The operational leader of front-line workers is one of the busiest roles in an organisation. Managing your time, and the tasks you will complete and your approach to them is an essential part of your success. Investing in the ‘core’ activities (your operating rhythm): Your operating rhythm. There are key activities that improve your effectiveness as a team manager. There… Read More »Manage YOURSELF FIRST
The business impacts from the coronavirus lockdowns represent a huge opportunity for organisations who are willing to adapt and view the challenges in a positive, long-term way.
The current Coronavirus pandemic is cause for concern for many businesses. Pandemic response plans are being established and staff are being prepared for changes to the workplace that may (or may not) be implemented. What will happen to your team’s productivity if health agencies implement biosecurity measures and force your staff to stay at home? The availability of remote IT… Read More »Maintaining productivity in uncertain times
Business inefficiencies may seem to creep in over time, but they are actually ‘designed by default’. That is, inefficiencies are created (but are not always apparent) by not designing work systems properly at the right points in time. Inefficiencies wouldn’t creep in if the right design was in place (and being followed – which is a result of having a… Read More »Business inefficiencies
Part 2: Switch the Story. Setting Continuous Improvement targets is misguided. The concept of CI targets implies that these are different and distinct from real business outcomes, and therefore it pits these 2 areas against each other. People mistakenly believe that if they focus on their CI target, then the business outcomes will suffer, and vice versa. Business outcomes are… Read More »CI Programs – Switch the Story
… if there is no burning platform Part 1: Continuous Improvement programs can come in all shapes and sizes. But there are commonalities between the successful ones that anyone responsible for CI cannot afford to ignore. Too often, the CI Program is seen as someone’s job. But continuous improvement can’t be delivered by one person, or even a group… Read More »Continuous Improvement Programs are doomed to fail…
I often hear people say “I don’t have enough time to do . . . [insert something apparently not important]” But what if that thing IS actually important? Well, the organisation, the customers and the staff all ultimately suffer. My view is that this situation is actually a symptom of poor communication (and poor accountability) from the management chain. This… Read More »“Not Enough Time” is a convenient excuse
Spending time on non-value tasks results in reduced productivity. But given this seems self-evident, why are non-value tasks so prevalent in our workplaces? A not-so-recent article preview here indicates that certain knowledge worker roles can realise a 40% improvement by eliminating non-value tasks from their working day. And while the sample size wasn’t large for this particular article, the observations… Read More »The Wicked Productivity Problem
Community Aged Care is undergoing significant reform. With an increasingly open and competitive market where the consumer choice is at the centre, providers can no longer assume the safety of a guaranteed steady level of income. Customers having the choice to select their provider and switch if not happy with the service (along with providers no longer restricted to allocated… Read More »Sales is No Longer a Dirty Word, in Community Aged Care
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!
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
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
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