Our unit
Our Unit is composed by a group of university professors and consultants with long experience in guiding large groups, small and medium companies and public administration structures as they design and manage projects to focus their strategies; innovate their business model, products/services and/or organization. Our distinctive characteristic is knowing how to integrate hard competences with soft skills to obtain significant and sustainable results, bringing together business objectives with a valorization of people.
Each of us has worked in a number of business and consultancy contexts and has developed a profound vertical knowledge which we use to help you intervene transversally over all the key elements of your value chain.
We work with the most innovative instruments and techniques to strengthen people’s knowledge capital, create knowledge in individuals and the collectivity at any level in the company, stimulate participation and a sense of shared responsibility, triggering a system of trust relationships.
Work with uscan lead to your reaching of solid coherence among new scenarios and strategic designs, the defining of an agile organization with flexible roles and competence profiles, a streamlining and optimization of structures and processes for digitalization as well as a significant enhancement of productivity and value.
Persona di riferimento
Luisella Erlicher
Head of Strategy&Organization
Italy | Milan
Adjunct Professor of the Department of Organizational Studies at MIP School of Management, Politecnico of Milan. Partner of the consulting firm Mays International, based in Florence. Consultant at FCA (Fiat Chrysler Automobiles) on the WCM (World Class Manufacturing) Production System. Author of...Read more
Le nostre soluzioni
An agile organization and digital processes
To survive in today’s markets with current competitiveness and digital transformation, we need to look beyond the past’s hierarchic structures, immobility and its dividing of an organization into silos. An agile organization is a network of teams that acts according to a culture that focuses on people and operates with rapid learning cycles and fast decision-masking processes. An operative model that allows one to reconfigure strategies, processes, structures, competences and technologies quickly and effectively, to create value in complex, uncertain and continuously evolving conditions.
How can we gradually transform our company and business units into clusters of teams with precise objectives and responsibilities but in such a way that they can reconfigure, when priorities require it? How can we guarantee control and coordination? How can we intervene on the processes to make them more efficient and innovate?
Consultancy
- A participated redesigning of the organization following agile and teal principles;
- Designing of a multidirectional system of communication and collaboration (system of interaction among teams, interfunctional collaboration platform, with clients and suppliers;
- Support in redesigning processes according toevolved lean and World Class Manufacturing (WCM) standards to get ready for digitalization;
- Support in analysing overall performance of processes and the definition of KPI.
Training
- Laboratory to instruct executives and middle managers in agile organization reprograming;
- Training course for the process owner and on-the-job coaching using the BPM Institute method and a proprietary system;
- Reprograming laboratory for the digitalization of the processes.
Innovation and knowledge management
A company’s ability to produce and manage knowledge constitutes its main competitive asset. Creating networks of operative figures and technicians, connected to clients, suppliers, Innovation Digital Hubs and other research centers is a necessary precondition to innovatingone’s business model, portfolio of products and services, processes and collaboration effectively.The technological revolution requires that a new role be created with specialized and transversal competences whose job it is to select and integrate 4.0 technologies and then render them friendly. To all of this one must add the need to acquire a capacity to manage data. This is only possible if the data is available, correct, continuously updated and residing in integrated IT systems.
How can we renovate our company’s distinctive heritage of competences for the future? How can we modify this heritage into the competences of widened and more flexible roles and thus contribute to developing the cognitive potential of the company as a whole?How can we collect and make available the information and knowledge necessary for digital processes and 4.0 solutions?
Consultancy
- Design thinking for product, service and organizational innovation;
- Designing of flexible roles and jobs;
- Competence model and competence assessment, role mobility and career management also based on AI/machine learning;
- Digital Corporate Academy.
Training and coaching
- Developing models and systems of thinking based on neuroscientific paradigms;
- Training in creativity and mental plasticity;
- Design a thinking lab;
- Group coaching to communities of knowledge and practices.
Organization of research and engineering
The technical departments of companies that have complex products are difficult to manage. One often has the strong impression that technological research activity costs more than it is worth.
