Services | Upstream Management

Our PULSE Consulting Services

Policy Research, Development & Analysis

Policy is a preferred or prescribed rule or procedure to simplify and standardize decision-making objectively based on principles and values.

Policy can be expressed in many forms, from legislation, regulations, policies, programs, protocols, procedures, and guidelines, based on the organization’s context, needs, and flexibility or discretion.

Policy Development is the "R&D" engine for organizational change.

What We Offer

Upstream Management Solutions can work with your organization to

Critically assess your current policy-making capacity
Build a scalable policy development process and resources
Add "Right Touch Regulation" risk identification and proportionate interventions
Research, validate and analyze problems
Design and develop viable options
Facilitate stakeholder engagement
Provide staff and volunteer training
Prepare implementation and evaluation plans to bring your policy goals to life.

User Experience/Human- Centered Design

User Experience/Human-Centered Design (aka Design Thinking) is a powerful methodology to solve complex problems by focusing primarily on the current or future users (customers, clients, patients, passengers, etc.) and to solve their unmet challenges.

Every interaction (such as pre-sales, sale, onboarding, annual reporting, and customer service) can be explored in depth to identify its users' “pain points” and to ideate, prototype, test, and implement viable and durable solutions.

What We Offer

Upstream Management Solutions can work with your organization to:

Assess your customer/user-centricity and interaction points
Identify your current and future users of your products, programs, or services
Understand their “pain points” in interactions with your organization (a Journey Map)
Ideate, prototype, and test solutions
To set up solutions for successful piloting, rollout and evaluation
Provide User Experience design training

Learning & Development

Changing markets, regulatory requirements, knowledge, and technologies require organizations to continue to invest in learning and development of all their employees.

There must be alignment between an organization’s overall and strategic goals, as well as helping individual employees or managers to continue to develop their skills and proficiency.

Effective learning and development must be immediately practical and contribute to employee and managerial performance, not just theory.

What We Offer

Upstream Management Solutions can work with your organization to:

Assess your overall learning and development framework
Identify your strategic business needs for employee development
Identify who needs to be engaged in new learning or development
Develop the learning and development content with subject matter experts, or source it externally
Develop the appropriate formats and instructional design
Identify systems to provide the learning content and allow supervisors to evaluate the results

Strategy/Strategic Planning

Within the broader public sector, strategy is about identifying the Why, What, and How of directional change to improve an organization’s performance effectiveness or efficiency against its mandate, or to move it to a different mandate through specific activities or choices.

Strategy can take many forms, from corporate Strategic Plans to aligned strategies at all levels of the organization.

What We Offer

Upstream Management Solutions can work with your organization to:

Critically review your current Strategic Plan (or whether you need one)
Conduct market research, environmental scans and trend analysis
Review your organization’s change capacity, strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats
Formulate strategic change directional options and scenarios
Develop or refine strategic missions, visions, and goals
Review or develop strategies at all levels of the organization
Develop KPIs, performance monitoring and adjustments

Engaging with Stakeholders and Partners

A critical success for organizations is having meaningful two-way dialogue with users, customers/clients, and other related organizations. These strategies ensure that organizations are connected with and understand their users/customers’ needs and interests, stay up-to-date on emerging issues, and can co-create on durable solutions.

In an increasingly complex and interconnected world, organizations can’t usually solve problems only by themselves. That’s why partnerships with other organizations with shared jurisdictions or interests, either on a project or more comprehensive basis are so vital.

What We Offer

Upstream Management Solutions can work with your organization to:

Critically assess your current stakeholder and partner engagement capacity
Understand your ecosystem of related users and potential partner organizations, and their roles and opportunities
Identify incoming and outgoing requests for comment or consultation
Establish regular communication and collaboration channels
Build relationships with stakeholders and potential partners
Build the supporting infrastructure and resources

Staff & Volunteer Training Programs

Enhance your team's capabilities with our customized and specialized training programs and solutions to empower your workforce and volunteers. Our session topics include:

Regulatory Policy Development & Analysis - Basic/Intermediate/Advanced
- Getting Started (Basic)
- Policy Analysis (Intermediate)
- Policy Objectives & Options Development (Intermediate)
- Stakeholder Consultations & Communication (Intermediate)
- Implementation Planning & Evaluation (Intermediate)
Making Act and Regulation Change requests (Basic)
Policy Intelligence (Advanced)
“Upstream” Problem Solving (Advanced)
Introduction to "Right Touch" Regulation (Basic)
Extending Right Touch Regulation Across Your Regulatory Functions (Intermediate)
Strategic Thinking for Regulators (Basic)
Strategy Making, Planning & Adaptation for Regulators (Intermediate)
Evaluating and Updating Strategic Plans (Advanced)
Service Design improvements through User Experience (Intermediate)
From Stakeholder Management to Partner Collaboration (Intermediate).

...and more to come!

We can also offer customized training to meet your specific audience and needs. Available in in-person, remote or hybrid options, live or asynchronous (e-learning) at competitive rates.

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Empower your team with our Training programs and solutions.