By Elisabeth Goodman and John Riddell On 6th July, we held a very enjoyable second iteration of our APM workshop on this topic in Norwich, having run it previously in Stevenage in May. As with the previous seminar, our audience ranged from people and organisations with very limited knowledge of Lean and Six Sigma, to …
Lean Six Sigma and Project Management – triangles and (virtuous) circles Read More »
Business Process Excellence for Pharmaceuticals, Biotech and Medical Devices, The Brewery, London, April 2011 (2 of 2) John Riddell and Elisabeth Goodman, RiverRhee Consulting1 For part 1 of this blog see: 2nd Business Process Excellence for Pharmaceuticals, Biotech and Medical Devices (1 of 2) http://wp.me/pAUbH-40 Application to ‘other’ environments (1): biotech Simon Orchard, Vice President Biotech Operations …
Business Process Excellence for Pharmaceuticals, Biotech and Medical Devices, The Brewery, London, April 2011 (1 of 2) John Riddell and Elisabeth Goodman, RiverRhee Consulting1 This was the second of IQPC’s specialist conferences on this theme, and as last time2, many of those questioned by the authors were finding it of real value for learning about …
The term ‘burning platform’ has its origins in a real life/death scenario faced by an oil worker in the North Sea and now commonly used to help change agents and stakeholders articulate organisational or personal motivation (WIIFM – What’s In It For Me) for change. ‘Burning platforms’ form the basis of ‘sticky’ or unresistable messages …
Reflections from IQPC’s 6th Annual Smartlab Exchange, Berlin, February 2011 ELNs, LIMS, and LESs IQPC kindly invited me to speak on Operational Excellence and Knowledge Management at this year’s Smartlab Exchange conference in Berlin. Although I have been responsible for Biological Data Management and Laboratory Notebooks in an R&D environment during the course of my …
Operational Excellence and Knowledge Management in an R&D Laboratory Environment Read More »
I’ve just finished reading Michael George’s “Lean and Six Sigma for Service”1, a very useful refresher on many of the key concepts of Lean and Six Sigma, as well as a useful perspective on the challenges and opportunities for applying the tools and methodologies in non-manufacturing environments. Learning from books like these is always helpful …
Lean and Six Sigma in R&D and Service Delivery – opportunities and challenges Read More »
Intuition has an important role in process improvement In a previous blog “The problem with relying on intuition for process improvement and decision making” I emphasized the problems with, rather than the opportunities for intuition. However, as Gary Klein(1) points out, the analytical techniques practiced in Lean Six Sigma also have their shortcomings. A point also …
Intuition does have an important role in business In a previous blog “The problem with relying on intuition for process improvement and decision making” I emphasized the problems with, rather than the opportunities for intuition. One of my blog readers, Deborah Peluso, kindly pointed me to Gary Klein’s 30+ years of work on intuition with the …
Jokes about consultants abound, and, like all good jokes, the experience that provoked them is not hard to discern. An excellent one-liner, quoted by Parcell and Collison in their book ‘No more consultants’1 is: “Consultants ask to borrow your watch to tell you the time, and then walk off with your watch!”2 As you would …
Guest blog by Matthew Loxton1 This discussion is about Process Improvement from a Knowledge Management perspective, but rather than covering the topic from the stratosphere, I have chosen to dig into a very specific and somewhat narrow slice – the use of internal crowdsourcing and tagging as a conduit to producing (and encouraging) process and …
