http://www.BurgeHughesWalsh.co.uk/ en-gb Tue, 07 Sep 2010 13:53:57 GMT http://www.BurgeHughesWalsh.co.uk/News/September-2010/Embedding-Continuous-Improvement-with-Bronze-Silver-Gold.aspx http://www.BurgeHughesWalsh.co.uk/News/September-2010/Embedding-Continuous-Improvement-with-Bronze-Silver-Gold.aspx Tue, 07 Sep 2010 10:13:41 GMT Read the SUSTAINABLE GOV's review of BHW's 'Bronze Silver Gold' approach to embedding continuous improvement, highlighting a case study with the Street Cleansing team in Aberdeenshire. Follow the links below to see the article and for more information on how the 'Bronze Silver Gold' approach works. http://www.BurgeHughesWalsh.co.uk/News/August-2010/ARE-YOU-THINKING-SYSTEMS.aspx http://www.BurgeHughesWalsh.co.uk/News/August-2010/ARE-YOU-THINKING-SYSTEMS.aspx Wed, 11 Aug 2010 09:46:51 GMT Are you a systems thinker? Improvement activities, be they lean, Six Sigma or hard-hitting Rapid Improvement Events, can realise their full potential through the adoption of a systems approach. Based upon the systematic application of systems thinking, these revised approaches to improvement cause the improvement agents to: • question and understand the purpose of the situation they seek to improve, thereby providing focus and clarity • identify and explore the alternative solutions at different levels to determine the best outcome • recognise and address the change management issues necessary for sustained and embedded improvement http://www.BurgeHughesWalsh.co.uk/News/June-2010/MOVING-FROM-DEPLOYMENT-TO-BUSINESS-AS-USUAL.aspx http://www.BurgeHughesWalsh.co.uk/News/June-2010/MOVING-FROM-DEPLOYMENT-TO-BUSINESS-AS-USUAL.aspx Mon, 21 Jun 2010 11:49:55 GMT Report on the i&i Community Network Meeting, May 2010 The i&i Members Community Network Meeting helped attendees towards building capability within their organization by providing actionable insights into how Continuous Improvement (CI) programmes can progress efficiently and successfully from deployment to ‘Business As Usual’, where the principles and ideas of CI are ingrained within the company. i&i designed the meeting to provide working examples and best practice to help programme leaders make the shift in focus and strategy required to build a sustainable CI programme whilst demonstrating significant business benefits. A pre-defined Maturity Model was used to design the agenda and as a baseline for discussions. http://www.BurgeHughesWalsh.co.uk/News/June-2010/READ-SOME-RECENT-CLIENT-COMMENTS.aspx http://www.BurgeHughesWalsh.co.uk/News/June-2010/READ-SOME-RECENT-CLIENT-COMMENTS.aspx Wed, 16 Jun 2010 09:41:37 GMT We try our best to deliver top quality services to our clients. It is rewarding to receive positive feedback. http://www.BurgeHughesWalsh.co.uk/News/May-2010/Kaizen-in-the-Public-Sector.aspx http://www.BurgeHughesWalsh.co.uk/News/May-2010/Kaizen-in-the-Public-Sector.aspx Wed, 12 May 2010 15:12:25 GMT With the increasing pressure to cut costs whilst maintaining service performance, the application of Blitz Kaizen in the public sector is becoming an imperative. Burge Hughes Walsh (BHW) is pleased to be working with Pat Browne who is a Lean Kaizen Specialist and Performance Coach. Working with XCD Ltd, she has conducted many Rapid Improvement Events in the local authority sector. Pat has extensive experience as a project manager and improvement leader. She has worked across both private and public sector and admits to having a particular empathy with and connection to the latter. Between 2005 and 2008 she was responsible for driving a major LEAN Kaizen change programme in a large local authority. Her leadership and commitment were recognised as part of the success of that initiative in picking up a prestigious European award in 2006. She has been a regular speaker at National and International Conferences where performance improvement was the focus and has supported and inspired many others in this field. Linking with Pat has strengthened BHW’s ability to provide a great service to public sector organizations. http://www.BurgeHughesWalsh.co.uk/News/May-2010/START-WITH-THE-END-IN-MIND--why-process-map.aspx http://www.BurgeHughesWalsh.co.uk/News/May-2010/START-WITH-THE-END-IN-MIND--why-process-map.aspx Wed, 05 May 2010 11:27:57 GMT In my experience, mapping is never an end in itself and in the world of continuous improvement it certainly isn't the objective! I once met a team of people who had been sucked into mapping their organization's processes for a whole year and had literally forgotten why they had started the exercise. Whilst process maps are useful for documenting a process as part of standardising practice (very important for reducing variation), the route to establishing that process, ie your continuous improvement or BPR activity, is a hands-on affair and I would subscribe to the 'pen and post-it' technique. BHW has also developed another approach, which is very effective at digging out the waste in a hard-to-map process and which is often far more accessible to the workforce. The problem with mapping is knowing when to stop - in the words of Stephen Covey (author 'Seven Habits of Highly Successful People'), and to slightly misquote him: "start with the end in mind". Or as Abraham Lincoln was once heard to say, when asked how long a man’s leg should be: “Long enough to reach from his hip to the ground!” If you are digging a well for water, when do you stop? Answer - when you find water! If you are after oil, keep digging!!! A SIPOC