Freeing Business to do Business

After almost 12 months - I'm back to bloging.

Great news, SkyScape Solutions Consultants have just helped another client become ISO 9001 and ISO 27001 accredited!

Congratulations to Capula Healthcare Limited. They have been SkyScape's major client since late 2006. We have helped them in the transition to separate company after the parent company was sold, and have used our business profitability and process know-how to assist them in generating a profitable 2007 and through the acquisition of proper processes for information security and business management.

CHL is in the healthcare software and services arena, and SkyScape have been enjoying learning that industry and applying our supply chain, logistics and process expertise to a new area -- but with the usual results, it works!

The most important lesson I've had over this past year is that the macro processes that drive good logistics and supply chain management are equally appliable in patient care. Rapid movement through the process through streamlining procedures and eliminating un-necessary steps whilst collecting data in as automated a fashion as possible works just as well in the patient journey as it does in getting the right part to the engineer to fix a machine down.

The key tenets of making a better and more effective process work just the same when applied to the movement of people through a healthcare process as they do goods through a supply chain. You have to accurately identify, measure and improve the links/interfaces between actions.

And technology (RFID, 3D Barcodes, Smartphone applications) are just as important in healthcare as they are in logistics.

I suppose I shouldn't have been surprised, but I was .... the amount of directly applicable actions which would have been identical in the logistics environment and worked in a hospital environment was staggering to me.

So my thought of the day is --- try it, it might be relevant and it may very well work. Just because you are tackling a problem in a new area, or a new industry or a new company, don't assume that the tried and true approaches you used before wouldn't work.

Hoping you're enjoying nice weather wherever you are... the daffodils just starting to bloom here in Holland.

I loved the idea of a blog - spending some time letting other people in on our thinking process and hopefully giving them some ideas to improve the profitability of their business.

Of course, reality rarely turns out like you expect! Instead of writing loads of columns of wisdom (which I could compile into a great-selling book), I post once in a blue moon - literally.

There was a lovely lunar eclipse a few weeks ago - so I suspect it is time for another post.

I've chosen for today's quote "You can be right or you can be rich but you cannot be both. People who have to be right do not listen and people who do not listen will not be successful."

I have to credit the quote to the wise Keith Cunningham who talked about this in his weekend seminar in London - which I should have been at but was too ill to attend. However, it was a gem in the notes passed to me by a thoughtful classmate today.

I don't know what Keith meant when he said it over the weekend, but I know how I think of it .... it is a guideline for change. It makes me think about how process change works and why it sometimes doesn't.


You have to have the ability to admit that what you are doing now isn't working 100% - without understanding that today's process isn't right - you cannot change it.

It reminds me of the story of the Zen Master who had a student come to visit. The student was an experienced businessman who had been very successful, and when the Zen Master poured tea for his visitor, he just kept pouring and pouring and the cup overflowed. The moral of the story was that the businessman came with his cup already full, and without being able to empty it - to admit not knowing - he couldn't receive anything new. (For quite a few lovely Zen stories, see Paul Reps "Zen Flesh, Zen Bones".)

I suspect that a lot of process redesigns fail because the person who is the process owner cannot accept that the process is broken (or at least isn't 100%). It may be his or her baby, and it is just too hard to believe that what he/she has designed might not be perfect. It is more important for that person to believe that they are right, than to let in the possibility of wrong which allows change.

For nothing is perfect in business, and certainly nothing in business can be sustainably perfect as all sorts of external factors change even if the internal ones do not. You must constantly acknowledge that what you are doing is not perfect and can be improved.

If you just keep doing what you are currently doing, you'll just get more of what you've currently got. If that's a little profit, you will get a little more profit. If you want amazing profit and you aren't making that now - then you really need to admit that you have to do something differently to reap different rewards.

And that's what Spring is all about - doing a little spring-cleaning to let in a bit of sunshine and to sweep out the cob-webs of old ideas.

Enjoy the spring! Admit your processes aren't perfect. Try something new. Don't be right! And become more profitable in the process of not being right!

Well, the summer has come and gone. And the weather here in the UK has gone all autumnal. Fog in the mornings, cool and damp in the evenings - grey and gloomy most of the time.

A sunny day with gloriously-coloured leaves slowly falling from the trees would be a really nice change!

And change is the subject.

If your business seems a bit grey and gloomy this month, add some change!

It takes real motivation and effort to get change going, but it is even harder to stay the course.

Keith Cunningham has a wonderful phrase "Get in line, stay in line".

How often do we change lines because ours is going slower? How often do we change lanes on the road because the other lane is going faster? How often do we give up and get out of line altogether? And how true is that when it comes to a change programme that we are trying to implement in a business?

The truth is that if we stay with it, we get to the front of the line eventually. If we don't stay in line, we won't get there.... ever.

I think that to see change truly embedded in an organisation where the benefits are consistent and truly experienced -- that takes time. And you have to stay in line.

