One of my clients had a project that was not moving at a pace that they wanted or needed. Every week my client would ask his team ‘what has happened so far in the project?’. The answer was always the same - “we’re too busy to get around to the tasks”. This happened week in week out. Instead of letting this situation pass I asked them a series of simple why questions about the lack of progress. In every case the person being questioned found the conclusions weren’t as they had originally expected and were now in a position to complete the work. This was in addition to all of the other tasks they had to do. The following week we found a little bit of progress was made. The following weeks and months progress continued and before we knew it a number of projects were being completed. Question the first answer – it may be a symptom and not the cause. Smartspeed Consulting Limited 'For When Results Matter' www.smartspeed.co.uk

The other day I was standing in a queue at my local post office watching the people in the queue complain about the slow pace in which it was moving. I had already noticed this. I then looked around to see what the staff in the post office were doing whilst this slow movement was taking place - they were not working on activities that would reduce the size of the queue! How funny I thought - most businesses would be using their resources to reduce the queues by flexibly deploying their resources to cope with the surge. Smartspeed Consulting Limited 'For When Results Matter' www.smartspeed.co.uk

I had the luxury of visiting a company the other day who had made some superb changes to their business. It was the end of a project I had been working on and I agreed to arrange a factory tour for local businesses, and this was the company that I had chosen. There were many questions around the table from the people who attended and the main theme was 'what are you doing differently here compared to us?' Explanations of working practices were put forward and it was interesting to see the looks on people's faces when the generic answer was 'good management practice that we don't pay lip service to'. I think that sums it up for a lot of businesses. When things aren't going as well as planned it might be worth considering how much lip service is taking place in the organisation. Smartspeed Consulting Limited 'For When Results Matter' www.smartspeed.co.uk

When we look at a business we can see that the building blocks present are pretty much the same as in our rivals. We all have people, computers, knowledge and equipment. How we put these resources together to form our business makes all of the difference. If you think of the building blocks that children play with you can see the issue quite plainly. Some of the configurations are more interesting, prettier and more fun than others. When you look at businesses that are doing well they fundamentally have the same kinds of resources, but what they do with them creates a different effect to the other options they have available. Are the resources in your business configured as the most effective option, or do they lack the punch that is needed to make the business really take off? Smartspeed Consulting Limited 'For When Results Matter' www.smartspeed.co.uk

Agility is the ability to move between different forms of production or service delivery - allowing you to change your business outputs in a dynamic marketplace. Lean is the approach of removing wasteful actities from your business operations to allow your workforce (both office and production) to spend more time on work that the customer will pay for (aka value adding activity). As they are two separate approaches you can be both agile and lean at the same time. A lot of companies in industry are in positions that are more polar in this respect - i.e. very lean but with low levels of flexibility (and not agile) or highly agile with large amounts of spare resource (so not very lean). Developing agile systems and driving out the waste in the system is one way to become agile and lean. Consideration of supply chains that allow resources to be turned on and off may allow a company to create different products that vary greatly - allowing the output to be both lean and agile, and then

When clients complain of having too much work to do, and too many distractions getting in the way of them doing the work I ask the following question. "How much of your activity is spent on pro-active work?" Many times it is the distractions that turn into big chunks of time that cause the problems and a simple realisation can change this situation. Does the activity being undertaken help you to get where you are going to? If the answer is 'no' then let's move on. Find a way to bring the conversation to a close. Find a way to avoid getting dragged into other people's responsibilities. Find a way to get back onto proactive work. Smartspeed Consulting Limited 'For When Results Matter' www.smartspeed.co.uk

Many people find that they have certain times in the day when they are better at doing certain things. Some times of the day are better for thinking, some for doing and some for talking. My clients who get the most done (in a period of time) understand when these times of the day are and allocate their work activities to these slots. If the afternoon is the best time to have meetings, then this is when they are scheduled for. This leaves the morning free to do their strategic work and report writing. From my observations people usually have similar times of the day for doing things, but we never discuss it openly. Could it be that by having this chat with our teams we could find better ways to organise our working days and get more done in the same amount of time? Think about your own situation and when you feel at your best for doing certain things. Then consider rolling this idea out once you have changed the structure of your day. Smartspeed Consulting Limited 'For Whe