Action boards are an integral part of effective team meetings . Constantly capturing actions to remove obstacles from the day to day operations, identifying small improvement opportunities and avoiding having to 'remember to remember' tasks really can help a team to perform at higher levels. However, the other day I was asked a question - "what is an action?" I have never had to really think about this topic, it has always come naturally to me (and I probably capture more actions in my to do list system than I need to!), so I came to an agreement with the team. So, this got me thinking about when is an action actually an action (and when is it something else) and I thought I would share the list we developed with you. If you are struggling to get your team meetings and action board off the ground you might find it to be useful. Here it is: The following are not actions The task can be done in less than 10 minutes, directly after the (morning) meeting.

Are you like me and want all of your continuous improvement projects to be delivered at once? The fact is that there isn't enough time in the day (let alone if you have a day job to contend with too!) or enough resource to call up to engage with all of your improvement projects at once. I am a big fan of effective prioritisation of improvement opportunities and so I thought I'd share with you part of a conversation I recently had with one of my client's member of staff. In front of us was a number of projects. Each one looked like it would give the business a real boost in terms of tangible results. But, when you listed them out there was a clear priority based on the dependencies. In this list was one of my hot topics for this business, kitting of orders. I spotted this and naturally became excited; its benefits will be huge for the business. Then I looked at the other options; cell design, stock control, 5S etc... The reality is that I could either have my

Out of ten, how hard do you currently push your business processes ? Are they well developed and delivering the results you need, or are they just a feature of your business? Develop your business processes with this step-by-step guide. Available from Amazon and iTunes . I thought I’d ask you this question to challenge you, to see if you are getting the most out of your processes. Properly developed processes can make the difference between poor performance and amazing performance. My clients have seen 500% increases in productivity, 80% reductions in lead times and tripling of sales with no extra employees through maximising the management of their business processes. It really is worth investing some of your time and effort to look into this topic. So, let me help you out with the scoring for this by sharing with you some of the things I look for. This is part of the ‘what does good look like?’ question that can really help you and your management team to focus on driving th

I have just re-published my guide: 7 Ideas to Gain Control and Improve Profit for Your Business You can download your copy by visiting:  https://mailchi.mp/smartspeed/7-ideas-to-gain-control-and-improve-profit-for-your-business If you are looking for simple but effective methods to drive up your business' productivity, performance and profits then this is a great resource to push you in the right direction. To get your free copy you just need to sign up for my email updates. Hopefully you will find them to be useful to you and your business and you can unsubscribe at any time. Enjoy, Giles About the author Giles Johnston is a Chartered Engineer who specialises in helping businesses to grow and improve through better business processes. Giles is also the author of Business Process Re-Engineering and creator of the ' Making It Happen ' continuous improvement toolkit.

I see two different types of businesses that engage with Continuous Improvement . Those that focus on problems only. Those that have an ability to move towards excellence. The challenge that I see, for those organisations that want to move from category 1 to category 2, is depicted in the diagram below: Being able to know what to do once you get past your immediate problems makes a huge difference to the overall effectiveness of your continuous improvement efforts and your eventual business performance. This kind of shift requires you to develop a continuous improvement strategy for your business that is based on more than just fixing today's problems. Here are some quick ideas for you: You could take generic challenges and decide to undertake root cause problem solving on them and not stop with your improvement projects until the challenge has gone. Use your existing business metrics as a springboard for continuous improvement projects and use them as

Let’s be realistic, days very rarely run smoothly. Most teams have bumps in their day to day working, which need to be resolved . This is normal, but the effectiveness of a team’s ability to deal with this massively impacts the overall performance of the function they are responsible for. Making the issues (and corresponding actions) visible and ‘in your face’ is a big part of this effectiveness. An example of a simple approach to managing an action log When the actions are visible they don’t get lost. They are constantly in your line of sight and the actions required to close out the issues have a higher chance of being completed if they are in the front of your mind. Out of sight, out of mind is certainly true in this case (and strategy doesn’t often get results). If the actions are visible there is a great chance that they will get worked on during the course of the day and not five minutes before the next meeting (in a state of panic). Many people are bad at taking notes a

Earlier today I was in a conversation with a Procurement Manager for a very busy national business. We were discussing the triggers that were missing within their business for identifying and communicating the long lead-time items on projects. You'll know the sort of things that I mean, the items that you can't pick up next day and typically cannot be replaced with a similar item. The manager was half complaining, half justifying the actions of the business. Whilst it is true that the world hasn't stopped to date because of this linkage being missed out in the business it is also true that they only achieve their mediocre on time delivery results through blood, sweat and tears. This is also the case for many businesses, and it can be different by changing just a couple of minor things within a business. Let me give you a few examples. Fixing the parameters of a capacity planning tool and enforcing the output of the capacity plan allowed one business to improve their