Systems Thinking and Lean
Sustainable Breakthrough Change
Poor business performance is often related to project over-runs, initiative overload and weak alignment of work to strategic objectives. This can lead to constant fire fighting with people working in functional silos. Systems thinking and Lean can improve team performance and offers a coherent framework for delivering Continuous Improvement, Lean Management Systems and Sustainable Breakthrough Change.
Does your business experience constant project overruns?
Do projects suffer from late delivery, constant slippage, frequent changes? Are the benefits less than anticipated, hard to track and difficult to measure? Does this continue even though the project management skills have been developed?
The root cause may not be with the projects and the way they are managed but instead with the business environment and the way it manages its change agenda. Systems thinking and lean can provide an alternative approach to rapid change that may be a more appropriate method to deliver rapid focussed change.
Does your business suffer from Initiative overload?
Too many “critical project” competing for scarce resources? Is there poor business ownership of the projects and no senior accountability for delivering the benefits? Are there too many initiatives and nobody knows how they all fit together? Are there so many initiatives that it almost impossible to get on with serving customers and business as usual? Does everyone agree that it would be better to focus on a few priority initiatives but no-one is able to set the priorities?
Some organisations overcome this problem by using systems thinking and lean as the basis of the complete business management system.
Is there weak alignment of work to strategic goals?
Are people unclear how their work fits into the bigger picture of the business? Can people easily explain how their work impacts the performance of the business? Do the teams know the business priorities? Do they know how to use strategic goals in their day to day decisions ?
There are simple systems thinking and lean processes and tools that enable everyone in an organisation participate in aligning their work to the business goals. These tools also provide a simple way for all the teams to communicate with each other.
Has fire fighting become the normal way of working?
Does the organisation operate in a blame culture? Do individuals and teams work in isolation without considering the wider business? Is there a constant stream of operational issues with customers being impacted? Are the issues recurring where the same problems keep happening.
This is often a symptom of core business processes not being managed and continuously improved. Systems thinking and lean is particularly good a stabilising processes. Systems thinking can help focus the work on process performance and lean can be implemented to deliver continuous improvement, visual management and a daily improvement cycle.
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