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The “A” Team

4 October, 2014 by James Lawther 5 Comments

Mr T Fool

The escalation What do you do when things get out of hand?  When your staff are bombarded with queries that they can’t handle? There are two lines of thought… Management Model 1: First split your staff into two pools, the experienced people who know what they are doing and the less so (who presumably don’t) […]

Filed Under: Blog, Process Improvement Tagged With: beliefs, call centre, cheap and nasty, escalation, first call resolution, learning, mitigating demand, office productivity

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

The Shocking Truth About Your Improvement Project

6 August, 2013 by James Lawther 9 Comments

Is this an improvement?

Yesterday I read that only 5% of the changes we make at work are changes for the better.  Only 1 in 20 improvements actually improve things. Allegedly everything else we do is ineffective or, worse still, counter-productive. Ungrounded statistics I thought that sounded horribly harsh.  Only 1 in 20 improvements are really improvements?  It sounded more […]

Filed Under: Blog, Process Improvement Tagged With: beliefs, continuous improvement, office productivity, project management, service improvement

Should you go to Work in Your Slippers?

4 December, 2012 by James Lawther 7 Comments

Results only work environment

How would it be if you could come and go at work just as you pleased?  If nobody checked your hours, if you didn’t have to attend meetings and if the only stick you were measured by was the results you achieved? If you believe the articles the American retailer Best Buy has created that […]

Filed Under: Blog, Employee Engagement Tagged With: accountability, best practice, employee performance measures, empowerment, objective setting, office productivity, performance management, results only work environment, trust, wasted motion

6 Ways to Avoid Endless Meetings

21 April, 2012 by James Lawther 3 Comments

Boring Meeting

I spent 7 straight hours in meetings yesterday Have you ever thought to yourself that: you might just be able to do some of the things that you said you would do in one meeting if you didn’t spend all your time in the next meeting explaining why it is you haven’t done what you […]

Filed Under: Blog, Employee Engagement, Tools & Techniques Tagged With: effective meetings, office productivity

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