Your strategy is only as credible as your ability to execute it.
Cello Consulting works with HR and business leaders to design, develop and deliver commercially grounded workforce strategies that create confidence, mitigate risk and underpin successful strategy execution.
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We recognise that it can be hard to know where to start...
A hands-on, high trust partnership with Cello turns business strategy into practical workforce decisions, concurrently developing People functions while building the capabilities your organisation requires for successful execution of business strategy.
Workforce Capability Diagnostics
Quick workforce capability diagnostic - We offer a quick diagnostic to help you understand where to focus and to create a high level view of your maturity across the workforce capability system.
Deep dive modular diagnostics - we take time to properly understand your uniqueness, challenges and what interventions will create the greatest positive impact for your organisation. We conduct this review at system and modular levels to create a personalised transformation plan.
Half day Exec workshops - A workforce capability system is a whole-business venture. We support you to get things moving creating clarity, defining the purpose, parameters and benefits of a bespoke workforce capability solution for your organisation and crucially creating buy-in.
Workforce Transformation Design
Workforce Capability System design - We implement bespoke solution designs and workforce transformation plans that blend your strategy requirements, your maturity and your level of ambition. We do this through workforce transformation best practice, bringing together the right internal and external technology and talent intelligence partners to create an integrated, user friendly and adaptable workforce capability system, required to provide the right insights for your workforce strategy at the right time.
Module transformation plans - Bespoke plans that mature and transform specific module initiatives, e.g. skills framework design, SWP implementation strategies and plans.
Workforce Transformation Enablement
Workforce transformation programme delivery. We orchestrate and develop internal and external stakeholders to deliver early insights and enduring transformation benefits.
Cello can work inhouse as your intelligent customer stakeholder or transformation director. We lead and assure the implementation and integration of frameworks, technologies and behaviours to ensure you get the best outcomes for your business.
Developing HR teams and Business Leaders
We work intimately with HR leaders, EXCO leaders and your People teams through the design and implementation phases. We place a particular emphasis on insight creation and resourcing strategy enablement, innovating throughout the talent lifecycle.
We offer bespoke development workshops and guides on Workforce Capability Systems and how to create an integrated, more strategic value proposition for business leaders from HR. Each module includes guides and workshops.
We also mentor and coach Exec leaders to support visioning, mindset work and workforce transformation delivery success.
Fractional Strategic Workforce Advisory Support
We offer a fractional strategic workforce advisory service on a retainer for Chief people Officers and their direct reports. This enables instant advice, solution design support, assurance and facilitation at short notice.
Cello helps organisations:
One Method. One System.
Six Modules.
We adapt our designs to meet your bespoke and specific requirements using a suite of diagnostics. Thereafter, all system and module transformation activity runs though our Workforce Capability by DESIGN methodology.
Six connected deep-dives create the Workforce Capability System
We conduct maturity assessments and transformation design plans across six progressive modules.
Strategy to
Capability
A validated capability map and future-back demand logic that drives critically, SWP demand and investment choices.
Capability
Frameworks
A proportionate, governed capability architecture (adopt, adapt or build) that enables assessment, SWP and development.
Strategic Workforce
Planning
A capability-led planning method that produces timely, costed and owned resourcing strategies and interventions.
Workforce
Strategy
Review of business and HR strategies and workforce plans to design and assure current or new workforce strategy for your organisation.
Workforce
Criticality
Criticality exercise with Execs and capability leaders, to discern the value contribution of roles to strategy. Combined with talent scarcity criteria & SWP to discern critical role/skill risks over time.
Integrated Business
Planning
A cross-functional series of planning and governance events over time horizons that enable collaborative capability and integrated business planning.
A proven approach to create a Workforce Capability System - it spells 'DESIGN'.
Baseline your workforce capability maturity
An explorative deep dive with HR and business leaders to map workforce capability painpoints, strengths and maturity across key enablers.
A baseline workforce capability maturity report articulating maturity levels, risks and issues, opportunities and recommendations
Define and agree future requirements
A visioning exercise with HR and business leaders to match workforce capability with strategy ambitions and budget over time.
A shared future state definition, purpose, remit and design principles for workforce capability or a supporting element (e.g. SWP)
Design your bespoke solution
A collaborative approach to design your workforce capability system (or element of it), considering in-house capabilities, technology architecture and opportunities, governance and wider dependencies.
A workforce transformation plan and implementation roadmap with buy-in locked in
Transformation programme lead or assurance roles
We work with you to deliver and implement vital transformation workstream activity, enabling good governance and integrated solutions.
Transformation that sticks, with your team developed to innately understand new ways of working.
Developing your inhouse capability
We offer module related development sessions for HR, a mentoring and coaching service and partner with you throughout all transformation activity.
Strategic HR teams that are capable of delivering enhanced value for business leader decision making.
Future-proof adaptable solutions
Change is an everyday phenomenon. We develop planning agility and change/update processes as part of solution design.
Resilient solutions and teams, able to react promptly and with confidence when changes occur.
How capable are you, really?
Twelve questions, about ten minutes. An indicative read on your workforce capability planning maturity and where to focus first, the start of a conversation, not an audit.
Cello develops HR Functions:
We partner with you throughout transformations or as a fractional advisor. In all cases we support and develop you and your teams to build systems that compliment your ways of working, creating strategic value.
Cello supports Business Leaders:
We drive growth and capability for leaders through-career
Working with Chris has been both inspirational and challenging in the best possible way. Chris led the design and delivery of a new approach to building organisational capability, bringing his unique mix of knowledge and practical experience to bear to deliver fundamental positive change for our people and the organisation.
Workforce, HR and Career strategies that deliver
A strategy on a shelf changes nothing. Everything Cello does holds to three principles:
Start a conversation →Commercially grounded
Tied to the business case, cost and value. Capability where it changes the outcome, not headcount for its own sake.
Practically deliverable
Designed to work inside your organisation and its real constraints, not a theoretical model on a shelf.
Owned by the organisation
Built with your team, so they own the decisions and sustain them long after we step back.
Workforce strategy that actually gets delivered.
Thinking on workforce, capability and the future of work.
What does Cello Consulting do?
Cello helps leaders turn business ambition into a practical workforce capability system, connecting skills, critical roles, workforce planning and investment decisions so organisations can deliver their strategy.
What services does Cello offer?
Five core offerings: Workforce Capability Diagnostics, Workforce Transformation Design, Workforce Transformation Enablement, Developing HR teams and Business Leaders, and Fractional Strategic Workforce Advisory Support.
What is the DESIGN methodology?
Cello's connected six-stage method: Diagnose the real problem and evidence, Envision the capability the strategy requires, Shape the choices and trade-offs, Implement through a real planning cycle, Grow the organisation's own ownership, and Navigate change as strategy shifts.
Who will I work with?
Directly with Chris Woodward, an experienced practitioner who has led this work in-house and advised organisations externally, combining independent challenge, bespoke design and hands-on support.
What experience does Cello bring?
Chris spent nineteen years as a British Army officer, worked in consulting at Korn Ferry, and has held senior HR leadership roles including acting CPO and HR Strategic Advisor at the OECD and Global Head of Strategic Workforce Planning in engineering organisations.
How do I start?
Book a short introductory call, take the free workforce capability diagnostic, or start a conversation through the contact page.
Not sure where your biggest workforce risk is?
Start with a conversation. No pitch, just a clear-eyed look at whether your organisation has the capability to deliver its strategy.
Start a conversationPractical thinking for people and business leaders, now and again, never too often.
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