Skip to content

Articles and Information

LGA SA – 2017 Council Best Practice Showcase & LGA OGM

      Thursday 20th and Friday 21st April 2017 – Adelaide Convention Centre Bee Squared were once again proud to exhibit at this Local Government Association of South Australia event. The event was showcasing council best practice driving economic development, engaging with residents and businesses, creating exciting and welcoming places, responding to and managing emergencies and pursuing better environmental… Read More »LGA SA – 2017 Council Best Practice Showcase & LGA OGM

ACFI Voluntary Appraisals – The risk of taking a well-earned break

Now that you are over the hump of submitting all your ACFI voluntary uplifts and admissions prior to the 1st Jan changes and engaged your team on the new guidelines, one would think now is the time to take a well-earned break. With the changes reducing residential aged care margins, unfortunately now is not the time. Now is the time… Read More »ACFI Voluntary Appraisals – The risk of taking a well-earned break

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

LGA SA – 2016 LGA Conference & LGA AGM (Creating our Destiny)

      Thursday 20th and Friday 21st October 2016 – Adelaide Entertainment Centre Bee Squared were once again proud to exhibit at this Local Government Association of South Australia event. The event was looking at best outcomes for changes such as rate capping and cost shifting from other spheres of government. It provided us an opportunity to meet with… Read More »LGA SA – 2016 LGA Conference & LGA AGM (Creating our Destiny)

Don’t bother with complex tasks

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

ACSA Awards for Excellence 2016

      Friday 3 June 2016 – National Wine Centre, Adelaide Ben Haigh presented the award for “Innovation in Service” Award. With clients in the aged care sector, it is valuable for us to be a part of recognising and rewarding best practice, new initiatives and valuable individuals. The ACS Awards promote and recognise excellence in a range of… Read More »ACSA Awards for Excellence 2016

LGA SA – Council Best Practice Showcase & LGA OGM 2016

      Thursday 14th and Friday 15th April 2016 – Adelaide Showgrounds Bee Squared were proud to exhibit at this Local Government Association of South Australia event. The LGA Council Best Practice Showcase provides an opportunity for Councils to learn from each other. It provided us an opportunity to meet with the executives and local members to discuss and understand… Read More »LGA SA – Council Best Practice Showcase & LGA OGM 2016

ACSA Finance Symposium 2016

Wednesday 24th February 2016 – Morphettville Racecourse Bee Squared is proud to have sponsored the keynote speaker. With clients in the aged care sector, it is valuable for us to hear about best practice, new initiatives and changes in the industry. This event focussed on plans for the sector, the economic outlook, demographic impact, benchmarking and trends across the sector,… Read More »ACSA Finance Symposium 2016

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?

LGA SA – 2015 Conference and LGA AGM – Prospering Communities

      Thursday 29th October and Friday 30th October 2015 – Adelaide Oval Bee Squared were proud to exhibit at this event – our first with the Local Government Association of South Australia! The event focussed on prospering communities with an array of prominent speakers on subjects relating to economic development. It provided us an opportunity to meet with… Read More »LGA SA – 2015 Conference and LGA AGM – Prospering Communities

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

Requisite Organisation conference New York

We’re excited to have presented our models of Value Coherence and Process Coherence to the Requisite Organisation community at the Global RO conference (Designing the Smarter Organisation) in New York yesterday. It’s been fantastic to meet this inspirational group of organisational design experts who provide real hope for transforming the way organisations are structured and, most importantly, how organisations of… Read More »Requisite Organisation conference New York

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