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The Pitfalls of Being a Results-Driven Organisation.

Expertivity Technologies , Alex McDonnell

The Pitfalls of Being a Results-Driven Organisation.

Organisations often boast about being, or aspiring to be, a results-driven organisation or having a results-driven culture, not understanding its pitfalls. Results are outcomes and when organisations ...

2 Aug 2023

Entanglement: The Core Driver of Frustration and Poor Productivity in Service and Knowledge-Work Organisations!

Expertivity Technologies , Alex McDonnell

Entanglement: The Core Driver of Frustration and Poor Productivity in Service and Knowledge-Work Organisations!

Globally, the low productivity of the service and knowledge work sectors is causing governments and economies a major concern, given that they now account for over 80% of GDP and the bulk of employmen...

4 Dec 2022

Quality versus quality? Why knowing the difference can help change your organisation for the better.

Expertivity Technologies , Alex McDonnell

Quality versus quality? Why knowing the difference can help change your organisation for the better.

I recently came across an article proposing that "It’s time to stop measuring productivity" by Dominic Price, the resident "work futurist" at Atlassian. His "5 second summary" is: Productivity metrics...

18 Jun 2022

The 4 Root Causes of Poor Effectiveness and Efficiency in Service and & Knowledge-Work Organisations (S&KWO)

Expertivity Technologies , Alex McDonnell

The 4 Root Causes of Poor Effectiveness and Efficiency in Service and & Knowledge-Work Organisations (S&KWO)

Background Work teams or front-line teams (to distinguish them from project teams) are responsible for executing the day-to-day transactions of the organisation and are usually found at the lowest lev...

23 Mar 2022

Without Substantiated Reasons, Can Managers Really Ask for More?

Expertivity Technologies , Alex McDonnell

Without Substantiated Reasons, Can Managers Really Ask for More?

For those of us who have worked in the manufacturing and industrial sectors, the question posed in the headline would seem strange if not bizarre. Managers in those sectors take for granted the skills...

22 Mar 2022

Team Leaders Without Training?: Just Dodgem!

Expertivity Technologies , Alex McDonnell

Team Leaders Without Training?: Just Dodgem!

Why is it that many newly appointed Team Leaders and Mid Level Managers receive little formal training in the hard skills of effective and efficient resource management, either before or after being a...

22 Mar 2022

Why Service & Knowledge-Work Teams are "Pre-Lean" and Can Therefore Quickly Double Their Productivity or better!

Expertivity Technologies , Alex McDonnell

Why Service & Knowledge-Work Teams are "Pre-Lean" and Can Therefore Quickly Double Their Productivity or better!

Most Service and Knowledge-Work Organisations are Pre-Lean and by that I mean, the core skills and disciplines of Operations Management, the operations management fundamentals, are weak or absent. Thi...

15 Jun 2021

Collaborative Management and the "Planned Percent Complete" KPI

Expertivity Technologies , Alex McDonnell

Collaborative Management and the "Planned Percent Complete" KPI

Sometime back, while working with the Resource Teams in a large Information Technology client, a dispute arose amongst the resource team leaders, around how well the Project Management Office (PMO) wa...

11 Jun 2021

Measuring and Improving Service Productivity

Expertivity Technologies , Alex McDonnell

Measuring and Improving Service Productivity

Measuring and Improving Service Productivity There's a generally held view in the research literature that improving service productivity is a challenging if not elusive goal, in the main due to the d...

6 May 2021

Why TPS is not "Lean for The Masses" ....hint, the answer is in the name!

Expertivity Technologies , Alex McDonnell

Why TPS is not "Lean for The Masses" ....hint, the answer is in the name!

The Machine That Changed the World At the risk of being branded a heretic, I'd like to propose that, in their seminal books on Lean (The Machine that Changed the World and Lean Thinking), Womack and J...

26 Dec 2020

“The measure of intelligence is the ability to change.”

Expertivity Technologies , Alex McDonnell

“The measure of intelligence is the ability to change.”

That quote from Albert Einstein has a particular resonance today, given the recent troubles of one of our (Irish) national political parties, Fine Gael and it's handling of the "Alan Shatter affair". ...

26 Dec 2020

Confusing Common Practices with Best Practices

Expertivity Technologies , Alex McDonnell

Confusing Common Practices with Best Practices

I work quite a bit with helping senior management teams improve the performance of their organisations and one of the most common issues I come across is the confusion between "common practices" and "...

26 Dec 2020

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