is great for scoping the process under scrutiny, establishing stakeholders affected and ascertaining the purpose/output of the process; more detailed maps (from VSM to flowcharts) help to find waste activities, including queues and sources of errors. It's not always easy to draw a map, though. I recently was involved with street cleansers and our aim was to find the non-value added activity in their day/week/month. Drawing maps was limiting, as their 'day' was made up of many interacting activities and this is not untypical of most office jobs, either - we manage many processes in parallel, switching back and forth. So we devised a technique we called 'activity listing', in which the street cleansers conducted a three hour workshop to list their activities, identify their nva and prioritise it in terms of 'time stealing'. This short workshop resulted in a list of projects, mostly easy JGDI (Just Go Do It) actions that resulted in over 20% time savings. We developed the activity listing as a step-by-step technique that thoroughly engages the team, using simple tools and which produces a shortlist of effective actions that the team can execute themselves. For more information on the activity listing technique, contact Stephen on swalsh@burgehugheswalsh.co.uk http://www.BurgeHughesWalsh.co.uk/News/April-2010/Strengthening-our-Service-to-the-Public-Sector.aspx http://www.BurgeHughesWalsh.co.uk/News/April-2010/Strengthening-our-Service-to-the-Public-Sector.aspx Mon, 19 Apr 2010 11:38:26 GMT BHW has been working with the public sector on a number of projects over the past few years – developing change agents, training facilitators to run Rapid Improvement Events and helping to embed a mindset of continuous improvement in the behaviours of local council staff. As part of the continued provision of excellent service to the public sector, BHW is pleased to have created a partnership with HelpGov Ltd. MD Roger White was recently head of service for corporate policy and improvement for a large local authority in North East Scotland serving a population of some 240,000 people and was also a board member of the Scottish Local Government Improvement Service. Roger’s knowledge and experience of working with public sector organizations in Scotland and England will ensure a focused service provision to our clients in this sector. http://www.BurgeHughesWalsh.co.uk/News/March-2010/I-was-asked-the-other-day.aspx http://www.BurgeHughesWalsh.co.uk/News/March-2010/I-was-asked-the-other-day.aspx Wed, 24 Mar 2010 09:30:32 GMT During a meeting with a local council, I was asked the other day "given Toyota's current situation, are you embarrassed to talk about them in your lean training?" Fair question – but to be honest, for a very, very long time now I have declined to describe lean in the context of Toyota, so "no, it's made no difference". When working in the public sector, I have always been bemused when witnessing an introduction that begins "Lean started in manufacturing..." - the tutor opens up an unnecessary (i.e. wasteful) debate about whether it really is applicable to public sector activity. Lean in some senses is an efficient way of managing processes (though I grant you, some people don't believe they have processes!) and as such has been around far longer than Toyota - bread makers of 3000 years ago were making and selling on the same day! Toyota has certainly shown the West how to apply this organization-wide and formalised a philosophy, but I have also found that half of today's audiences are too young (by that I mean under 40) to remember the days of UK Manufacturing and those that do were resentful of 'yet more comparisons with the Japanese - we have some Best Practices of our own we could learn from'. So the manufacturing origins all seemed a bit irrelevant to them. It is important to acknowledge the great teachings of the Japanese Gurus, but Lean is more than one company. We are now recognising, too, that Lean isn't everything, either - hence the increasing debates on Systems Thinking. At the end of the day Lean (and, for that matter, Six Sigma) are reductionist techniques that have their limit - take an existing process and improve it to be more efficient, effective, repeatable and predictable. The approach may well give room for creativity, but doesn't really encourage innovation, which is far more the realm of Systems Thinking. You might, for example, work hard at 'leaning out' your meetings to halve the time spent in them - but it never questions the reason for the meeting in the first place. I take my hat off to Toyota and to anyone who has persevered to better their performance, through better customer services. They have shown the rest of us the way and we should show them some respect. By Stephen Walsh, Partner of Burge Hughes Walsh. http://www.BurgeHughesWalsh.co.uk/News/December-2009/TURNING-BRONZE-INTO-GOLD--EMBEDDING-CONTINUOUS-IMPROVEMENT.aspx http://www.BurgeHughesWalsh.co.uk/News/December-2009/TURNING-BRONZE-INTO-GOLD--EMBEDDING-CONTINUOUS-IMPROVEMENT.aspx Mon, 07 Dec 2009 13:33:23 GMT “We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act but a habit” – so said Aristotle. Various organisations, including manufacturing and public sector bodies such as councils, have discovered how the Burge Hughes Walsh ‘Bronze Silver Gold System’ (BSG) creates a culture of workplace continuous improvement, successfully transforming people and organisations, where the alchemists only dreamed of transmuting metal.