Surely the most important aspect of successful businesses and organisations is providing the products or services that people want. This seems pretty simple to understand, so why do some get it so tremendously wrong sometimes? Logically there are only a couple of...
If you understand and have followed the history of lean then you will already be aware of the different stages. Key contributors from Adam Smith* in the late 18th Century, Henry Ford, Deming, Ohno, Womack/Jones and more current thinking from John Seddon and Eric Ries...
I recently coached some lean workshops in a large hospital. They weren't part of an enterprise wide transformation but were three stand-alone activities which were all being run in parallel during the same week. The facilitators and team members were great. All...
A good friend of mine got married recently in Nottingham, the city of my university education. While in the area I decided I would extend my stay and see if I could summon any memories of those years of my life. I could not. Undeterred I dropped into my University...
Teams that get little support and development often tend to be those delivering smaller degrees of change for their organisations. There is a parallel in healthcare. Those that are self-taught and get their information from books and the internet can only be expected...
Whilst we know that everyone hasn't yet realised that Lean is a critical success factor when it comes to organisation performance, fortunately there are a lot of people who do have the message and are running their own Lean programmes. This is great news and I admire...
It is an overused term today, often not really describing any significant change at all. I have seen it used to describe routine upgrades to the next generation of software for example. This is not Transformation. To us "Transformation is the deep review of everything...
This principle is so easily forgotten in the pressure of the workplace. Available time is in short supply; available work is abundant. It's near impossible to square this circle (sorry) The two key areas of improvement work that I wrote about in my last piece are...
To think about this properly we need to go back to the improvement strategy. Without one it can become unclear as to why the improvement should be made which has a damaging effect on engagement. So we should ask: "What does the business look like if we deliver the...