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Improving service through systems

Whenever there is a risk that a customer might not be getting the best service possible – consider the system. Many times people look purely at the people who are working with the customer – are they doing the right things? Do they have a good attitude? These are normal questions to ask. It has been stated that the system accounts for 94% of the effects created – the people in the system therefore can only have a limited effect on what happens. Considering the system makes us ask other questions. How can the system allow us to deal with customers swiftly? How can the system allow errors to be made? How does the system please our customers? By considering both the system and the people operating the system you get a more complete picture of how to improve this area of performance. Of course, this isn't an excuse to back down when people are abusing the system/customers! Smartspeed Consulting Limited 'For When Results Matter' www.smartspeed.co.uk

Marginal efforts

When you state ‘marginal efforts’ people think about the lack of effort being put into that activity. What if the marginal efforts were applied after the other work had been done? This would be extra effort – making marginal efforts potentially a good thing. So, if at the end of the working day one last activity were undertaken – something small, what would happen at the end of the year? The additional efforts could have made a project come to life, a new skill be learnt, or new relationships formed with colleagues or clients. What additional small activities could you add in to your working day? Smartspeed Consulting Limited 'For When Results Matter' www.smartspeed.co.uk

Provoking a review

A lot of people review where their businesses (and personal lives) are heading around this time of year. New business plans are drawn up and new objectives are considered. Many of these plans aren't reviewed or updated as the year passes, and this is a real shame. Finding ways to provoke reviews within the business can help with more timely corrections in which way the business is heading. Do this on a regular basis and it gives a degree of control that many businesses don't have. The review of course needs to be meaningful, it needs to be able to get people to think, not just allow a session for perfunctory feedback that doesn't actually help the company in any real way. The questions that are used during the review could of course be standardised so that the process develops over time, that this exercise gets better as the experience grows. If the process is slightly uncomfortable because if forces people to be clear about what is happening then this too is a benefi

Turn off your e-mails?

Watching people at work can tell you all kinds of things. One of the activities that I see on a regular basis is people gazing at their e-mails. Even worse is when the e-mails interrupt meaningful work. You can see the frustration in people's faces when they realise that the e-mail isn't really that useful and then they have to go back to what they were doing before. Checking your e-mails less frequently could help to raise your personal productivity. What would happen if you didn't get to an e-mail straight away? Could you live with that result? Experiment to find the right frequency for you and for the business so that service levels are maintained and productivity optimised. Smartspeed Consulting Limited 'For When Results Matter' www.smartspeed.co.uk

Asking better questions

When faced with issues in the business it is sometimes easy to jump to conclusions based on what you believe. It might not be a fact-based idea that is helpful to the situation – it could be a distraction. When we state what we think the problem is we can often end up limiting our options. This can lead to a narrow view of the world and not help us to generate a really effective solution. If we discuss what we can see (or feel or hear) about the issue then that is about as close as we can get to in terms of facts. An example of this would be a flat tyre. Some people will say that you have a puncture (the narrow view) because that is what they expect. This could be the case, but there are other reasons why the tyre could be flat – the only thing we can see is that there is a lack of air in the tyre. There could be multiple reasons as to why this is the case. By keeping the initial thinking broad we can find out what is the real situation. If we can stay with broader thinking at the o

Agree the end point

I was watching two members of one of my client’s team arguing over where the end point of the handover was. This seemed to be a good point to raise; unfortunately the end date had been and gone by two months. How you agree the end point has more to do with than just how the business works – how do the people work within the business? As handovers usually have a people element to them it is important to ensure that the capability of the individuals is also present. When you define the end point of a project it is worth describing this as a scene – what will the people be doing (behaving) once you walk away? And where are they now – can they do these activities? This is the gap that needs to be closed. Smartspeed Consulting Limited 'For When Results Matter' www.smartspeed.co.uk

Take the bumps?

