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Don’t kid yourself – cost reduction is complex!

Organisations are complex systems, often far more complex than they appear in organisational charts or functional business unit descriptions. When introducing improvements and change, particularly for cost reduction projects, you need to be aware of the inter-relationships across the organisation to ensure you plan for impacts and deliver true value to the organisational system. Overlooking these inter-relationships means you risk… Read More »Don’t kid yourself – cost reduction is complex!

Old MacDonald nearly had it right

E-I, E-I-O! goes the familiar refrain from the nursery rhyme. It’s very close to the mantra we use for process improvement…. EIAO: Eliminate, Improve, Automate, Outsource Delivering Efficiency and Effectiveness gains in a business process generally uses one of these approaches Eliminate: Critically look at a process (and then each process step) to see what value it is creating. Ask… Read More »Old MacDonald nearly had it right

Don’t bother with complex tasks

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It’s a fact of life that, as a leader, you will be interrupted throughout every working day. No matter how much you empower your staff to make decisions autonomously, you will always have interruptions. And, there is plenty of research to show that much time is wasted in ‘mental set up time’ as you subconsciously deal with the cognitive shift… Read More »Don’t bother with complex tasks

Are you getting benefit from your organisational knowledge investment?

If with great knowledge comes great power and opportunity, how do you avoid wasting your investment?

In the first 2 parts of this series, we covered the reasons why you really should be creating a better way of documenting your organisational knowledge. But how do you do it without making it too complex, unwieldy and over-engineered? How can you avoid implementing something which is ultimately doomed to be unsuccessful? When designing your approach, consider the guiding principles:Read More »Are you getting benefit from your organisational knowledge investment?

Are you ignoring your organisational knowledge opportunity?

If with great knowledge comes great power and opportunity, why is harnessing this knowledge so often ignored?

Harvard Business Review (Staats, Upton, 2011) concluded that “we’ve found that lean principles can be applied in some form to almost all kinds of knowledge work and can generate significant benefits: faster response time, higher quality and creativity, lower costs, reduced drudgery and frustration, and greater job satisfaction.”

Outcomes like that are music to the ears of most CEOs and Boards. Yet a knowledge management strategy is often ignored because it’s mistakenly seen as too difficult, too time consuming or it doesn’t add enough value. Quite simply, decision makers don’t understand the Return on Investment or the benefits from running an efficient and effective business.Read More »Are you ignoring your organisational knowledge opportunity?

Who has the knowledge in your organisation?

If with great knowledge comes great power and opportunity, who has the knowledge in your organisation?

The majority of organisations have a major issue, staring them right in the corporate face. One that can be solved with a little time and effort. However, time and time again, this issue is not identified, addressed or resolved until it’s too late (or at all).Read More »Who has the knowledge in your organisation?

Systems Thinking

Systems Thinking for Business

Systems Thinking describes a way of understanding the world around us, of thinking about how things work and ‘seeing’ things in a particular way. People who use Systems Thinking often use diagrams to model their understanding, not only of the elements that make up a whole, but also of the interactions between these elements. “The essence of systems thinking and… Read More »Systems Thinking for Business

What is Organisational Coherence?

Organisational coherence is a system of ‘views’ and ‘activities and practices’ that align the organisation to its purpose throughout the organisation. It focuses the organisation of what the customer values, removing wasted effort and has mechanisms for resolving the inevitable conflicts regarding competing priorities for resources. It is formed of three levels: Value coherence – the value outcomes you want… Read More »What is Organisational Coherence?

Retention Reinvention

Feedback – the crucial first step to establishing trust Establishing trust and/or understanding with a customer in a retention call is the single most important factor in determining if the attempt to ‘save’ the client will be successful. Time and time again I review retention calls, and no matter how skilled the staff member is at solving the customer’s problem,… Read More »Retention Reinvention

Beware the subjective metric

I recently read an article that proposed a pretty dodgy way to measure Cost Per Transaction (CPT).  It proposed an simple alternative to activity-based-costing through some simple extimates and sought to break down the CPT between different transaction types in a Service environment using the following method: Team Managers estimated the % of time their people spend on the varying… Read More »Beware the subjective metric