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Proven Tools & Techniques for achieving increased profitability and growth: Close Quarter aims to use the most appropriate, effective tools and
techniques for each individual project.
In our experience most process management techniques are overly complex, take much too long to deploy and at the end of the day deliver little or no customer or financial benefit. If your existing process improvement initiatives have run out of steam and you are under pressure to achieve results rapidly, the tools that we would recommend for process improvement are:
The best toolset we've come across in achieving these goals is from the Bennu Group. You can learn more about these and how you can deploy them to your organisation at http://www.bennugroup.net. Clearly, we believe we're better than most people at deploying these process techniques in really difficult and demanding situations. Nonetheless, you can quickly learn and begin to deploy the Level 1 version of these tools for yourself and achieve immediate business benefits through more effective business processes. We're confident that you can achieve performance improvements with these tools in the first 24 hours for yourself. Don't get too good, or we'll never get to work again ;-)
If your customers don't fully understand the value you bring to them then you are going to lose margins and sales undermining your business profitability. If you don't market your business effectively, you'll be wasting your marketing budget and leaving profitable business to be picked up by your competitors. Download our 'Revenue Growth Start-Up Kit' filled with rapid action tools, techniques and templates to help your sales people be more effective and win more business. Click here to DOWNLOAD (169kb PDF).
In the exciting times
of the booming frontier, it was said that there were only two kinds of
gunfighter “the Quick and the Dead”. Thankfully in business your
life doesn’t literally depend on the pace and accuracy of your
decision-making and execution – it only feels like a matter of
life and death. Making good
decisions quickly and executing them rapidly with confidence remains the key
trademark shared by high-performing organizations. We can all share this ideal
objective and yet many times in the real world we can find that the way
forward on key business initiatives is unclear, resulting in unnecessary
stress and frustration in our attempts to get important things done. So what
can we do to help improve our performance? The RACI technique can
help you make and then execute strategic business decisions with greater pace
and confidence. Learn
more - click here to DOWNLOAD (145kb PDF).
'A picture is worth a thousand words'. Thus, when one needs to understanding a process and all its intricacies clearly, e.g. in order to improve or redesign it, drawing a diagram or map of it is very powerful. Typically, two versions are drawn: the current state of the process and the required state. If the current process is performing reasonably well, then it is appropriate to document it in sufficient detail that the documentation can be used to train new staff and inform continuous improvement activities. If the process is in need of radical overhaul ('re-engineering') then it is normally only useful to document it to a sufficient level of detail to identify the trouble spots and opportunities for improvement. Learn more - click here to DOWNLOAD (58kb PDF) >>
PDCA (Plan, Do, Check, Act) and DMAIC (Define, Measure, Analyse, Design, Verify) In the 1950s, W. Edwards Deming introduced the Plan, Do, Check, Act (PDCA) cycle for continuous improvement. The Six SigmaŽ methodology uses the Define, Measure, Analyse, Design, Verify (DMAIC) continuous cycle. Both of these cycles are a process - indeed, a culture - for institutionalising continuous improvement in an organisation. Learn more - click here to DOWNLOAD (14kb PDF) >>
These techniques aim to get at the root causes of a problem and not just the symptoms. Kaoru Ishikawa, a Japanese Quality pioneer, introduced a very visual 'Fishbone' diagram that helps a whole team focus on this and get rapidly to consensus. The problem is put at the 'head' of the backbone of a fish and categories of likely causes are added as the 'bones'. Each cause discovered is added as a sub-bone to the appropriate category and is subjected, in turn, to further analysis (sprouting its own 'bones'), until the root causes are discovered. The 'Five Whys' approach can be used, where the problem is analysed to five levels, give or take a level, until it is clear that the root causes have been found. |
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