Quick benefits and low-hanging fruit are great things --- but sustained effort produces sustainable change and profitability in the longer term. A solid business. Certainly worth staying in line.

It has been a long time since I last posted. A combination of loads of work (a quality problem, really); a summer visitor from the US and the holiday season here in Europe have conspired to keep me busier than a one-armed paper hanger.

But I have to say that despite the time-lag, I'm just as enthused today as I was a month ago about our idea to spread the process of making your business more profitable. We are looking at ways to reach more people, and one of the best looks to be seminars and/or evening events.

We are focussing on the small-to-medium market segment of companies with under 100 employees and generally under £25M in revenue - the companies that are too small to use our "big cousins" like McKinsey or Accenture, but large enough to want to do something serious in terms of continual improvement.

Our first seminar is going to be "Using Process to Assess and Achieve Greater Profitability", and we are preparing now to launch it in September. Keep watching!

It's been a very interesting month. In the past four weeks, we've made the decision to change the focus of our company. We have always worked on large projects with our clients, helping them to identify and remove unnecessary cost from their businesses; generally using our business process tool with them, sometimes just in the background.

But after spending all this time "doing" the work, we are realising that what we enjoy most is creating the teams and teaching them to do the work; facilitating the workshops, passing along the tools and the knowledge.

We have decided to put a lot more focus on this in our SkyScape business, and we have just set up a new area of the business - "growth days". We will be offering a series of workshops and taster events to clients and non-clients alike, where we share with them and teach them to use the tools that we have found so effective in our work.

Watch this space, and within the next few months we will be announcing our first events. I hope you will join us!

I was privileged to meet Keith Cunningham last weekend. What a fantastic guy! Listened to him speak for a few hours, and learned an enormous amount from him. But what made the most impact was his forumula for greatness.

G = I + E + S

Greatness = Inspiration plus Experience plus Skills

If you don't have all three, then greatness is a very big stretch goal.

I realised that what inspires me at work is helping and teaching others - not the doing, but the enabling of others. And so thanks to Keith, I'm going to be changing the focus of what we do at SkyScape to be better at enabling our clients to manage process and change themselves.

We are setting up a number of courses which will give our clients the right toolkits to enable change in themselves and their businesses.

Watch this space!

No matter where I look, I can see process -- I am often baffled that other people don't see it. Possibly it is because I spend my time looking for it -- you see what you focus on.

Then again, I've also thought that only certain types of people can see and appreciate process. People who love music, languages, mathematics .... they all understand process, progression and logical sequencing. I would certainly think that scientists see it....

But do other people? What about politicans??

Would love to hear your thoughts on this.

There is an NLP "presupposition" which states:
The communication you give is the response you receive.

When my son AJ was little, I used to tell him "please take your toys to your room." And then I'd be very surprised to see this pile of toys just inside the door to his room when I went to tuck him in to bed.

Changing the request to "please put your toys away where they belong in your room" completely changed the response. No more pile of toys in the doorway....

Of course, once he was a teenager - well, I think as parents we stop actually being able to communicate, and I just shut the door to his room!

But I was thinking about this recently when working with a client. Sometimes things just don't happen the way you want them to - in fact, sometimes, they just don't happen at all.

I think it is always helpful to look at the communication we gave.... was it enough to get the response that we want?

Food for thought.

Process is easy. Whenever someone's eyes glaze over when I start talking about the value of process.... and they seem to find the idea a bit esoteric, I use the simple analogy of making a fancy meal on a special holiday, like Easter.

I remember the first Thanksgiving meal I ever made.... it was the first year we were married, and I had invited loads of friends over. I bought the ingredients for all my favourite Thanksgiving foods, and special decorations for the table.

I spent the morning cooking, but by the time everyone had arrived, I was in a panic. I thought the turkey was done -- but it was raw inside. The rolls still had to go in the oven, the mashed potatoes were getting cold.... the jello was slowly melting. We had the potatoes, corn and salad at 3:00pm and the turkey at 6:30pm - what a disaster!

I didn't understand that I needed to work out a schema of when everything had to go into the oven based on the time, sequence and temperature required!

What I needed then was a step-by-step workflow for the meal....and instead I winged it, and the only thing done on the turkey were the wingtips at the same time as the rest of the meal was ready to be eaten.

Planning a meal, and figuring out what goes first and then next is no more difficult than mapping a process.

And the results in both cases are the same -- everything ready right on time!

One very interesting way to use a business process modelling tool is to determine the ROI of a project through modelling & simulation.

When working with clients, we document the current process (including timings and costings) and use simulation to document and validate the existing baseline costs. We then extrapolate from the projected process changes the new timings & costings. You determine the ROI of the proposed changes by simulating your average volume with the new version of the process giving you the new total costs. The difference in your current costs and your "improved" costs is the ROI for doing the project.

A lot simpler to show The Powers That Be and to get approval for that change!