Hilltop’s primary services in this area are as follows:
- Organizational Effectiveness
- Change Management
- Program/Project Management
- Training
Hilltop has performed engagements for large and medium sized companies that want to create a sustainable yet dynamic business enterprise that is constantly changing to enable a long-term strong competitive position in changing market conditions. To design the organization to be effective in such situations, our OE consultants work with our clients to:
- create a business framework (including policies, processes and disciplines) that withstand and adapt to changing market conditions,
- take a fresh and objective look at your business, competitive advantages, shortcomings, and opportunities and identify how the company can maximize its strengths while making changes to overcome or lessen the impact of its shortcomings,
- affirm who your customers are, why they choose to do business with the Company or not,
- determine what your customers say about your Company,
- change the customer experience to change what they think about your Company,
- anticipate and understand market shifts and plan how to prepare to optimize your results,
- harness your employees’ strengths, motivation, positive attitudes, willingness to change and interest in helping the Company with achieving its goals,
- validate your recent business results and alignment of priorities, plans, and tactics against your strategy.
Essentially, the purpose of an organizational effectiveness assessment is to figure out how to get “everyone rowing in the same direction” to achieve your strategy. Another benefit of this type of effort is to clarify direction and objectives of the Company, ensure cross functional alignment (all the silos are working together) and informed optimization that drive results.
Organizational effectiveness is the “foundation” for the other component of successful change which includes:
- a clear Strategy to execute,
- encouraging employees to Engage and get involving,
- facilitating Change Management to be easy for all to be involved, and
Demonstrating that the Customer Experience will improve when the Strategy is Engaged by the Company’s employees, once they are no longer afraid of Change.
Organizational effectiveness engagements need to consider the following:
- Strategy
- Customers
- Goal alignment
- People
- Products
- Policies
- Technology
- Service standards
- Sales effectiveness & workforce productivity
- Marketing & Communications
Culture
Hilltop’s change management services are different from our competition because we won’t design a new business process that looks good on paper but is not likely to be implemented given a lack of support by Management and/or staff. We understand the need to obtain “buy-in” from our client and their employees. Identifying leaders that will encourage change and assist in the process of designing the change is critical to the success of any project.
Hilltop’s project management approach is to adopt our client’s methodology (Six Sigma, Lean Sigma, Agile, Waterfall, etc.). If the client does not have a preference, the team will use one of these methodologies based on the team’s knowledge/experience with the methodology and what type of project is being managed. Many of our consultants have or are in process of obtaining their Project Management Professional certification. The project management tools will also differ based on the client environment, the team’s level of use with a particular tool and the complexity of the project to be tracked.
It is not unusual for there to be more than one project that needs to be executed as part of a larger “program” of changes that need to be implemented. Program Management is also a very familiar effort for the Hilltop teams as most projects are not single dimensional and do require tracking and executing multiple projects that are all co-dependent on each other to make the program successful. Most of our project/program managers have both the project management skills and experience as well as an industry background – so most of our project/program management is financial services or Federal agency related.
Hilltop professionals have extensive training experience in course creation, industry subject matter content development, and instructional delivery (either training participants or “training the trainer”). Internal and external courses have been designed and delivered. We have helped instruct numerous industry and topical courses in the operations and finance arena. Some examples of our training qualifications include:
- training bank examiners on the audit risks of mortgage lending and servicing businesses (for FFIEC)
- instructing secondary market sessions for the MBA’s School of Mortgage Banking
- instructing accounting sessions for the MBA’s School of Mortgage Banking
- instructing accounting, audit and consulting sessions for KPMG and BearingPoint on a regular basis from 1987 to 2005
- conducting client seminars on credit risk
- conducting client strategy sessions
- instructing Financial Analysis courses at Georgetown University
- instructing Corporate Finance courses at Georgetown University
- creating and instructing many other courses for clients.
Hilltop has created and delivered very detailed and customized courses which reflect the way our clients do business and/or delivered “off the shelf” content. Our customized courses can also be used as “operational handbooks” or guides of how our Client wants the process to work. Examples of our operations-oriented courses that we have often customized to our client’s needs include:
- Loan officer training – the loan officer’s role, job expectations, regulatory knowledge requirements, etc.
- Loan Processor boot camp – what the processing efforts are and expectations for performance
- Loan Underwriter boot camp – what the processing efforts are and expectations for performance
- Loan Closer boot camp – what the processing efforts are and expectations for performance
- Quality control boot camp – what the QC required steps and scope are and policy relating to escalation to Management,
- Workflow analysis and defining business requirements – how to analyze, define and document business processes and interfaces
- Operations Training Wheels – how to create job aides to support new operations employees and/or improve performance
From our training efforts, we can also assist your company with creating “leave behind” materials, policy documents, process documentation, workflow aids, and other tools that can directly enhance the business processes and compliance for your employees.