I've had three conversations this week with different clients' teams about raising issues about their business processes.

In all three cases the teams had problems that they were dealing with, but very ineffectively. Namely their strategy was to grumble to each other about how bad things are. Does this sound familiar in your organisation?

The trouble with this all too common strategy is that the people that can help resolve the issue can't 'see' the problem and therefore can't 'hit' it for the other people.

A really good tool to help your teams engage with this discussion is the Concern, Cause, Countermeasure (also known as CCC or 3C) approach. (In fact, it is such a good tool that it is built into the StreamLiner CI software to accelerate continuous improvement planning. You can find out more about it here.)

The key to getting this approach work is to make the conversations easier for your team. Here are a few ideas:
Make it clear to your teams that you…

Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) are a vital part of any management team's toolkit.

Get them right and KPIs can help you to lead your team to victory and success. Get them wrong and they suck up time and resources and frustrate all of those that are involved with the activity.

I was working with a team the other week and they had come up with about twenty different KPIs they could use for their function and they were getting stuck as to how to proceed.

I asked them to test their measures against the ultimate test:

"Can you use the KPIs to make management decisions?"
Great KPIs can help you make swift decisions that affect the outcomes for your business.
Effective metrics allow you to keep the standards you need in your business in place.
Well thought through measures guide and support your thinking, making you more effective and efficient as a manager.
The team I worked with applied this simple test and eliminated pointless metrics, enhanced others and prioritised just a…