Services
At Instead Consulting we have four core capabilities to help you realise your strategic goals. We start from an idea or desire to do better, to do more, to do differently and help you analyse and construct a plan to help you realise your goals through Vision, Strategy, Development and Engagement.
Uniquely we specialise in working with organisations who deliver complex systems; railway systems.
With our experience of working with business leadership in project-centric organisations, and on the coalface of delivering projects, we ensure that your Vision is clear, with a Strategy for success, developed into a workable Plan, and with all of your people engaged on the way forward whilst sympathetic to their needs.
Whether your Vision is for new market entry, new technology and innovation strategy, programme delivery, bidding for contracts, or just to refocus your business, we can give you the solutions you need to develop a comprehensive and robust plan to maximise your delivery success.
We also have some further unique capabilities to complement our core capabilities, in Rail Skills Strategy, Project Mapping, and Technology Connections; more information about these can be found below….
Vision
Working with you to define and articulate your goals by identifying key objectives, visualising your ideas through diagrams, and creating engaging imagery. We use a soft systems methodology to build a rich and robust vision of tomorrow’s reality.
Strategy
A successful strategy will give you clarity of the journey ahead. By identifying your key future challenges, we can give you a robust roadmap you can trust for achieving your ambition and bringing your stakeholders along with you.
Development
Our project architects will develop a structure and plan to achieve your vision. We will define work packages with clear and succinct requirements, reduced complexity, and defined interfaces that will give you confidence you can realise your goals.
Engagement
People will be crucial in delivering grand visions so we help you to craft engaging and influential messages which will resonate with your audiences. By preparing speeches, presentations, websites and brochures, we will turn your audience into your champions.
Additional capabilities
Technology connections
In our era of connected technology we have the opportunity to greatly enhance our interconnected railway systems by bringing new novel ways of gathering data and disseminating information. And in classical domains too with novel materials, sensors, power sources, simulation and automation we are at the forefront of a new rail renaissance.
At Instead Consulting we can help you leverage technology to enable you to do more, for less, more safely, and in line with your business goals.
We believe that finding the right technology and technology partners is essential to innovating for commercial success. What makes us unique is our connections, through our network from SME partners and academia, to leading blue chip companies and non-rail expertise, we can help you to bring the people together to enable your innovation ambitions.
Beyond rail, our Technology Connections expertise is also used by leading blue chip companies to help them make better in-house connections to boost their internal innovation through collaboration. Instead Consulting is able to leverage this deep insight into companies to help you find the right expertise for your projects in rail.
Project Mapping
Engineers in Rail love their scheme plans, their horizontal and vertical alignments, and their tomes of requirements setting out the scope of work. But these long drawings taking reams of paper create a barrier to effective Project and Commercial Management.
Have you ever wished your engineers could just describe your project to you on a single A3 page?
At Instead Consulting we take all your project documentation and translate it into easy to read maps of the railway, helping you understand, manage and communicate your project scope.
Our maps help to reduce the integration risk between disciplines; they can be used to help stakeholder management; and can even help with planning safe systems of work too.
We can work on any sized project, from 15 mile redoubling works, to route level schemes from Paddington through to Swansea adding tailored overlays to suit your needs.
Rail Skills Strategy
Our Lead Consultant, Adam Stead, has recently lead the Young Rail Professionals organisation through it’s growth into a national organisation working with dozens of industry partners and collaborators.
Through this voluntary role, Adam has been proving industry-level leadership on strategy for engaging with young people, attracting more people to join the rail industry, and developing and retaining our young people as they set out on their rail career.
Adam can now provide his insight to your organisation too, for how to get more out of your young people through engaging them and building on their educational background to create your future talent and innovative products. Adam can also help you to learn how to attract more people to join your company by effectively promoting your brand to the right audiences, pitching your messages appropriately, and developing plans for who to engage, when and how.
Adam continues to volunteer via Young Rail Professionals by providing leadership on strategic collaborative projects including National Rail Week 2016, and a Rail Industry Online Careers Website.