Case study 1 - Process design

Client: a global hotel management company

Background: founded in Germany over a hundred years ago, the company has long reflected the finest traditions of European hospitality. The brand is now in many of the world's most famous and resorts and includes hotels in the grand style, pace-setting modern establishments and older hotels of individual charm. The business is headquartered in Switzerland.

Consultant/s: Ian Graham, Doreen Boulding and Mike Wrigley

Project objective: to develop a tailored yet generic checklist of issues that should be addressed during the period from the signing of the development agreement to the appointment of the executive team.

Project scope

In total, almost 300 separate processes were identified. Rather than focus on developing this checklist from a purely departmental or functional point of view, it was felt that this approach would fail to recognise four critical matters.

1. The enterprise was seeking to address these matters in a holistic and integrated manner
2. Added value comes from professional project planning
3. The tasks required to open a hotel are likely to be very similar regardless of whether the hotel is:

4. The tasks are likely to be largely the same whether there is a two-year or a two-month pre-opening period
5. The skills and competencies required during this phase are so significantly different to either development or operations

Results

• The checklist was organised around four main themes (now available to registered users for download).
• The time required to complete all the tasks on the checklist including sub-tasks was calculated, assuming a 12-month period of pre-opening.
• A detailed drill-down of each sub-task to the process level was provided.
• Each task was defined and an indication of the time taken to complete each one was given. Importantly dependencies were highlighted - that was, which tasks needed to pre-date later ones. Ownership of each process or task was established, indicating those that had to be performed by the client and those that could be accomplished by either the client or by an external resource.

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