At Tin Can Monsters, we provide a dispassionate set of eyes on your business. We don’t know what you do as well as you do, but sometimes an outsider can help you look at your issues through new lenses. We have the skills to assess where you’re at and what you do, suggest change, and where necessary train you and your team on how to get onto a new and better path.
What is a Tin Can Monster?
Tin Can Monsters is the name we use for the big unsolvable problems that hide under the desks and in the day to day work of most organisations. They are complicated and messy and everyone knows where they are, they just don’t know how to fix them.
We work with you to take the monsters apart. We break them down into manageable parts – all the nuts and bolts, bits of old string and rubber bands, emotions, history and myth – and then work out ways to reassemble them into working solutions.
“Teamwork is the ability to work together toward a common vision. The ability to direct individual accomplishments toward organisational objectives. It is the fuel that allows common people to attain uncommon results.”
– Andrew Carnegie
What we do
We work with the private and public sectors, in not-for-profits and educational institutions, in Australia and overseas. We understand business in whatever form it appears. Our job is to look at what you do and how you do it, and work with YOU to do what you do better.
Please click on the boxes below to see some of what we can offer your organisation.
Your Organisation
Design
Implement
Evaluate & Monitor
Change & Improve
Apply our Skills, Knowledge, Capability and Training to improve your organisation.
Strategic & Business Planning
Business Design
Governance
Enterprise Risk Management
KPI's(Business, People & Systems)
People & Structure
We help organisations determine their goals, and guide the planning to achieve those goals. The planning hierarchy uses ongoing work (business plan) activities to incrementally build over time to meet the longer term (strategic plan) goals.
We help organisations analyse what they do, how they do it, and what they need to do to succeed. We review organisational structures, systems, people, and planning and guide them to ensure that success.
We assist organisations to establish effective governance and management frameworks. This includes understanding the rules, relationships, systems and processes required for good governance, providing training to staff and ensuring that organisations meet their legal, social and business governance requirements.
We help organisations identify their current and future staffing and skills needs. We assist in developing people management systems, and ensuring that the right people with the right skills are in the right place at the right time.
We work with organisations to develop meaningful, practical, and measurable Key Performance Indicators (KPI’s) . Our aim is to ensure KPI measurement is an aid to constant organisational improvement - an integral part of the organisation’s ethos and not a perceived "bolt on" to the "real work."
We assist organisations in establishing and reviewing Enterprise Risk Management (ERM) frameworks. An ERM framework allows organisations to manage risks and seize opportunities related to the achievement of their strategic objectives. An ERM strategy should provide answers to three basic organisational questions:
Should we do it?
Can we do it?
Did we do it?
Policies & Procedures & Forms & Toolkits
Process Design
Operational Risk Management
Workforce Recruitment & Succession Planning
Operational Resilience (EM & BCP)
We help organisations develop useful and meaningful policiesand procedures based on best practice, and appropriate legislative and internal business frameworks. We work with organisations to customise and/or develop toolkits to make compliance to policy and procedural framework more “user friendly” for staff.
We review what an organisations does now, what it needs and wants to do, and evaluate the differences. We do this by mapping existing processes and determining how to modify, add to, or delete them to ensure they work to more effectively achieve the organisations goals.
Operational Risk Management is the continual cyclic process that includes risk assessment, risk decision making, and implementation of risk controls. We work with organisations to establish a process to identify, analyse, evaluate, treat and accept operational risk.
We help organisations manage and recruit their workforces so they have the right people with the right skills when they need them, and can meet current and anticipated skill requirements. Workforce planning is a crucial tool to ensuring the execution of strattegic and organisation plans, and in managing and achieving operational goals on a day to day basis.
We work with organisations to ensure they are operationally resilient. We assess an organisation’s Business Continuity maturity and can design and develop bespoke BCP and EM frameworks. We focus on an “All-Hazards” approach to managing business continuity which enhances the organisation’s ability to adapt rapidly to changing environments. Our system includes assessing the resilience of systems and processes and the ability of the organisation to continue to operate its business in the event of disruptive events.
Evaluation & Review
Data Analysis & Visualisation
Performance Measurement
Performance Management
Recommendations for change
We can assist with an ongoing program of assessment for most elements of an organisation. These assessments answers questions about programs and program elements, assessing them against operational and strategic requirements such as: is it meeting its organisational goals, is it actually doing what was intended (and is that appropriate), what does it need to change, what will it need to succeed in the future etc.
