How well does your corporate strategy work - for your company as a whole, and for individual business units? If it fails in some areas - which ones? And why? How good is your strategy-making process at gathering information and opinions, and at delivering strategies that win support and deliver growth?

This self-assessment audit comes in three parts:

• First, a 3-step audit to give you a clear, objective picture of the 'business environment': market, competitor and financial realities. (Of course, this information is already available to you - but probably not in a form that is tailored to help you shape and realign your overall business strategy.)

• Second, a 7-step organizational assessment. This lets you audit your company's existing strategy, viability and robustness, business processes, capabilities, resource allocation and company culture.

• Finally, it gives you the tools to integrate all these elements and a framework within which to develop an appropriate and flexible strategy for the future.

Run this audit regularly to plot how well your strategy is aligned with changing company needs. Check the targeting of resources against company capabilities and capacity - and identify any potential mis-match. Most important, use the audit to improve the way you develop new strategies.

Every company should use this audit as an essential first-step in its strategy-making process. The results will focus any strategy meeting or strategic planning group on the key issues that need to be addressed.

The Business Strategy Audit ~ 56 pages ~ Novations Group

Use these Audits in 3 different ways: If you have problems in any business area, use them to identify problems and corrective actions If you are concerned about problems ahead, use the Audits to 'X-Ray' your business for early-warning of potential risks If you are planning - or have begun - a company-wide program of change, use the Audits systematically to measure performance levels, set targets and monitor improvement.

It is becoming clear that the only sustainable competitive advantage in the future will be one that is based on satisfying customers thoroughly. Yet research shows that less than one third of all companies have a well-developed and coherent customer satisfaction process linked to operating strategies and plans. (Even though many companies do have elements of a total customer satisfaction process in place.)

This audit, which includes important sections on managing the customer satisfaction process itself, is the ideal business tool for any company setting out to analyse and improve customer satisfaction levels.

The audit begins by explaining the customer satisfaction process in detail, then analyses why companies fail to satisfy their customers and sets out a framework - the Stages of Excellence Framework - within which you can develop and implement an effective customer service program. Overall, it will help you to:

• Understand and define customers' needs and requirements
• Analyse your current capabilities
• Assess your competitors' capabilities
• Measure gaps between your capabilities and your customers' requirements
• Identify and compare the available options for gaining a strategic service advantage
• Analyse costs, benefits, risks and trade-offs
• Develop new strategies, prioritize initiatives, target results and apportion resources
• Structure service offerings and set goals

The Customer Satisfaction Audit ~ 52 pages ~ A.T. Kearney, Inc.