Working with our clients and not just for them is a subtle, yet we believe significant, shift in focus.  We seek to work with our clients as a collaborative team in a manner which best suits the context of the activity and the desired outcomes.  This involves being open about assumptions, sharing all information, leveraging the best of everyone involved, and inspiring superior outcomes.

Working with our clients also means going above and beyond the traditional mechanics of working for a client.  We place significant emphasis on establishing effective mechanisms for communicating progress, risks, issues, and outcomes.  But we also seek to achieve and maintain outstanding relationships with our clients.  This investment of our time in your business pays dividends ... as our many long-term clients will attest.

We also think that working with our clients involves an explicit expectation that we will help you to grow your organisational capability.  In practical terms this means that we highly value the transfer of knowledge and skills.  Please don’t get the impression that this is completely altruistic ... we learn and grow just as much as our clients.  We actively seek to achieve this through formal and informal opportunities.  These tangible measures help to ensure that all results endure beyond our formal engagement period.

While it is not always practical (or convenient!) to walk a mile in your shoes we do try to take the essence of that American Indian adage to heart.  We try very hard to understand your view of the world before sharing ours. 

Put plainly, this means that Acaché will work closely with all key stakeholders to understand your business – its context, issues, and risks as well as its culture, systems, direction, maturity, etc.  We pride ourselves, and frequently astound our clients, on how rapidly we grasp the essence of a new business – through voracious reading, insightful questions and a real thirst for understanding.

We also pride ourselves in our ability to maintain our knowledge of your business over time.  Our internal knowledge systems and an ongoing commitment to remain abreast of developments hold us in good stead with all of our clients.

Project management principles underpin just about everything that we do.  The associated discipline brings certainty to process and outcomes.  And like projects, our assignments with our clients are typically described in terms of agreed expectations for scope, cost and schedule.  However, our experience with many clients and many projects reinforces our conclusion that it is not sufficient to consider success in terms of these measures alone.  We believe that success – in any endeavour – is what relevant stakeholders expect it is.

Let’s unpack this a little.  In any client endeavour (where we work together on an assignment, project, etc) there are many stakeholders.  However, when it really comes down to it, the success of that endeavour will be judged by only a subset of those stakeholders – frequently only a small subset.  We therefore work hard with our clients to identify the relevant stakeholders.  And when we engage with these stakeholders we also understand that while many of their metrics for success will be overt – and written down and talked about – some will be unstated.  All sorts of sensitivities will arise – of personal or organisational origins – that keep some expectations unstated.  This is a fact.  The expectations are still important.  We deal with it.

This is no overstatement!  For Acaché, our reputation is everything.  Our reputation is at the core of our value proposition and so we nurture and protect it assiduously.  Our livelihood is based on us being known as the people who deliver quality outcomes in a cost effective manner.  Our referees can attest to this, as can our record of providing services to many types of industry, all tiers of Government and a range of organisations in the not-for-profit sector. 

We have also built our reputation on our ability to react to the needs of our clients, to work with them in partnership and to be agile in the marketplace. 

Our approach to offering our services also involves a strong business focus on the timeliness of our responses.  We understand that when our clients highlight issues for resolution that those issues will not get better with age.  We pride ourselves and frequently delight our clients with the speed with which we are able to propose (and deliver) high quality, innovative and cost-effective outcomes.  Feedback from existing clients indicates that our ability to provide both timely and innovative service offerings is highly regarded. 

Much of what we do involves working with people to solve problems ... real-life and frequently very difficult problems.  We believe that the approach to problem solving has an enormous impact on the engagement you get from affected stakeholders and, ultimately, to the outcomes you get.  Traditional problem solving asks “What is wrong?” and then looks for solutions.  The standard gap analysis adopts the same approach: (1) Describe the ‘as is’ – i.e. the current situation or problem; (2) Describe the “to be” – i.e. the future state or the answer; and (3) Describe how to get to the future state – or the workings behind your solution.  These approaches frequently force us to dwell too long on the negative aspects of the past or the present.

In tracking brain waves and through other experiments, cognitive psychologists demonstrate that we perceive more options and opportunities when we're in a positive mindset, and far fewer when we're in a negative or depressed frame of thinking.  We've all felt a deep sense of "stuckness" when we're depressed, that dark place where solutions seem elusive and where every option seems either wrong or undesirable.

We appreciate the complexity and uniqueness of our client’s environment.  All clients differ culturally, technically, administrative and contextually.  Acaché therefore believes there are very few practices that could be called ‘best practice’.  Rather, there is a pool of ‘better practices’ that can be drawn upon, either as a whole, or more likely in part, to provide solutions that are customised and tailored to the unique requirements of every client. 

Acaché understands ‘best practice’ to be that body of evolving knowledge that has generally been accepted by reputable and market leading organisations as being “optimal”.  We therefore prefer to think of “best practices” as “better practice”.