The Smartspeed Performance Improvement Blog

When discussing change projects with clients, time is a key factor. Like anything, if you have already walked the (continuous improvement) path you have a better idea of how hard and how long things will take. These conversations are no different. What I have found is that when you break down the project into the individual tasks, most people that are relatively new to change will expect the tasks to take longer. They often build in lots of procrastination time in too. A quick remedy If you are experiencing this issue in your organisation, here's a quick way to fix this. When your team member is defining the actions required to make a change happen, partner them with a more experienced person until they have at least three improvements under their belt. Use this as a way to estimate a realistic duration for the tasks. Don't confuse deadlines with duration The work content for a task and the duration to complete it are often two separate things. A task might have a total of fift...

The reason I wrote the book What Does Good Look Like? was for this reason. Improvement shouldn't be hard. For many organisations we spend too much time telling people what we don't want and not enough time being clear about what we do want. Available from Amazon What does a good performance look like? Describe it to yourself, clarify it and then describe it to your team. Just doing this can be enough to witness a step change in your performance. Tie it in with some decent Standard Operating Procedures and you have the making of a sustainable change. Are you up for having a go at this? Giles About the author: Giles Johnston is a Chartered Engineer who specialises in helping businesses to grow and improve through better business processes and embracing Kaizen . Giles is also the author of Effective Root Cause Analysis and ' What Does Good Look Like? ' .