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The Power of Cooperation

20 January, 2024 by James Lawther Leave a Comment

koffie met slagroom

Koffie Met Slagroom Anyone? I went on holiday last month. No sun-soaked Caribbean beach for me. Instead, it was the joys of Northern Europe. It rained every single day and then the rain became stormy (you should experience the Rotterdam to Hull ferry in a force eight gale, it is a big boat but it […]

Filed Under: Blog, Employee Engagement Tagged With: collaboration, cooperation, performance management, road sign, standardisation, targets

Standards Make Good Servants but Poor Masters

4 November, 2019 by James Lawther Leave a Comment

standard work

Standard work I found an interesting post about standardisation in public services.   The post argues that standardisation doesn’t work in the service industry.  Each customer or citizen is different and because each citizen is different they want different things.  So if you standardise everything and then force your staff to follow the standard process […]

Filed Under: Blog, Process Improvement, Tools & Techniques Tagged With: andon, best practice, command and control, compliance, conformity, standardisation, work instructions

Standards and Innovation

14 June, 2019 by James Lawther Leave a Comment

Using Standards

Riding roughshod over the standard We had a bit of an issue last week.  We were trying something new and it went — how can I best put it? — belly up.  In fact its belly went so far up it ended up in a conversation with our risk and compliance team.  They were displeased.  […]

Filed Under: Blog, Process Improvement Tagged With: innovation, standardisation

Variation or Standardisation?

4 October, 2017 by James Lawther Leave a Comment

Standardisation

Standard work The process guys will tell you that you should standardise and reduce variation. Variation is a bad thing. The customer experience guys will tell you every interaction is different.  No customer is the same. Variation is a good thing. Which camp is right? The case for allowing variation Some situations call for a […]

Filed Under: Blog, Process Improvement Tagged With: service design, standardisation, variation, video

The Rules of the Workplace

27 September, 2015 by James Lawther 3 Comments

The 20 rules: Prioritise the work Don’t make your customers wait There is always more work than people Study the work Understand how the work works Standardise the work If the work is important write it down Train your staff Make the work easy Build systems Stream line the work Find the bottleneck Clean the […]

Filed Under: Blog, Tools & Techniques, Wild Cards Tagged With: bottleneck, communication, customer focus, effective meetings, error proofing, five s, gemba, lean thinking, learning, process mapping, service improvement, SlideShare, standardisation, systems thinking, visual management

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