The OPUS Method

In November 1991 I made the momentous decision to leave employment and become self employed. I had decided that I had a particular contribution to make but still had to work out how to make it. I joined a now-defunct network of self-employed "consultants" and discovered that most of them were just lonely "business advisers" looking for a home; it was not encouraging. The group was often targeted by people with a methodology who wanted to franchise or licence it. and I went to a presentation made by one such company in the group's headquarters in Battersea.

My train was delayed and I had to slip into the back of the meeting about ten minutes after it had started. The presentation was being made by two guys, a Swede and a Swiss. After twenty minutes, I had made a decision. I would find a way of getting involved. Now some background.

During my final years in ICL I had worked in a unit whose purpose was to research, develop and sell products and services to support boards and senior managers in national, international and multinational enterprises. My particular interest was in consulting services and my interviews with some of these people had revealed that one of the reasons it was difficult to sell consulting services to them was that they were unclear how much they would pay and what the deliverables would be. They had responded positively to the idea of consulting "products", so I set out to explore how this could be done. I developed three or four such products (see my blog on Robin Seward) but never really felt that I had cracked the problem.

The subject of this presentation was The OPUS Method. It was a genuine methodology - the architecture remained constant, as did the interfaces between the four stages in the process - but there was scope for innovation and the exercise of consultant or client preference in each stage. It did not pretend to be strategic - it was all about identifying and putting into effect operational improvements, and its target audiences were stakeholder groups, commonly customers and employees, less commonly the wider society, intermediaries and investors.

I engaged with the owners at once and consulted for the initial UK licencees. Then, in 2003, I became the sole UK licencee and continued to use the process as my sole source of income until I decided to retire in 2015. This blog is work in progress; I intend to write about some of the more interesting assignments where they drew particularly interesting or surprising conclusions. Some of these may justify blog posts of their own and I may append others to this piece.

This is not the place for a detailed discussion of the process - I have written about this elsewhere, as have others. If you read this and would like more information, do get in touch.

My influences: Hazel Austin (my mother)

My mother was born Hazel Jessie Pearl Binding in Ystradmynach in 1917, Monmouthshire. Her parents were Lucy Totterdell, whose father was a master baker in Taunton, and Francis Leonard Binding, from a seafaring family in Watchet, both in Somerset. They had moved to South Wales in search of work - my grandfather worked as a miner - but returned to live in Watchet in around 1925/6.

My mother was awarded a place at the newly built Minehead Grammar School which she attended until she returned to the primary school in Watchet to learn the skills of a teacher. Photographs taken of her in her school uniform suggest that she was very proud to be there and she always talked about the School with great affection. Her favourite teacher was Mr Traherne (which she always pronounced "Tray-Herne") and, when I gained my place at Bristol Grammar School my mother was delighted and took me to Minehead to show me off to Mr Traherne. 

On leaving the primary school in Watchet she moved to the primary school in Westbury-Sub-Mendip where she made friends with Myrtle Northam, a farmer's daughter, and they remained friends until my mother died. When my mother was still teaching in the village Myrtle gave birth but declined to marry her daughter's father. Despite her position my mother's friendship was unswayed which, I suspect, must have given rise to some adverse comments in the village. My mother's steadfast support for her friend is one of the things of which I am most proud.

When my younger brother Martin also moved to Bristol Grammar School my mother decided to fulfil a long held ambition to train as a domestic science teacher. She attended college in Bristol and started teaching, part time, when she qualified.

My mother loved writing - when I was at school she would spend Sunday afternoons writing letters to her friends and family - these were always substantial and I suspect would have required "large letter" stamps under the current pricing structure. She had recipes published in the Bristol Evening Post, a number of articles published in "The Lady" and contributed a piece to an anthology of memoirs edited by the Marquess of Bath of the time. No doubt there were other things of which I was unaware.