Consulting · Jewellery manufacturing · SEEPZ, Mumbai
Ten strategic initiatives. None abandoned.
The short version
Fine has manufactured diamond jewellery from SEEPZ since 1987 and supplies some of the largest brands in the UK and Europe. The directors had a familiar problem: a managerial team so deep in daily operations that the strategic projects meant to move the business forward were not being executed. We spent the year putting a working mechanism around those initiatives — expectations, weekly plans, declared dependencies, real reviews. Ten were planned, seven were completed, three met their milestones and two more were added. Then, in the last quarter, we went back to a harder question: where the goals had come from in the first place.
The strategy existed. The execution did not.
Every company of this size has a list of strategic projects. Most of those lists look the same by September: two things done, three quietly dormant, and nobody willing to be the person who says the rest are not happening.
Talking to the team heads produced four causes, and none of them was effort.
| Expectations were unclear | People knew the name of an initiative and not what finishing it would look like. |
| There were no action plans | An initiative existed as an intention, not as a sequence of things somebody was doing this week. |
| Dependencies were not declared | Most initiatives needed another team, and that need surfaced when it blocked something rather than when the plan was made. |
| Reviews had no structure | Monthly meetings existed. What they were reviewing against did not, so progress was reported as sentiment. |
A strategic initiative that has no owner, no weekly task and no declared dependency is not a project. It is a preference. It will lose every argument it ever has with an urgent operational problem, and it will lose them silently.
What we changed
| 01 | Sat leadership and stakeholders together to define, for each initiative, what done actually meant — before any planning started. |
| 02 | Broke every initiative into weekly tasks with timelines, and made the cross-functional support each one needed explicit at the point of planning rather than at the point of failure. |
| 03 | Required weekly review by the project owner. Not a report to management — a check by the person accountable, every week. |
| 04 | Rebuilt the monthly review to run against action plan updates, so the meeting had something specific to be about. |
| 05 | Followed up continuously between reviews, unblocking dependencies and pulling in leadership support where a team could not clear something itself. |
Item three is the one that does the work and the one most often skipped. A monthly management review catches a problem up to four weeks after it started. A weekly self-review by the owner catches it while it is still small enough to be embarrassing rather than serious.
Item five is the part that is difficult to sell and impossible to substitute. Between the reviews, somebody has to chase. Frameworks do not chase.
Then the harder question
Nine months of running the initiative machinery surfaced something the machinery could not fix. The initiatives were being executed properly. Where they came from was another matter.
Annual goal setting at Fine was built around a company revenue target. Every department then aligned its plans reactively to that number. Team heads wanted their functions to match industry benchmarks and could not tell whether that ambition served the company’s direction, because the company’s direction had never been stated as anything other than a figure.
A revenue target is not a strategy. It tells every department how hard to push and nothing about what to build. Run a business on one for long enough and you get a set of individually reasonable departmental plans that do not add up to anything.
So the sequence was deliberate, and it is the reverse of the conventional one. We fixed execution first, because that was the presenting problem and because a company that cannot finish anything will not benefit from a better strategy. Then we went upstream to the source.
Two days, and the questions nobody enjoys
We ran a structured two-day workshop with the leadership team to define Fine’s core purpose, its BHAG — the Big Hairy Audacious Goal — and its vivid descriptions, using Jim Collins’ methodology. Then the same exercise with team heads, so departmental direction came out of the company’s rather than alongside it.
The method matters less than the temperament. These sessions fail when they are comfortable. A leadership team left to its own devices will produce a purpose statement that every person in the room can agree with precisely because it commits to nothing. Our job across those two days was to keep asking the question after the acceptable answer — why that, why not the opposite, what would you refuse to do, how would you know if this were false.
What came out of it was a stated purpose, a long-horizon goal specific enough to be wrong, and departmental goals, scorecards and initiatives that trace back to both.
What it produced
| Count | |
|---|---|
| Planned at the start of the year | 10 |
| Short-term projects completed | 7 |
| Longer-term projects on milestone and timeline | 3 |
| Added mid-year | 2 |
| Abandoned or dropped | 0 |
| Under management at year end | 12 |
The two added mid-year are the number we would draw attention to. Adding initiatives during a year is normally a symptom — somebody has had an idea and the list absorbs it. Here it happened because the existing ten had stopped consuming attention, and the capacity was real rather than optimistic.
Alongside that, the leadership team and stakeholders came out of the visioning work with a stated core purpose, a BHAG and vivid descriptions, and every department with goals, scorecards and initiatives aligned to them.
What we can and cannot tell you
These are counts, not outcomes. Seven initiatives finishing tells you the execution machinery worked. It does not tell you what those seven initiatives were worth to Fine, and we are not in a position to say — the commercial value of each sat with the business and we did not measure it.
Alignment is asserted, not measured. The client reports reduced decision-making bottlenecks and better cross-functional collaboration after the visioning work. We believe it and we cannot evidence it. Nobody baselined decision latency or cross-team escalation before the workshop, and both would have been measurable.
We had no access to Fine’s financial performance. The company has grown substantially in recent years and that growth surrounds, precedes and outlasts our involvement. Its causes are the business, its products and its customer relationships. We make no claim on it.
This is one of several engagements. Debox also ran a digitisation and automation programme at Fine across the same period. That work is written up separately and this page covers the consulting only.
Constraints that shaped the work
Doing execution before strategy is defensible and it is not free. For most of 2024 the initiatives being driven were ones set against a revenue target, which means a share of that year’s effort went into finishing things that a proper strategy exercise might have deprioritised. We would make the same call again — a company that cannot finish anything gains nothing from a better list — but the cost is real and it is worth naming.
The other limitation is measurement, and it is the same one we keep finding in this kind of work. We counted initiatives because initiatives are countable. Decision latency, escalation volume, the time between a strategic project being agreed and being started — all of those were available, none of them was baselined, and any one would have told a reader more than a completion count does.
In their words
“They are a young business consulting firm — much more than just an HR consulting firm — who have helped us in various areas such as process improvements, digitisation and visioning exercises. I believe all businesses can engage with them and they can add value to varying extent. Our overall experience with them has been very good.”
Jignesh Hemani — Chief Financial Officer, Fine Jewellery Manufacturing
If your strategic projects keep stalling
Check whether they are projects. An initiative with a name, an owner in principle and a slot in a monthly review is not one. It needs a definition of finished, a task somebody is doing this week, and every dependency on another team written down before the work starts rather than discovered when it blocks.
And then somebody has to chase between reviews. That part cannot be systematised, delegated to a tool or replaced by a dashboard, which is why most strategic project frameworks work for one quarter.
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Measurement note. Initiative counts, scope and workshop structure are from our own project records and the client’s year-end review. No baseline was established for decision latency, alignment or cross-functional escalation, so improvements in those areas are reported as the client described them rather than as measurements. We had no access to Fine’s financial performance and make no claim on the company’s commercial growth.
