International Turnaround Management Standard

The ITMS was developed as a result of a 5-year research project led by Dr. Christoph Lymbersky of the Turnaround Management Society on why most corporate restructuring methods fail. The team around Dr. Lymbersky analyzed 150 cases to try and figure out what leads to a successful corporate turnaround. Basically, the ITMS is considered currently as an industry standard manual to help your company through its restructuring process.

As a corporate restructuring framework, the ITMS has been structured to tackle the reasons as to why companies usually fail in turnarounds. This includes problems such as insufficient support of shareholders, targeting of symptoms instead of issues causing the company to fail and the use of unstructured approaches among other factors.

Structure of the International Turnaround Management Standard

Basically, the ITMS serves your management team as a guideline of what is needed to be done, how they should do it, and who is to be informed and what other aspects need to be taken care of during the restructuring process.

This turnaround standard incorporates a more organized structure which is divided into four stages and each stage is designed to include specific turnaround method of corporate turnaround management. Further, there are two overlapping stages within the ITMS turnaround framework: the retrenchment and the recovery stages. The main objective of the former stage is to help your company or organization secure its survival and to guarantee a positive cash flow as a result of liquidating, improvement of operating efficiencies, and investments among other factors. On the other hand, the goal of the latter overlapping stage is to get your company back on its growth path and be profitable in the long run. It is at this stage that your company diversifies and penetrates into other markets.

In a nutshell, the restructuring method proposed in this turnaround framework is structured to include four stages which employ specific techniques for corporate restructuring: Pre-Turnaround Stage (PS), Diagnostic Review Stage (DR), Crisis Stabilization Stage (CS, and the Turnaround Stage (TS).

The Benefits of the International Turnaround Management Standard

The ITMS corporate restructuring framework offers a number of advantages for your troubled business, restructuring experts, or any entity party involved in the restructuring process. Some of these benefits include performing turnarounds in a structured manner, allowing the repetition of restructuring management methods, and problems to be encountered are indicated early throughout the turnaround process.

Additionally, the ITMS allows the turnaround process to have an organized beginning, middle, and end; ensures that stakeholders are involved at the right time throughout the turnaround management; and provides clear and proven channels of communications between the restructuring management team and the rest of the entity and its stakeholders. Lastly, it provides an agreement on the required deliverables at the beginning and continuously monitors the actual corporate turnaround situation against an entity's requirements.