Not every organisation needs to develop process managers with Lean and Six Sigma skills. Yet, every organisation deserves to have managers with some basic process management skills. Even better, if process management skills became part of the daily business routine and were applied unconsciously, became habits. What are the seven habits of highly effective process managers you should be cultivating?…
A few years ago I was leading a session for high potential managers in an international phone company. Before I was to speak, a senior executive from the company was asked to say a few words to the group about becoming a leader. He told this story… Continue reading →
Two weeks after joining Central Bank in Germany, I spend a full week in the so-called Black Belt Training by TE Capital Europe. Black Belts are the project managers for process improvement approaches at TE. This approach comes from Motorola and is called Six Sigma. The first two weeks in the new company, I have tried to understand Six Sigma and to learn about the methodology and steps, after I got somehow familiar with TE Capital and its terminology, our banking products and our bank itself. While my new colleagues could help me with the latter, the learning of Six Sigma seemed to be an unsuccessful venture, as nobody in my bank had more than a hunch about it.…
Thinking ahead is a cardinal rule of business. In addition to monitoring the daily operations of your business, you need to think about the future. And, as difficult as it may be, it’s important to envision the day when you no longer will be in charge. …
A team spends months on improving customer-facing branch processes of a bank. After benchmarking with sister companies across the world and after carefully mapping out process steps they come up with an improved flow that drastically reduces the processing time for branch customers. It surely looks like a nice success story. However, they get devastating feedback from the customers whilst piloting the solution in five branches. Why? …
Becoming a Lean Six Sigma Black Belt – and to a certain degree a Green Belt – is a major career move and should be considered carefully. There are not only the Pros; there are plenty of Cons. For you, it will definitely mean putting in more time. On top of someone’s normal job, the Black Belt is required to spend a considerable amount of time on the new commitment. Your additional time will not be rewarded financially at the outset. Your organisation will not be willing to put much money in something that is new and has not paid back yet.
Every year around December, he gets very busy. He plans for the big event and he wants to make sure everything works out to the expectations of his customers. He prepares gifts; most of them are not expensive in value. However, they are precious because of the warm thoughts and lovely considerations put in. Everyone knows him by his good deeds, only a few have seen him. He is hardly recognised and never awarded for his contributions although he adds value in multiple ways and touches countless lives. Knowing that he helps many and supports those who need his aid is enough award for his selfless work.…
There are several invaluable lessons learnt during the different phases of YOG. A significant task has been the recruitment, preparation and motivation of more than five hundred staff and of more than twenty thousand volunteers within a timeframe of less than two years.
It is not new that recruiting people means evaluating, finding skills and experience that make up the eligibility – the aptitude – on the one hand and the suitability – the attitude – on the other hand. However, it is commonly much easier to evaluate the former in detail whilst neglecting the latter.…
I was chatting with a friend of mine who is in a senior leadership position. He wanted to implement a relocation strategy and he mentioned that based on his intuition all the processes should move to a particular country.
I asked him whether he knew why the processes were where they were today. His answer: “What for? How does it matter?”
I was taken aback and puzzled by the question and I remained speechless. Not because I did not know but the questions were bizarre.…
Discussing workforce planning with an HR professional of a government entity in Singapore we explained our approach that starts from customer and strategy, goes via processes and concludes in workforce needs, in short. The answer I got from my client was “Why do you look into operations in order to do workforce planning. We want to do this without dealing too much with processes.”
I was surprised to get this reaction from an HR professional.…
Imagine most of your trainers as well as your team leaders have never done this job before either. Most of them have joined the new organisation only slightly earlier than…
Especially in service organisations, productivity is usually quite low due to a lack of efficiency caused by a missing focus on the process.
We often accept Rework as Normal Part of the Process.…
“We need to increase productivity!” What sounds very reasonable on a country scale could be damaging on a company level.
Now, after nearly two years of recession the economy is back on track, i.e. companies of all sectors sell more. This is good news, isn’t it? It brings our productivity to new heights, meeting and even surpassing the levels we had seen before the recession. Stop! This is not really good news. This is expected news. Every company – well managed or not – will be able to show these figures. The question is: have companies used the time of low productivity to expand the productivity potential in preparation for the future?
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To find the most valuable Six Sigma projects – ones with the highest system-level leverage – can require systems thinking and tools like the causal loop diagram, which supplies much more information than the usual cause-and-effect analysis.
Well-focused improvements done in the right place can lead to significant system-wide results for an organisation. In simple terms, it is a matter of choosing the right Six Sigma projects. But the problem is that it is not always easy to know which projects will produce the highest system-level leverage.
Often Green Belts and Black Belts are left to their own devices to find projects. Because the locus of high-leverage changes is normally not located in close proximity, either in time or space, to the symptoms of the problem, it is often not obvious to participants in the system. The result is: the “right” projects may not be selected.
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Productivity measures the ratio of output quantity over input quantity. Increase of productivity means growing the output quantity faster than the input quantity. Output quantity can stand for anything from number of products made over number of customers served to number of donors treated or number of work passes produced. Input is usually summarising all resources needed to do this from raw material over equipment to man hours.
How is productivity increase possible?
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Architect of High-Performing Organisations
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