How to accelerate and streamline Operations dramatically
Nearly everyone is doing the best they can - and some very smart people are totally committed and putting in huge effort.
Is dramatic improvement really possible?
How to accelerate and streamline Operations dramatically
- Optimise flow, by relieving the bottleneck
- Free up capacity by reducing multitasking
- Accelerate and streamlining processes and practices by treating them differently, using asymmetry, reverse-engineering procedurisation and basic automation.
- Catalyse engagement, collaboration & mastery.
Impact Potential
The Dramatic Improvement Opportunity
The opportunity for dramatic improvement is huge in Operations. Here are some estimates to give you a feel for what's possible in most organisations:
- A 30% - 50% gain in capacity.
- A 20% - 50% reduction in lead-time.
- A 40%-80% improvement in customer and staff satisfaction and retention.
- A 50% - 100% reductin in overtime.
The Dramatic Improvement Prerequisites
There are ways of making the transition fun, engaging and pain-free.
The primary prerequisites are:
- Aspirations that exceed what you think you can achieve using conventional approaches.
- Commitment to adopting a different way of thinking and going about things.
- Leadership commitment.
Foundational Solutions
Flow Optimisation
<image>
Every organisation, situation and relationship is a flow-system: so knowing how to optimise flow is essential to - well: everything.
The trick to accelerating and streamlining flow is to improve the flow-rate at the bottleneck.
This is so obvious that we all think we're already doing it - but we seldom are.
Flow-Optimisation
Is there universal agreement on where the bottleneck is - and is everyone focused on getting more though it?
We have not yet come across a situation in which there isn't at least 25% capacity being wasted unnecessarily, as a result of focusing elsewhere.
Defrag Time & Focus
Multitasking wastes time, energy and opportunity and destroys ingenuity, capability, relationships and fulfilment.
We're largely unaware of the impact of multitasking - and assume that because our world demands it, it's a good thing to do.
Defrag Time & Focus
It takes the human brain 10 - 25 minutes to - and a huge dose of neurochemicals to achieve deep concentration on a challenging task. We incur those setup costs every time we return to an interrupted task.
The Solution
Set time aside to work uninterrupted and manage interruptions in a way that improves customer satisfaction.
Advanced Solutions
Orchestrating Engagement
Engagement is crucial to impact and satisfaction and the primary constraint on improvment and change.
The real problem isn't an irrational and obstructive resistance to change - it's mastery in the old way and total lack of capabiltiy - individually and collectivel - in the new one.
How to Orchestrate Engagement
The key to boosting engagement and motivation is to use simple response and engagement frameworks that guide people and help them voice their legitimate and valid concerns and contributions.
Capacity & Productivity
Our go-to excuse for lack of impact and fulfilment is lack of time and resources.
The reality is that we're have a huge penchant for burning time and energy unproductively and unsatisfyingly. The problem is that the human brain wasn't evolved for productivity, but for survival, so the opportunity for improvement is massive.
How to boost Capacity & Productivity
There are .
Ingenuity & Innovation
Ingenuity and innovation is as hard, time-consuming and unpredictable as it is because true ingenuity is, of necessity, counter-intuitive.
And counter-intuitive doesn't look counter-intuively brilliant ahead of time - it just seems, well: stupid.
How to boost Ingenuity & Innovation
Provisionals, alternative generation and integration, forced innovation postponed/ reserved judgement.
Deliberate Evolution. Innovation hothouse.
Collaboration & Synergy
We suck at collaboration and are appallingly hopeless at synergy.
We're drowning in opportunity for both collaboration and synergy - and yet wasting it needlessly.
The problem is that we suck at it and that's not as easy to fox as we might think.
How to boost Collaboration & Synergy
Notes.
Capabilty & Mastery
<image>
Individual and collective mastery is the key to all human endeavour.
The trick to mastery is intervening at the ideal time (mostly early) in the most effective way.
The problem is that if we're haven't mastered the domain yet, it's impossible to know how and when to intervene - or is it?
The Key To Mastery
The secret is to work out what the most common failure modes (things that can go wrong) are - and what each of their earliest symptoms are.
Then practice diagnosing and intervening in increasingly demanding simulated and real-world situations.
Services
Prodsol Website Membership
Register (it's free) for more detail on a selection of dramatic improvement solutions.
