The Smartspeed Performance Improvement Blog

When you start generating improvement opportunities, it can be tempting to flit between activities. For many people, the starting of continuous improvement activities is exciting. Planning out improvements, thinking about what could be. This can be motivating and, for some people, more interesting than doing the work to deliver the improvement. During the delivery of the improvement there will undoubtedly be: Frustration Learning Friction Experimentation Bouts of looking foolish Backtracking Winning I see too many organisations that dabble with improvements. Great ideas, poor execution. Persisting with an improvement, until it is done, is a strategy that most of us can benefit from. After all, if you don't deliver the improvement, you won't get the results. If you find that you have lots of loose ends in your business, then I recommend you reflect on this post and decide how you want to do things differently going forward. If you want some additional strategies to help you del...

You know that phrase about there being no such thing as a stupid question... Well, do you have a collection of these 'stupid questions' in your business that you use? What do I mean when I say 'use'? Some of the stupid questions we have heard in our business can also be perfect to launch continuous improvement thinking from. What are the questions you have in your business that your team have learned not to ask anymore? Here are some I have heard recently, in hushed conversations... How can we achieve double our current profit margins? Why do we have to do all of these steps in our process? What happens if we embrace our mistakes? Why don't we get rid of our bad customers? How do we deliver our products in half the time? I think all of those questions could be used to stimulate some interesting conversations... if you can get past the look of incredulity on your colleagues faces. What stupid questions could you ask in your business, to provoke some alternative ideas...

When you are leading continuous improvement projects , it can sometimes feel lonely if you seem to be the only one outputting ideas and options. Talking to yourself... that's how it can feel. A really good strategy, to get your team involved, is to share some building blocks with them. Instead of feeling like you need to provide a working solution, teach your team to 'fish'. Can you remember that phrase? “Give a man a fish, and you feed him for a day; teach a man to fish and you feed him for a lifetime.” We can change it to something like this: "Give a team a solution and they'll continue to expect you to produce all the solutions; teach a team building blocks of continuous improvement and you can unleash them on all your future challenges." I might be taking some liberties here, but I think you get the gist of what I am trying to say. There is a trade off with doing continuous improvement and teaching ideas, but getting this balance (between learning and impl...

One of the curious things I see in business is the planning for improvement objectives (or any other kind of objective, for that matter). Well, I say curious. That's probably the wrong word... Often I see no planning for an objective. This is how it looks to me: In the above image, something magical is expected to happen. No input from anyone (let alone management!). The result just appears. You'll know that this rarely works, so excuse me for stretching this scenario to its irrational extent. Reality says that the image below is what should happen: So, you might be thinking that this is stupidly obvious, so let me pose a question for you: "How effective is your planning to achieve your objectives?" Do you include all of the steps? Do you assign responsibilities? Do you determine deadlines for the tasks? Do you review progress regularly? If your planning looks a little more like the top image, please take stock of what you do and what improvements you can make. And, ...