Tag: Collaboration

The use of Lean and collaborative delivery methods increases team performance on Major Projects

Hunter Dean

The greatest impact you can have on a project outcome is in the early phases, where during the concept design thinking, you create some of the success frameworks for delivery through which your project will evolve.

By the time you’re at the pre-construction, execution phase and beyond, it’s likely there’ll a whole lot of inefficiencies built into the project which result in many different types of waste.

Taiichi Ohno, whose founding role in the development of the concepts of Lean birthed the concept of Lean Manufacturing, identified 7 key types of waste all of which are very relevant but mostly invisible or ignored on large / major projects:

  1. Mistakes or defects;
  2. Overproduction of parts, raw materials, steel etc;
  3. Stock or Inventories waiting around for a next stage in any given process;
  4. People waiting for things to happen, materials to be available etc before they can proceed;
  5. Unnecessary processing, doing things which are actually not even going to be required;
  6. The mobilisation of teams where they are not required; and
  7. Transport of goods that was not really required.

The same basic wastes occur just as much in most major projects as they do in manufacturing, causing expensive losses of time, money and negative morale.

The quality of the thinking and planning work done at the outset can however greatly reduce waste, but how do you do this, if the systems in place are already inefficient?

Lean Manufacturing, Lean Construction and Lean in an Enterprise, is all about the elimination of inefficiency and waste with a focus rather on high-performance cultures and efficient processes. The results include improved profitability, more engaged clients, more motivated teams and in many cases increased environmental sustainability.

By changing your up front thinking and the way you engage with your key clients, stakeholders, JV, Alliance, PPP or other project partners you can have a really positive influence around the success or failure or projects measured off the traditional time, cost, quality safety parameters we all ultimately live by.

A simple video description of some of the Lean Construction concepts can be found here:

Author: Hunter Dean see https://www.linkedin.com/in/hunterdean/ for LinkedIn Profile

Based in Melbourne Australia and Wellington New Zealand http://www.hunterdean.com

 

Business Results & Collaboration

Hunter Dean

Collaboration is a funny word, and ironically many of us are not to good at it.

Think about it – when someone cooks dinner at your place, who does it, do you share the duties? Often one person will do all the cooking and another all the washing up. Often one person becomes great at one of these two things. In business you often have a similar occurrence.

John is great at the Project Management schedule but never gets it together around creating solid relationships. So his assistant becomes great at doing it, and does it so well John never gets out to see his people when part of his role was to be out on the work front. So how could you use collaboration in a way that it would absolutely revolutionise a team’s results in your business? Being able to identify and management your talent in such a way that the transfer of “What they know & do” starts to occur organically within your organisation.

Business Teamwork - Hunter Dean

  1. Look at how often you setup specific learning tasks for the people in your team who are not at the top?
  2. When you have meetings with the team what are the expectations you set?
  3. Do you have a selection of your team sharing the things that made the biggest difference to them across the past month, censored by you
  4. Do all team members leave the meeting with structured things to improve on based on where they are at?

How do you then meaningfully sit with all these people in order to ensure the skills, behaviours and attributes that matter are being learned? By consistently considering these factors organisational change can occur faster.

If some of the above is ringing bells also consider the %age greater sales or production & productivity your best people create against those struggling, and consider what changes could you make to your own style of leadership around knowledge transfer and collaboration.

Author: Hunter Dean see https://www.linkedin.com/in/hunterdean/ for LinkedIn Profile

Based in Melbourne Australia www.hunterdean.com

Expert Knowledge Management – Author Hunter Dean 

Hunter Dean

Knowledge Management Hunter Dean

What is Expert Knowledge Management EKM 

As part of a personal aim to see the performance of any business team continue to increase in different business verticals. I’ve decided to contribute to the area of Expert Knowledge Management EKM.

What does that mean, well given my expertise is not in English, it means this blog will be exploring everything to do with you getting more out of your people. That includes areas where I have been working for the past 10+ years around talent identification & management, the value of internal collaboration on team performance in both sales & productivity/output based environments, performance management. It also includes areas like how to get value from the use of past cultural transformation, sales & L&D programs that may have worked in some but not all pockets of the business.

A clear distinction to make up front is that this does not mean the team have to work harder, probably teams do however need to start thinking differently and with more focus on collaboration, performance, strategy, innovation and what it is their best people internally are doing already.

Expert Knowledge Management EKM is a subject few organizations even understand let alone use.

A major part of this blog will be about exploring what the world’s best organizations are doing in this area to ensure that when the markets are falling faster than ever and the “World” is in trouble you have solutions in order to replicate what is best practice not from another country but in many cases within your own organisation.

We will also be looking at how interventions occur in the worlds largest organisations around Human Resources, Talent Identification, Performance Management, Human Performance, Change Management and other related areas.

If you have other questions on these topics that are not answered here, a good research resources can be found at www.hunterdean.com.

Or you can contact me at hunter@hunterdean.com

All comments are appreciated and welcomed!

 

Harness Knowledge via Technology

Hunter Dean

As yet, technology in business has hardly been used to harness the knowledge held by talented high-performing individuals. Why not? Well, it’s funny that you should ask. We are now great at storing data – check on any company you like and you’ll find shared hard drives with data trees up to your eyebrows. But in most cases if you ask the users where they access essential information on the best people’s progress and what they have learned in the last week, they’ll seldom tell you – Oh that’s right here.” It just does not seem to happen. This kind of organisational change, although being used in some cases, is still some way off.

What would you need to do in order to be able to do it better?

  1. Firstly, you’d need to have a system where you could design a database of internal smarts, probably categorised by area, and which uses a kind of hierarchy to capture information design.
  2. Then you’d need to define the “Key” areas and who knows the most about them – a talent identification and management process. In other words, you would want to have a series of “Internal Experts”.
  3. You’d need some way of downloading in each area a series of what really matters e.g. in a projects environment, it might be meeting schedules, quality of pre start meetings, project knowledge, resource management, major supplier relationship building etc.
  4. As the database was built upon, almost certainly you would want to have some kind of tags or “Meta tags” where the information in each file has a meaningful link to a user searching for it.
  5. Finally, you’d need to understand how, why and when people would access these smarts.

Have a listen to some of the world leaders discussing problems in the workplace. They talk about the new collaborative technologies and their deployment, and the effect on business processes. How are they affecting our use and definitions of what is public and what is private, our intellectual property? What about the way that language affects how we use these technologies?

Test small first, and test as you design, as part of the organisational change process. Find out what works and do more of that! Most often, the IT people get carried away with technology that no one else cares about or knows how to use, so the money is wasted.