All companies obsess about something, their USP, their IP, the thing that they can do that nobody else can. I used to work for Birdseye, the frozen pea people. They used to obsess about getting the peas out of the field and frozen within 2 1/2 hours. They had a panel of pea tasters who […]
Archives for November 2010
Tickets Please
I use the train a lot, and I buy a lot of tickets. The guys on East Midlands Mainline are very determined that I pay for all this travel. 1. They have ticket checking barriers at all entrances to the platforms to make sure I have a ticket. 2. They have train “managers” on the […]
The Stretch
How should you manage a stretch? We all have them. A whopping great big number forced in on top of our budgets. A couple of options: 1. Divide and conquer: split the two or twenty million up between departments and set them up against each other, Mano a Mano. See who succeeds and who fails. […]
The Monument Part 2
I wrote about monuments. Perhaps a 500 seat call centre is a monument. We have them to optimise efficiency (occupancy and productivity), they are hugely expensive to own and because of their scale they become inflexible. It isn’t easy to change agent training or the front end telephony for a 500 seat call centre. Does […]
The Monument
In the manufacturing world they use the term “monument” to refer to any piece of equipment that is too big for its purpose. They are expensive pieces of capital equipment that drive massive economies of scale at a local level but fundamentally mess up the total system. Because of their inflexibility they must be “fed” […]