Having recently completed OPP’s Myers Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI) Step 1 qualification, I was fascinated by Dr David Hillson’s letter1 in this months’ APM Project Magazine Inbox, and Patrick Bird’s article in the previous issue on ‘Type Setting’2, which prompted the letter. Both the originating article and the responding letter refer to the ability to …
Personality Type and Project Management – with reference to MBTI 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 »
There are some interesting inter-relationships between intuition and knowledge management (KM) This blog follows on from part 2: “Intuition revisited – implications for process improvement and Lean Six Sigma”, and part 1: “Intuition revisited – or how it could be important to a business environment”. All three blogs are based on Gary Klein’s book “The …
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 …
Last week I attended Day 2 of Internet Librarian International 2010 (#ILI2010), to hear the latest on the use of social media in libraries. The title of this blog is inspired by Dr Hazel Hall’s1 keynote presentation where she talked, amongst other things, about the need to help Library and Information Services users to evolve …
Employee involvement is of course fundamental to the success of any business process improvement initiative: without the close involvement of those who are involved in an organisation’s process, it would be futile to try to identify opportunities for improvement, let alone to try to implement them. So it was with some interest that I read …
Communities of practice and social networks Practitioners of knowledge management, sociologists, and many other business and academic professionals recognize the importance of ‘communities of practice’ or ‘communities of interest’ and social networks both within and across organisations for general human interaction, problem resolution, creativity and innovation, and personal or professional development. Techniques such as ‘social …
Social media: putting you and your business at the heart of your community Read More »
An integrated approach to Strategy, People, Process, Content and Technology is central to the success of business process improvement. Elisabeth Goodman, Owner and Principal Consultant, RiverRhee Consulting, opened the conference with the importance of these themes in achieving Business Process Excellence (BPE). She also came back to them in a later presentation (http://slidesha.re/aVhZso) describing the role …
