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
Introduction High performance for your business is about more than just making the right decisions. It’s about having the right KPIs in place to measure success, and rewarding employees for doing their job well. The key to building high-performing teams isn’t merely having good people on board – it’s understanding how KPIs work, what drives them and how to use… Read More »Building great KPIs
Our experience has been that Local Council staff and management care deeply about our communities. Recent history has shown that they have really stepped up in a time of crisis. For example, when Covid-19 hit, many Councils set up incident response teams and worked around the clock to put in interim changes to ensure continuity of service where it mattered,… Read More »Funding the “Future of Work” for Local Councils
Interesting observation over the last few days as people dust off their Business Continuity Plans as a result of the COVID-19 outbreak. Many are finding how much their organisation has changed since last updated and are simply unable to execute the current plan. For some their challenge has been disciplined regular review of BCPs in busy times. For many others… Read More »Keep dust off your Business Continuity Plans
Interesting observation from a number of people who are working remotely for the first time: Because there are less distractions, they are more focussed and are finally getting to some of the “important, non-urgent” items that they really should have done a long time ago. Remote working certainly impacts productivity – but not necessarily in a negative way.
There’s no over-stating it, excellent communication is vital to the performance of teams, and this is even more important when working remotely. Even for the most administrative of roles, daily communication is essential. When staff (including us managers) are accustomed to face-to-face communication, working remotely can cause significant disruption to the ‘normal’ flow of information. There are 2… Read More »Remote Working Series: Excelling at remote communications
Recently we launched a new approach we are calling Key Management Controls. We’re really excited about how this can help all managers to be free to focus on the big picture – safe in the knowledge that the critically important day-to-day activities are being done. Key Management Controls provides managers with a tool, and an operational discipline, to regularly check… Read More »Key Management Controls
Part 3: Creating the burning platform This is a classic case of implementing one change by focussing on another – create a successful Continuous Improvement culture by focussing on developing Operational Management disciplines. The hard thing is that this needs the commitment, discipline and effort from Senior Managers and Executive. Everyone, especially upper management, will complain that they’re too busy… Read More »CI Programs – the Burning Platform
Most strategic plans make my head hurt. I’m sure I’m not the only one. Common (aka frustrating) gaps include: No balance between the critical dimensions of financial, customer, staff and quality/risk Lots of fluff without substance – i.e. no tangible (objective, normally numeric) targets Not considering BAU as a critical part of the strategy It’s this last one that… Read More »Strategic Planning Gaps
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
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