ISO 9000 Projects – not just paperwork!
12 April 2011 Leave a comment
Excellence is Three Triangles Performance
12 April 2011 Leave a comment
19 July 2010 2 Comments
The best business modelling considers the business from different aspects:
1. business processes (the inputs, and steps that produce the outputs)
2. decision points and associated business rules
3. measures (KPI and operational) and controls for the processes
4. data definitions, status and life cycles
and for a human driven business:
5. roles, responsibilities, and levels of authority
It is very rare I see these in one place and without all 5 parts, there is an incomplete understanding of the way the business works.
Without that complete understanding it is difficult to assess if an upgraded system solution will give real benefits or simply give a need for different work rounds.
6 July 2010 Leave a comment
Business systems are the systems that help an organisation run: software like ERP (Enterprise Resource Management) to do the accounting and CRM (Customer Relationship Management) to support contact with customer. Like every other technology, they change surprisingly quickly. Most suppliers of these systems launch major updates every 9 to 18 months. Read more of this post
2 July 2010 Leave a comment
Lean is an approach to business operations that was first developed in manufacturing and formalised in the Toyota Production System. At its core is the question, “how to do this with the least overall waste?” That means viewing the operation holistically and dividing work up to be the most efficient way of using time, money, effort and resources to achieve the overall results. Read more of this post
27 June 2010 Leave a comment
A team at Warwick Business School has surveyed 500 above average trading performance businesses employing between 20 and 250 staff.
These business had these approaches in common:
How does this apply to programme management, change management or project management? We can use these to consider things we might need to plan to under pin the success of our projects. Read more of this post
15 June 2010 Leave a comment
CMMI (Capability Maturity Model) is used in a number of businesses to help improve how they work. It was started in the technology industries and with big organisations but you could apply parts of it to your organisation. The point is to get your organisation to do things in a predictable way (giving benefits in being able to estimate what new work will cost) that is measured so you can make business decisions based on real information not guess-work. There is another blog that talks about the structure of CMMI. Oh yes, the model is free to use but if you want a badge for your business, you’ll have to pay a qualified assessor. Read more of this post
14 June 2010 4 Comments
I’ve refered to IDEF0 in a number of posts. Its time to explain what I mean.
IDEF stands for Integrated DEFinition and the zero is there to distinguish this functional process modelling from the other tools in that tool kit. It was originally intended to define manufacturing processes but it works for human work too. Read more of this post
17 May 2010 Leave a comment
… so make the process the people’s responsibility.
That might be provocative for managers who believe it is their job to define the process. Let’s look at realities. Read more of this post
17 May 2010 Leave a comment
Kaoru Ishikawa lead the thought that said everyone was responsible for quality. Ray Kroc founded McDonalds success on a work system of very tightly defined tasks performed by people who needed minimal training to do that job as well as their company’s expert. Richard M Hodgetts defined check sheets (checklists) as a way to “record data on a form that readily allows interpretation of results from the form itself”.
These developments are helpful to quality: make everyone care about quality, define the job and train people, give them tools to monitor and interpret progress made on their work. That way is the road to great management and excellent performance.
So why does it go bad? Read more of this post