A lot of international and Russian companies have to spend millions of dollars trying keep or improve their situation on the Russian market by investing into the activities designed to raise their efficiency and get better performance indicators. In order to achieve these goals, owners or top management of such companies, as a rule, invite quite expensive international and/or Russian consultants to develop and implement Strategic Business Initiatives, such as:



?IPO Preparation

?M&A Deals/Due Diligence

?JV Creation

?Corporate Management Reorganization

?Business Restructuring

?Re-branding

?IT Strategy/ IT System Integration

?HR Strategy

?Investment Strategy/Management

?Risk Management

?Business Value Management

?Continuous Change Management/Optimization Function

?Strategic International Projects Management

?Reputation Management

?Cost Management

?Corporate Management Reporting System

?Strategic Planning

?Budgeting

?Accounting Consolidation and Fast Close Reporting

?Strategic Controlling System on Behalf of the Owner

?ERP/CRM/BSC Implementation

?Business Processes Reengineering

?Benchmarking

?Lean Production/6 Sigma, etc.

According to the current estimates, up to 70% of such initiatives fail to reach the expected goals. About 23% may be considered to get satisfactory results, while only 7% are a real success. Failures may be accounted for by various reasons, the main being as follows:

?Initially, the Customer sets up unrealistic, wrong or improper targets.

?The Customer itself does not know what he may really expect as a result of these Initiatives.

?The Strategic Initiatives contradict to each other.

?The Initiatives run counter to the Core Business Strategy.

?The consultants neglect the synergy in the Strategic Initiatives results.

?The consultants develop a Strategic Initiative "as is" without adjusting it to the real situation on the market or to the trends in the company.

?The Customer is not ready to accept the innovation.

?The consultants develop the Strategic Initiative, but do not take responsibility for its implementation.

?The implementation may also go wrong for various reasons: the Strategic Initiative documents have not been prepared well, or they are not clear to the Customer, the Customer lacks necessary experience, the consultants can not explain clearly what should be done in order to adjust the Strategic Initiative results to the real situation, there's a bad Customer relationship management, etc.

That's why Independent Consulting Group (ICG) assists its clients in developing and implementing these and other Strategic Business Initiatives in the following way. Being Independent Consultants, which means that we are absolutely impartial in our judgments, we provide Consulting Services Audit for the Customers within the framework of corresponding projects. Such Audit includes analysis and assessment of the proposals and of all materials related to the Strategic Business Initiatives development and implementation prepared and made by international and Russian consultancies, as well as working out of corresponding recommendations to the Customer.

Both Consulting Services Audit and Quality Assurance tasks are performed only on the basis of corresponding Confidentiality Agreements. But, for the avoidance of any ambiguity or doubt, if Independent Consulting Group is in charge of Consulting Services Audit for some Customer under a specific project, it cannot provide QA Services to the interested consultancies involved into the same project, and vice versa.