Our experience allows us to fully integrate specialized technical knowledge into the company’s processes and operative mechanisms and to distribute the research activity optimally, sustainably and transparently among external units, central units and all the other functions.
How can we minimize the costs and multiply the effectiveness of our R&D? How do we integrate our technical culture into our company’s wider culture and maximize its use as a technical lever, so important for many companies and a strategic factor for success?
Consultancy
- Interfunctional planning and formulation of the new products and services;
- Integrated development process of new products and services;
- Program and project management;
- Systemic and specialized development of the competences and necessary capacity, both technical and managerial;
- The specific R&D operative mechanisms and their integration into the company’s mechanisms;
- Allocating research strategically and exploring the possibility of sharing its costs in time and resources with other companies;
- The optimal positioning a central research unit;
- Distribution of research throughout the company’s functions.
Training and coaching
- Integrated and synergic with other interventions.
Tools
- Proprietary tools on strategy, processes, roles, competences, operative mechanisms which have been adapted to the needs of and shared with the people involved.
Cultural change
The ongoing transformation in businesses and in organizations requires a profound renewal of the workplace community culture, its values, mental models and the behaviour of individuals and teams. This means acquiring: mental plasticity, the capacity to coexist with uncertainty, a desire to learn more and know more deeply and finally the know how to orient change according to shared values instead of just submitting to it.
How do we identify the mechanisms that keep our people, teams and the entire organization from unravelling the knots of habit and the known, to get them to accept the challenge and bring into play positive energy and new insights? How can we give new sense to our work, so that every person is stimulated to contribute with all their energy?
Consultancy
- Cultural audit, analyses of the obstacles and dysfunctionalities of the current culture;
- Cultural shift, identification of what to keep and what culture, vision and values to change in the company’s founding nuclei;
- The development of artefacts to support change (creation of events, symbolic artefacts, storytelling and learning history.
Training and coaching
- Change labs;
- Development paths for shared and service leadership;
- Coaching and mindfulness paths for personal awareness;
- Paths to develop empathy and emotive intelligence.
Tools
- Future Search Methodology to define a common plan on which to base the new culture;
- Sense Making Model to establish the vision and values and to define the leadership model for the change.
The teams
Teams are the basic units of tomorrow’s organizations. Digital technologies have transformed the way work is carried out: smart working, collaboration between technicians and operative elements in developing products, cost reduction and process innovation, creation of ecosystems with clients and suppliers to promote coordination and horizontal integration and collaboration among autonomous teams.
How do we design and manage teams that will take decisionsand take on risks and responsibilities based on relations of trust and help?
Consultancy
- Support in designing teams as relative to their objectives, composition of these teams, definition of objectives, behaviour rules and KPI;
- Variables and ways of auditing the teams and instructing them in self-auditing.
Coaching
- Guiding in team shadowing and team coaching to develop connections, shared leadership and for excellence in performance.
Tool
- Modelling dysfunctionality in the team and experience workshops to resolve the gaps;
- Diagnostic TKI on managing conflicts within teams and negotiation laboratories;
- Searle Model on linguistic acts for effective communication within the team to promote change in the mental models of the group.
Insight di area
Digital Organization
That today our IT systems can “think”, implement a series of virtual reality technologies and analyze the enormous quantity of data that has become available is thanks to the massive introduction of digital management platforms and to the integration of these. This has modified the nature of...Read more
Conscious leadership
Strategic thought, leadership and decision making cannot always follow the schemes and models formerly considered best practice.
New ways of thinking and evaluating and new courses of action must be tried flexibly in relation to the prevailing conditions and to the continual appearance of...Read more
Neurosciences at work
Studies in the neurosciences and molecular biology have given us many ideas that challenge the most common and widespread company myths and they have also given us techniques that have permitted us to use our brains more effectively, whether we are thinking creatively to develop an innovation or we are trying to change personnel or the organization.Read more
Managing Complexity
The frontiers of sciences such as physics, chemistry, biology, neuroscience, cybernetics, social sciences and philosophy are converging as never before, building a body of knowledge and research that are called the theory of complexity.Read more