, stakeholder engagement and problem structuring and solving, to help clients get clear on 1) their actual challenges 2) what the best outcomes could be and 3), how they might approach them for greatest results and positive impact.

Our skills enable us to come up with radically different approaches such as having parties whose relationships have broken down collectively building a brighter future together rather than ending up going down the pathway of mediation.

From time to time, organisations want to train and develop their leaders and executive in the art of Decision Science. This can be Executive Education in complex decision making techniques or training for operational staff in such techniques as particular Multi-Criteria Decision Analysis and Decision Conferencing.