The News Agency had customer and market focused aims which meant that it needed:

1. A Case for Change signed off by the Board:

• Clarity about market requirements for Europe, Asia, the Middle East, and Latin America
• Clarity about their current competitive position in each region
• An analysis of the current position and required future state for technology for news gathering, production, content management, product portfolio and pricing
• An organisational analysis by region of matrix managed functional team alignment with market requirements

2. A well-managed transformation project resulting in the retention of clients and acquisition of new clients through focusing on workstreams by region covering:

• Strategic development and operational planning by region
• Technology – news gathering and production
• Content, Product, and Pricing • Sales force effectiveness
• Marketing
• Financial control
• Organisational change through new role development, internal communications, training and supported alignment of people to new roles

The News Agency had customer and market focused aims which meant that it needed:

1. A Case for Change signed off by the Board:

• Clarity about market requirements for Europe, Asia, the Middle East, and Latin America
• Clarity about their current competitive position in each region
• An analysis of the current position and required future state for technology for news gathering, production, content management, product portfolio and pricing
• An organisational analysis by region of matrix managed functional team alignment with market requirements

Mirabilis Management is highly experienced and skilled at Change Management. We work with our clients to scope their case for change and change plans and offer knowledge transfer to support sustainability of change operations in the organisation. Our experts are matched to the sector in which they are consulting for knowledge and cultural fit. We also match our people to the nature of the change which can be anything from technology and ERP change, to HR, Sales, Brand Marketing, product development, and PMO development to cater for Agile and Waterfall approaches. We work with private for-profit businesses, charities, government departments, and NGOs, to deliver services that work with the culture of the organisation and match audience and customer personas. For this project we provided the following:

• Developing a Case for Change
  This involved market research and running workshops with leaders in all regions to uncover for every part of the business, the current state of the organisation against market need, and the required future state, identifying what needed to be done to get there.

  After a six-month period of working with all departments across regions, we produced a full report and managed the development of the case for change presentation which was presented to the Board. We were responsible for presenting the market change scenarios prior to the respective leads presenting their case for change against these.

• Programme Design
  The case for change was approved, leading to our developing a programme design which included 21 workstreams.
  
  
• Programme & Project Management
  A waterfall approach was taken to programme management as we had defined deliverables. Project management was supported by MS Project and reporting to a steering committee was weekly for each workstream.

• Organisational Restructuring
  We supported HR through a full restructure of the organisation to align people and roles to regions, functions developing transformed roles that met the needs of the market.
• Business Change Design and Management
  Business Change was undertaken using PROSCI including change planning, support, communications and training.
• Technology Change Management
  Tech change management was iterative with different types of newsgathering and dissemination equipment being tested and implemented once the leads were sure that they had the correct solution. Production also changed and the development of new production areas with new tech was staged to ensure no disruption to steaming news to outlets whether they be text, photo or video customers.
• Portfolio Review
  We worked on a full portfolio review and transformation with the product and pricing teams to align content to regional and global products based on customer analysis.
• Implementation and knowledge transfer
  Our team mentored and coached change agents, department leads and HR to ensure that training was available and also transferred the skills of market research and analysis, internal and external change comms, and organisational design and implementation so that the change would be sustainable.

especially in the video news sector which was the growing market. Retention and growth was achieved and the News Agency is still in the top 3 agencies in the world.