We help organisations effectively manage their data. Data visualisation is putting data into a visual or graphical format to aid interpretation. This makes analysis much easier and faster and offers the ability to see at a glance what matters - more user friendly. Data analytics is the process of analysing all the information, or data sets to help organisations make sense of what they have, identify strengths and weaknesses, and helps with better business decisions for future planning. This is a specialised field increasingly using tailored business-intelligence tools and is key to advanced analytics.
We assist organisations in assessing their functions and activities against a meaningful, clearly understood performance hierarchy. The foundation of this hierarchy is to ensure that activities can be measured in ways that benefit the organisation, and assist in determining what action, if any, is required.
We help evaluate the matching of people, their skills and the work they are expected to do within the organisation. We help develop and manage systems that ensure performance is monitored to lead to individual and organisational expectations being met, skills being enhanced, and poor performance managed and remediated.
As change managers, we provide advice to ensure that any recommendations made as part of organisational reviews are effectively implemented and managed. We develop change management plans with organisational staff that outline the necessary actions to make effective changes going forward and undertake all necessary training, education, and system modification to ensure success.
Business Improvement (Refine / Adapt / Discard)
Change Strategies (Corrective and Preventive)
Future Proofing (Adapting and Growing)
We help organisations manage their end of cycle reviews by assessing and evaluating organisational, functional or project (planning, measurement, processes, structure, staffing etc) activities. In these reviews, current performance is matched to future needs and improvement strategies are implemented as required. These form foundation for the next business planning cycle.
We help organisations implement change. We help develop and negotiate change management plans to assist areas impacted by the change. They take into account strategic and business planning issues, performance management and measurement, system redesign, and the future goals of the organisation.
We assist organisations to future proof themselves. This involves constant scanning of the environment for any issues, trends, or changes that may impact it. It includes hunting for industry best practice, being aware of proposed policy and regulatory changes, technological changes or advances, market influences etc. It is about making sure the organisation is ready to pick up, run with, and capitalise upon the "next big thing."
Positive performance management
Managing people is hard – you spend 98% of your time managing the 2% of staff that go wrong. We can show you how to manage underperforming staff effectively and, perhaps even better, provide strategies and skills that prevent them from becoming problems in the first place.
Performance measurement and evaluation
Strategic goals, KPI’s, performance reports and evaluation all form part of the success and management suite that today’s managers and leaders have to deal with. We help you ensure that you have the most effective goals, that you measure the right things and that you can PROVE you are doing the right things most effectively.
Business and strategic planning
Everyone needs to plan, but effective planning that actually assists in the achievement of growth and good business, is rare. We can assist you in making your planning hierarchies help your business work better in the short, medium and long term. We work on plans that become part of how you work, not sit in your bottom drawer until they need to be reviewed at budget time…
Project and change management
Effective project management is a skill that most leaders and managers need. We can manage projects for you or train you and your people in the skills you need. As part of that we look at managing change – and maintaining that change – in workplaces. A separate and essential management skill that is often neglected and is the most common cause of project failure.
Entrepreneurship and Creative Business
We have spent a lot of time teaching business skills to visionaries and entrepreneurs, helping translate ideas into business realities. We can help you with the planning you need to turn your passion and ideas into profitable ventures.
Managing difficult interactions
Dealing with people, staff and clients alike, can be difficult. We run a range of programs on:
Bullying and Harassment
Dealing with Difficult Customers
Positive Interactions – How to Deal with Anger and Aggression
These programs are all designed to help you and your staff get the best results in achieving positive, productive interactions.
We listen. We deliver. YOU benefit.
We know business
At Tin Can Monsters, our team has worked in, and run businesses – we know both the pain and the joy.
We have a huge range of experience and skills and are particularly good at making business “real”. No management fads and spouting of the latest theories, just good, practical and very effective business strategies and education.
We currently are working on:
Training, development and targeted consultancy services including coaching
Infrastructure change, systems redesign and development (for both ICT and general work systems)
Unearth Analytics is an ICT Management Consulting organisation specialising in Data Analysis and Visualisation to enhance Organisational Measurement, Performance, and Evaluation.
Unearth Talent provides People Performance, Recruitment and Contingent Labour Services.
Unearth Risk is a Management Consulting organisation that specialises in Organisational Design, Governance and Resilience support services.
Design
Implement
Evaluate & 
Change & 