Registration will also give you access to a general discussion forum on all of the solutions accessible to registered members.
We'll be launching a paid membership option in due course. It will give you access to even more detail on a more comprehensive set of solutions - pricing will be adjusted as content is published.
Current Solutions
Anonymous Access
1 Impact & Fulfilment Solution Summary
Registered Access
3 Impact and Fulfilment Solution Summaries
Access to the Registered level Discussion Forum
Paid Access
7 Impact and Fulfillment Solution Summaries
eGuide, Audio and Videos and dedicated discussions on each solution.
Webinars
We hold webinars on various solutions and techniques for boosting individual and collective Impact and Fulfilment.
Our webinars are more interactive than conventional webinars and come in two forms:
1. One-hour sessions to convey the core idea and help them apply and implement it within their world.
2. A series of one-hour sessions addressind each of a series of key facets of each solution.
Current Webinars
We are currently offering 1. FlowGenius and 2. Defrag Your Brain webinars.
Lnks on each page of this site - or click here.
Future Webinars
We plan to release a new webinar series at least every two months. The current programme is:
3. Deliberate Genius
4. ChangeGenius
5. DemandGeneration
6. Sales Acceleration
Public Workshops
We hold a series of half-day and full-day Public Workshops in Auckland, New Zealand.
These workshops are for individuals from SMEs and from larger organisations who attend to experience our workshops firsthand with a view to rolling them out within their organisation if the fit is good.
Public workshops are more affordable per person, because of the inability to discuss potentially sensitive confidential information.
Public Workshop Schedule
FlowGenius Half-Day Workshop
Friday, 10 December 2016
Friday, 21 January 2017
FlowGenius Full Day Workshop
Tuesday, 13 December 2016
Friday, 28 January 2017
Deliberate Genius
Some time in February 2017
On-Site Workshops
We have a large library of on-site seminars and workshops that we can provide in an ad hoc way or as part of a mini-project.
Detail 1
Mini-Project
Detail 2
Is this for you?
Indicators
This is the best place to start if:
1. You need better engagement or collaboration or more capacity, or shorter lead-times, higher quality, consistency or predictability or lower costs or effort across the whole organisation.
2. Your people are keen - or at least open - to lifting their game, if you approached it right.
2. No single department or function is the bottleneck - they all could do with a boost.
Kick off with a workshop or mini-project
If all of these indicators resonate with you, targeting Individual and Collective Impact and Fulfilment could be the best place to start.
As people get more engaged, productive, innovative and collaborative, end-to-end performance will increase dramatically - and the functional area-specific opportunities will become more obvious and unequivocal.
It's probably still worth starting where the appetite and aptitude is highest, though!
Contra-Indicators
This is not the best place to start if:
1. The constraint is elsewhere
Your end-to-end constraint is clearly in a specific functional area or department and your people are fully engaged, productive, and collaborative but need a breakthrough in that specific area.
2. Your people aren't keen to lift their game
Whether the lack of apptitude is justified or not..
Start somewhere else
In either case, it may be better to lead with the functional area or stuational solution and introduce only the relevant Impact and Fulfilment solutions within the context of that specific intervention.
This is not so say that there is nothing gain from investing in the impact and fulfilment of your people - merely that the context of a situation-focused initiative will be a more direct way of securing immedaite gains and momentum.
How We Can Help
Services
WORKSHOPS
COURSES
ADVICE
PROJECTS
COACHING
Service Types
ONLINE
PUBLIC
ON-SITE
The opportunity for improvement in productivity and satisfaction lies in the reduction of wasted time and energy - and the refocusing of a portion of the savings made where it will make the most difference. The more productive people are - individually and collectively - the more valuable and meaningful their contribution, the greater their satisfaction. And the greater their satisfaction, the greater their engagement, collaboration and performance.
Ultimate State
We want our people to be fully engaged, vocational and collaborative in their role within our organisation - and we want them to feel valued and respected for the contribution they make.
The Performance-Limiting Problem
The problem is unpredictability of demand and invisibiity of opportunity, compounded by the human brain's need for clarity and predictability and the time needed to gain mastery.
