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
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
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…
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
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?