One of the challenges that we need to consider when developing strategies is: - can it take the bumps that we might see on the way? There are some very good ways to create and design strategies for businesses, but the acid test question is the one mentioned above. How do you use this approach? Very simple - work out what kinds of factors could adversely affect your business (but aren't on the current horizon) and then consider whether your strategy could withstand the bump that this would cause. Depending on the result, reflect against this 'scenario' and decide whether you want to take the risk. Otherwise alter the strategy or come up with a plan 'B' should the situation arise. Considering the weird and the wonderful when it comes to strategic design is a valuable approach. Smartspeed Consulting Limited 'For When Results Matter' www.smartspeed.co.uk

Good interruptions

Do you ever have those moments when you catch yourself going through the motions? Do you ever realise that sometimes you have done a days work and you don't quite know where the time has gone to? One of the hardest habits to form is the ability to stop what you are doing, before you are doing it, to work out the best use of your efforts. When we get a plan we have done the hard thinking work - haven't we? From observation and personal experience it is obvious how strong the pull to get on and do the work is compared to stopping and spending just a few minutes to ask questions like:  - what are the objectives that I need to achieve?  - what is the best approach to achieving the objectives? Just stopping and thinking about the work at hand can have a significant impact on the performance. It's worth a try. Doing it consistently however is another challenge! Smartspeed Consulting Limited 'For When Results Matter' www.smartspeed.co.uk

Purging the brain

Have you ever spent your time concerned about how many things that you have to do and not knowing where to start? This is a concern that many of my colleagues and clients have experienced either recently or in the past few years. It is not a new problem. I remember reading a quote that stated 'it is better to have a short pencil than a long memory'. This is such a useful thing to remember when your head is buzzing with ideas. Write them down and then deal with them - one at a time. Of course, please make sure that the item with the highest payback is done first (payback against your values of course). So, in short, get it out of your head so that you can do something with it. Smartspeed Consulting Limited 'For When Results Matter' www.smartspeed.co.uk

Get back up to 50000ft

Projects sometimes need to be reviewed in terms of their purpose. It is sometimes needed that we take a step back and see if we're going in the right direction. This is one of those terms that is often used - 'from 50,000ft'. However often it is used, it is still a really good way to look at the bigger picture, to step away from the day to day activity on the project and ask 'are we really doing the right things?' Projects do change. There are many things that can change; people, goals, resources, motivation. Regularly stepping back to check that these variables have not knocked the project off course is highly recommended. Have you stepped back recently? Smartspeed Consulting Limited 'For When Results Matter' www.smartspeed.co.uk

Periodic improvement

When working with organisations of all different sizes, working in different sectors to instigate change it is quite often noticeable that many of them only start making changes when they absolutely have to. This then runs the risk of not doing the best work possible as time becomes severely restricted. On the other hand there are organisations that take the view that improvement needs to be done in a more continuous fashion. Continuous improvement is a term that relates to the smaller activities that build upon the current working structures that are in place. Periodic improvement in this context refers to organisations that schedule in time to look at working on the step changes that need to take place in order for the business to keep ahead of its competition and remain strong in the marketplace. Quite often the periodic improvement is based on the insights gained from the continuous improvement activity and therefore begs the question - "when is your periodic impr

Personal Agendas

The concept of personal agendas is often described in terms of motivation - what are people really trying to do whilst at work? How will their actions benefit them? However - there is another way to look at the world of personal agendas. You can use them for the benefit of the organisation by getting really focussed on what you need to get achieved in a short period of time. I'm not suggesting that people don't know what they should be doing, but rather this is an opportunity to re-focus your efforts so that you can get the most work done with the least amount of time and effort. Just affirming the right things that need to be done can help increase the productivity of a meeting (or a half morning on a project). Those next steps, once recognised, might help shorten the amount of time required to complete a task. Try it over the next few days and see what happens. Smartspeed Consulting Limited 'For When Results Matter' www.smartspeed.co.uk

The value of a day

Days pass so quickly and I'm sure that most of us have experienced the feeling when we realise that months have passed by and memories are a blur. But how valuable were those days to our business? From a lean perspective we can either spend our time on value adding activities, or on wasteful activities. Let me clarify - there are two types of waste: 1 - Things that just shouldn't be done (non-essential waste) and should be eliminated 2 - Things that must be done, but we don't get paid for doing them (essential waste) and should be minimised For example: Value adding activities - doing the fundamental work that our client pays us for Essential waste - strategic planning, HR, accounts, system development Non-essential waste - re-working documents, waiting, taking longer than necessary It is worth asking yourself from time to time - 'how valuable is this work that I am doing?' By understanding the payback that the work gives to the business we can craft