Our train of thought is constantly being interrupted - if we're not by others, by ourselves - which kill thinking and consequently mastery development. Add to that, unconscous incognizance - we can't take advantage of what we don't know we don't know - and it's no wonder we under-achieve and are unmotivated.
The Counter-Intuitive Breakthough Solution
Our dramatic improvement solution for productivity targets both in concert, by freeing up time and energy needlessly wasted in avoidable multitasking, while deliberately providing the opportunities for growth and development within a respecting environment.
Design batching and streamlining to meet demand ratios. Use handover-ready templates for all handovers.
Other solution elements
Common Traps and Pitfalls and How to Overcome Them
Standard Solutions
Defrag your Brain!
The best place to start is to free up thinking and processing capacity. It takes a lot longer than we think to reach deep concentration on demanding tasks – and we incur this setup cost every time we return to uncompleted tasks.
Although we will never eliminate multitasking and interruptions completely, we can reduce their incidence and impact way more than we realise – and the indirect benefits are quite amazing!
It's easy to prove gains in capacity of 25% - and we have many case studies of significantly bigger gains than that.
We hold public and private (onsite and offsite) workshops to help people to understand the hidden impact of multitasking onthe human brain and apply and implement simple techniques for curbing unnecessary context swtiching.
Time Allocation Planning and Scheduling
Over time, reality conspires to shift our focus from the important and challenging to the urgent and solvable. We end up adopting a a 20:80 focus instead of an 80:20 one. It's a trend that is very diffcult to resist - and not easy to rectify without a careful and focused effort. The trick is to do a quick audit of where we're currently allocating our time and energy and compare it with where would ideally like to be allocating time and energy. From there, it's a simple matter of developing strategies for migrating from the former to the latter.
We hold public and private (onsite and offsite) workshops to help people through the process and adapt our set of solutions to their reality - or build tailor-made solutions, if need be.
Process and Practice Optimisation
It's crucial to distinguish between process (the steps each work-item goes through) and practice (the steps we go through in dealing with many work-items).
This makes it a lot easier to increase the flow-rate and reduce the flow-time of work-items and acclerate and enhance the co-ordination, batching, processing, decision-making and creative problem-solving elements of the practice.
Flow-rate (or flow-capacity is determined by bottleneck flow-capacity. Flow-time is the sum of waiting and processing time in the process. And they're the consequence of the practice we use. The following solution elements contribute various parts of the solution.
Solution Elements
- Defrag Your Brain!
- Time Allocation Planning and Scehduling
- Deliberate Respect
- Deliberate Synergy
- Deliberate Mastery
- Deliberate Genius
- Create a Pull-System for Change
Productivity is producing more, better, faster and more enjoyably on lower effort, time and dollar costs.
Key success factors
- The first step is to free up people's time
- Next is to help them progress current workload
- After that, deal with backlog and
- Finally, help them accelerate throughput
Our approach to departmental or organisational productivity improvement is to run a Defragmenting Time & Focus Workshop (Defrag Workshop) and create a pull-system for the introduction of subsequent productivity solutions as part of the implementation support service. Our Pull-System for Change solution replaces the conventional, coercive push-system for change (which people can't help but resist) with an appealing pull-system, which people can't help but embrace with enthusiasm.
The Defrag Workshop helps people understand the huge cognitive cost of multitasking (it's way bigger than peopel realise) and provides them with tools and techniques for reducing it dramatically, both individually and collectively.
The productivity solutions that participants choose to "pull" into their practice include:
- Time Allocation Planning & Scheduling
- Provisional Solutions
- GPS (Goal-Problem-Solution)
- Deliberate Innovation
- ActionEmail
- TurboMeetings
- Explor and
- PowerDelegation
Defrag Workshops are affordably priced (currently NZ$999) and include a month's implementation support and a 3 month implementation and impact review. We have delivered Defrag Workshops of different types to over a thousand people and the responses have been highly enthusiastic and the impact significant - sometimes within days.
Click here for a Defrag Workshop Service Sheet
Advice
- Start by freeing up people's time - the quickest and easiest place to start is by reducing the impact of multitasking
- Then remove or reduce the duration and frequency of unproductive activities, like meetings and administrative overhead
- Then provide innovation techniques and, finally
- Provide collaboration techniques
- Focus all techniques at current workload
- Immediate objectives and targets and
- Backlog
