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Struggling with routine tasks?

With so many day to day tasks required to complete our jobs it is hardly surprising that some items don’t get completed when urgent projects appear on our desks instead. The day to day gives way to the fire fighting and unique most times. The use of a timetable is one way to coping with your daily (or routine) tasks, but often the rigid nature of a timetable means that it can be discarded in a matter of days when the other items get in the way (that spur of the moment meeting, that customer complaint, that colleague who has phoned in sick etc..). How can we create a way forward that is more flexible to cope with both the erratic demands on our time and the stability of routine tasks? You could consider a ‘start of shift’ approach with a list of tasks that need to be completed and an ‘end of shift’ slot so the tasks that didn’t get completed at the start of the day could be completed at the end. You could timetable parts of the week into our diaries, once we had worked out which

Are you getting the most out of your software?

There are so many things you can do with your business software and yet how many of us can really make the software work for our business? Just as so many people leave their formal education and don’t continue learning we do the same with our computer programs. We learn enough to get by, in most cases, and then don’t progress. Occasionally we could dip into the help menus and see what stood out as interesting, ask other people how they use the software (for tasks that take a long period of time for example) or search the web for ideas to improve what we do by researching better methods. If you used a small portion of your time at work to find better ways to use your software you could face a big improvement in productivity over the longer term (if not immediately), so why not start today?   Smartspeed Consulting Limited 'For When Results Matter' http://www.smartspeed.co.uk/

The return of checklists

When we sit back in our chair in the office and review what has been taking place during the day we sometimes find ourselves wondering how much better we could have done things – don’t we? One of the tried and tested ways to make the working day more effective and more efficient is the use of checklists. Whilst we have probably realised this for ourselves the issue of concern is how we (and our colleagues) stop following the checklists so easily – how do we make checklists that stick? The simple answer is to create more effective and more meaningful checklists than we had previously. If you recall the continuous improvement cycle you can see how this fits in – we tried it one way and it didn’t work – so let’s try it a bit differently. If you start with areas of your organisation that keep failing you will be able to create checklists that may be warmly greeted. If it helps people to reduce their running around and reduce hassle from customers then there may well be an inc

USPs? Is this service design?

There is a lot of talk (constantly) about what is your USP. This is an important marketing concept about the uniqueness of your service offering, but an observation is that most businesses state what is currently the most unique thing about them. What about the service as it could be? What about the niggles that people face when engaging with your type of service? Could a revised approach to how you deliver your service set you apart from the competition? What could be your USP? Can you engineer a new way of delivering your service and become even more unique? Smartspeed Consulting Limited 'For When Results Matter' www.smartspeed.co.uk

Limping and broken legs

When we look at the types of improvements that take place within our organisation we can always tell which were the big improvements. The small issues that are resolved in their masses however are harder to spot. Unfortunately this is also the case when we are looking for improvement ideas in the first place. If you had a broken leg you would have to stop what you were doing and get it fixed. If you had a limp you could keep going for a long time, and perhaps the limp would go away on its own. Where in your organisation are you limping? Smartspeed Consulting Limited 'For When Results Matter' www.smartspeed.co.uk

Mailing it in?

Have you ever sat in a meeting where you could just tell that people were ‘mailing it in’? By this I mean that the people aren’t taking part, they are there physically but that’s about all. They are not engaging with the conversation and participation within the meeting is generally low. If you recognise meetings (or workplaces) like this then you have an opportunity to improve the productivity in these areas. In fact, recognition is probably the greatest step towards improving the situation (that’s why we spend so much time mapping things out) – if you put this recognition into the context of the situation the answers to improve the status quo will become obvious. Keep an eye out for those people who are present in form only, and then come up with some ideas to get them engaged. Smartspeed Consulting Limited 'For When Results Matter' www.smartspeed.co.uk

Appropriate level of detail

There appears to be an ongoing conflict when it comes to the level of detail on projects, meetings or in specifications. Getting the right level of detail is key to making sure that activity progresses smoothly, but there is often a lack of consistency around how we approach detail. If we get the level of detail wrong we can end up with an outcome that we don’t want. We could find that by having too much or too little detail we can get side tracked, delayed, or lost with the work we are involved with. By having too little detail we could miss important tasks that have a big impact on the end result. By having too much detail we risk closing down opportunities for exploration. Whilst I am not advocating what level of detail needs to be applied to your work I am asking you to consider this factor and ask yourself this question ‘is the level of detail I am working on appropriate to the work that I am doing?’ Smartspeed Consulting Limited 'For When Results Matter' www.s