These are the sorts of questions we ask when we start out in organisations:
- what you do – and why we need to look at it
- how long it takes
- where you discover errors, what causes them and what’s the root cause
- where does the time vary to complete an activity – and why does it vary (is this something we can change?)
- who works here, what is their expertise, what time do they spend doing this work
- what are the turnkey systems we already have to create service consistency
- who are your clients, customers and suppliers? how do we make their life easy (or not)?
We typically spend the majority of our time in the first few weeks gathering this kind of information directly from staff, by sitting with them at their desk and watching them work, by interviewing them at their desk or in focus groups, and by comparing what we have seen in other organisations to what happens in yours.
We’ll speak to lots of people. We’ll pay attention to all sorts of things. And then we’ll begin to suggest ways you can get at the low hanging fruit, and ways you can you change the systems of reward and punishment, the forms which feed your admin processes, the ways in which you correct errors, the way you train your staff, or anything else we find which creates a blackhole of wasted time.
Cindy