Over the Christmas my period I visited my parents. One of the discussions that came up was the long delivery time for a replacement fridge freezer that they had ordered online. As we were driving I spotted a store that belonged to this particular retail chain; we paid them a visit. It turned out that the delivery lead time is less than five days on average, so far my parents had waited over two months. The order my parents had placed was missing one piece of information and this had put the order into limbo. It was only after we made this enquiry that the missing piece of information was requested by the retailer. A two month delay for ten seconds of interaction!

There is a lot of talk about continuous improvement. There is a lot less action.

One of the drawbacks of process improvement is looking at why things don't work (or are sub-optimal). It can be negative and for some people this can wear them down over time. The successes we achieve as part of our process improvement work needs to be celebrated. I'm sure that your projects have yielded positive results and occasionally it is useful to stop and remember.

Is there a good time to plan your improvements ? I'm not sure if there is ever a good time to sit down and do planning; I just know what happens when you don't come up with some kind of a plan - drift. Apart from becoming more susceptible to the effect of the bumps you will inevitably hit, you don't follow up with what you should be doing. The noise of the working day becomes too much and you end up slowing down / stopping / going backwards.

Just a quick post to let you know that my book 'Business Process Re-engineering' has a 50% discount currently in place on Smashwords.

After an initially confusing conversation the other day with an organisation (who were in a bit of a tangle) I found my engineering background coming to the rescue. There was debate around what should go into a business plan, particularly with respect to their strategic content.

I advocate making continuous improvement part of your daily / weekly work life. This I think should be something that most businesses should work towards if they aren't there already. However, there are also times when things don't pan out quite as we have hoped to. Unfortunate circumstances, conflict inside the business or unforeseen problems. These take time away from the business and naturally makes it difficult to undertake continuous improvement activity. There are other times when energies are higher. There are other events that can affect the motivation of your staff and this too can be considered.

If you don't have time to undertake your continuous improvement projects then why not consider this approach? If you spend your whole day running around putting out fires then you will probably find that you just don't get time to undertake your continuous improvement project work. I've been there and I'm sure many of you reading this will feel the same.

When businesses are looking for areas to improve, the use of a FMEA chart can often work wonders. In some respects it is a crystal ball to help you predict where failures can happen. This is about being proactive with your continuous improvement projects rather than trying to pick up the pieces when something goes wrong! FMEA stands for Failure Mode and Effects Analysis. Basically, it gets you to look at individual elements of a process so that you can think about where the process can 'fall over'. It can also be used for products; looking at which components will fail.

For many businesses this time of year provides a good time to reflect upon the past year's performance and decide upon their plans for the upcoming year. How about you? Do you know where and how you want to improve your business during 2014? If you haven't pulled your plan together then the following pointers could help you to pull your ideas together to get you started:

All business processes have a drum beat. Certain tasks need to happen like clockwork and the ability for a business to develop these habits can distinguish them from the competition. My latest book, Sunrise Meetings , shares a step by step process to help capture these routines and make them an integral part of your day-to-day business. It is free this weekend on the Amazon Kindle (until the end of 16th December 2013 PST). You can get it here. Giles Johnston Author of 'Business Process Re-Engineering', a practical plan to improve business performance.

There is a phrase (I’m not sure how common) about good businesses being boring businesses. I don’t know how you feel about this, but I want to work in an interesting business. But here’s the thing. If your business is out of control then you need to define what interesting means to you. If it means that chasing your tail and always being under severe pressure from customers then I could understand you not wanting a boring business.

My new book 'Sunrise Meetings' is now available on the Amazon Kindle platform and is free to download between the 12th of December 2013 and the 16th of December 2013 (PST). Download 'Sunrise Meetings' for Kindle here. The book is focused on tying up your process management issues into an organised and routine way of working. The Sunrise Meeting is one great way of doing this, and the book takes you through a series of steps to create and define your own effective Sunrise Meeting. There's more in the book too, helping establish more disciplined and effective habits of working. I hope you enjoy it. Giles Johnston Author of 'Business Process Re-Engineering', a practical plan to improve business performance.