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The Sure Thing

28 September, 2014 by James Lawther 4 Comments

white elephant

Pain and despair Imagine you run a servicing centre. You have a staff of 100 who fill in forms to order things for customers. Maybe they process applications Maybe they fill in patient’s details Maybe they capture the details of car repairs You get the gist of it… Lots of people, lots of information and lots of screw […]

Filed Under: Blog, Operations Analysis Tagged With: assumptions, capital investment, continuous improvement, devil is in the detail, information technology, listening, office productivity, root cause analysis, systems thinking

Books Won’t Make You Clever

21 September, 2014 by James Lawther 14 Comments

Children learning

Correlation does not imply causation There is an apocryphal tale about an inner city education department in the American Mid West. In their efforts to increase children’s performance they commissioned an extensive study of the socioeconomic environment their students were raised in, to see what impact it had on a child’s educational prospects.  The study delivered […]

Filed Under: Blog, Operations Analysis Tagged With: beliefs, correlation, data is not information, global warming, root cause analysis, six sigma

A Splendid Waste of Time

14 September, 2014 by James Lawther 7 Comments

HMS Ocean

Is management by wandering around a good thing? I was talking to a friend of mine today.  He used to work for the Royal Navy. He navigated ships in his 20’s. Apparently getting H.M.S. Ocean around the Isle of White and into the Solent without sinking some fool in a yacht is no mean feat.  Particularly […]

Filed Under: Blog, Employee Engagement Tagged With: business process management, management by wandering around, management style, process mapping, work instructions

Assumptions Kill Creativity

3 September, 2014 by James Lawther 8 Comments

Innovation in reading

The population of India is well over 1.2 billion people. Second only to China in size. Roughly a quarter of that population can’t read or write. Or, depending on who, how and when you count, there are something like 300 million illiterate people in India. This is a problem that is worth fixing. But how? Teaching 300 million […]

Filed Under: Blog, Operations Analysis Tagged With: assumptions, innovation, literacy, problem solving

Quantity Versus Quality

29 August, 2014 by James Lawther 5 Comments

Conventional management wisdom: You can have quality or quantity but you can’t have both. Bang ’em out quick Sod the quality, feel the width Cost, quality, speed ~ pick any 2 Even the Romans knew this was the case. It is quality rather than quantity that matters ~ Lucius Annaeus Seneca So if you want […]

Filed Under: Blog, Process Improvement Tagged With: beliefs, cost versus quality

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