RiverRhee Consulting (http://riverrheeconsulting.wordpress.com) was established nearly 3 years ago with the goal of not only helping business teams in general to improve the way they work, but also to focus on those in the Life Sciences, Business Support groups such as Library & Information Management, and in the Cambridgeshire area.

So we’re particularly delighted about a couple of events that we will be running in the coming weeks.  So much so that we’re focusing this bi-monthly newsletter on Cambridgeshire!

Cambridge Awards Week and ‘engineered serendipity’

Cambridge Awards Week will be taking place from 19th-23rd March and is an annual event, which aims to raise the profile of Cambridgeshire Businesses and promote the area as a good place to do business.  Cambridge News and Business Weekly are responsible for 2 business award presentation evenings during the week.  The event is also being promoted by Granta Park (one of Cambridgeshire’s major Science Parks), One Nucleus, Cambridge Wireless and Cambridge Network.

We have just received the ‘go-ahead’ to run what will be a ‘wrap-up’ event for the week.  It will build on the theme of ‘engineered serendipity’: how Science Parks like Granta Park and events such as these can bring businesses together to share their knowledge and insights to develop and enhance customer – supplier and collaborative relationships, and the way they work in general.  It will also provide a taster of the course that RiverRhee offers through One Nucleus: Smart working for business growth and innovation. More details on our event will be available on the One Nucleus website shortly.

Cambridge Network

Cambridge Network’s mission is “to link like-minded people from business and academia to each other and to the global high technology community for the benefit of the Cambridge region”.  One of the ways in which the network supports this mission is through The Learning Collaboration’s shared learning programme.   Members are being given the opportunity to ‘taste’ a potential new course from RiverRhee Consulting during March: An introduction to Lean and Six Sigma.  We’re looking forward to helping delegates discover how Lean and Six Sigma principles and methodologies could help them improve the work of their teams.  Although the taster is a members’ only event, the hope is that it will lead to a full 1-day workshop, which will be open to the wider Cambridge Network.

The origins of the River Rhee

People often ask where the name ‘RiverRhee’ comes from: it is in fact one of the tributaries of the River Cam.  We have a connection with a historian who has been writing some fascinating blogs on the subject.  Links to his blogs can be found on the RiverRhee Home Page.

A footnote

We’ve been updating our case studies on the work that we’ve been doing.  This always takes a little time, as we need the consent of the organisations involved to describe something of what we did with them, and also to quote individuals’ feedback.  However we do now have some new case studies, which you can view through the RiverRhee Consulting Case Studies page.  We’ll add more as we can…

To find out more about RiverRhee Consulting, our range of off-site and in-house courses, and how we can help you “enhance team effectiveness” see the RiverRhee Consulting website or e-mail us at info@riverrhee.com.

November and December have been a very enjoyable couple of months for RiverRhee Consulting, as we’ve had several opportunities to fulfill our vision of helping teams and the individuals within them to enhance the way they work, become more productive and improve their morale!

Whether these teams and individuals are being coached to enhance their skills, responding to or leading change, looking for ways to improve their processes, or sharing their knowledge and expertise, the solutions, and the will to adopt them rely on personal discovery and motivation.

A paradigm only becomes the new paradigm when we as an individual, or our team actually make it ours. We do usually need the help of others though to discover it, and often also to make it happen.

In a coaching conversation, the ‘correct’ answer is the coachee’s

This was a recurrent theme in Lucy Loh‘s and Elisabeth Goodman’s coach-the-coach work recently with an international retail organisation.  It can be a challenge to managers and coachees alike, if they have been more used to a directive approach, to encourage and wait patiently for the coachee to identify what they are going to differently and how.  But as our managers discovered, the outcome is so much more motivating for the coachee.

Change is a personal journey

This was a key theme in our CILIP East of England 1-day workshop on “Critical Success Factors for Personal and Organisational Change”.  Many of the Library and Information Professionals attending the course were experiencing or planning some very significant personal or work-related changes.

We spent some valuable time identifying where the participants were on the Elisabeth Kübler-Ross change curve, and planning what they could do for themselves and others to gain a greater understanding of the associated resistance and motivation, and develop some influencing, strategic and tactical approaches to gain greater control.

The real magic of finding opportunities for improvement comes from those directly involved in the work

John Riddell and Elisabeth Goodman have delivered a number of seminars and workshops now on Lean and Six Sigma, and on Knowledge Management.  Elisabeth was able to run one such workshop for a gold member organisation of the One Nucleus Life Science network for which RiverRhee Consulting is now a listed ‘Support Supplier’.

“The training provided was of very high quality and will enable a good start into rolling out lean six sigma into the organisation by empowering key members of staff who will champion this culture and rollout improvement projects.” Sarah Mardle, Senior Manager PDM Operations, Abcam plc

RiverRhee Consulting passes on the Lean and Six Sigma principles, tools and methodologies to its clients, and we use our own related background experience to help them identify opportunities for improvement.  The real ‘magic’ though of finding savings in time and money, and of discovering ways to make the most of their expertise, comes from the individuals and teams concerned.  There’s nothing like the excited buzz in the room when this happens, nor the motivation and enthusiasm of those involved to go on tackling other problems and find and implement other solutions.

We look forward to more opportunities in 2012 to help our clients discover the magic and buzz of how you can improve the way you work.  In the meantime, we wish you a restful end-of-year holiday and all the best for 2012.

To find out more about RiverRhee Consulting, our range of off-site and in-house courses, and how we can help you “enhance team effectiveness” see the RiverRhee Consulting website or e-mail the author at elisabeth@riverrhee.com.

Unfortunately, the reality has been that several of our courses have had to be cancelled or postponed as organisations have found their budgets cut, and the time of their people too restricted to attend external courses.  Conference organisers have been experiencing a similar situation for a while, as was brought home to us when a business transformation conference that John Riddell was due to speak at on Lean and Six Sigma was cancelled this month.

Continuous learning is important for making the most of what you’ve got, so what are the alternatives for Continuing Professional Development (CPD)?

CILIP (The Chartered Institute of Library and Information Professionals) is reviewing the approach to CPD as part of the overall shake-up that they have been going through.   An approach that they are continuing to support is that of  ‘on-site’ training.  This allows client organisations to really tailor the content, format and price of the training to their requirements.  Elisabeth Goodman met with the CPD team recently to begin exploring how some of our training can be included in this mix.  We’ll share more information on this in due course.

Lucy Loh and Elisabeth Goodman are part-way through a contract with a retail organisation, to help their managers enhance their coaching skills, and hence their sale staff’s interactions with customers.  This is a great example of on-the-job CPD: enhancing the manager’s skills in coaching, and using coaching to develop the skills of their people.

Some organisations are still choosing to use external consultants to develop the abilities of their staff in something akin to a mentoring role – and Elisabeth Goodman’s work has continued in this context with the Pharmaceutical CRO in France to introduce Lean and Six Sigma for continuous improvement as a way of working.

Continuous improvement is another way of making the most of what you’ve got.

John Riddell and Elisabeth Goodman are in discussion with a member of the One Nucleus network (for those working in the Life Sciences) on how RiverRhee Consulting could best help them to adopt Lean and Six Sigma for continuous improvement.

We are also still offering the off-site “Smart Working for Business Growth and Innovation” course through One Nucleus, to help organisations who are looking to make the most of what they’ve got by more effectively focusing on their customers and other stakeholders, and thereby boosting their team’s productivity, creativity and morale on an on-going basis.

Making the most of the knowledge within your organisation

One of RiverRhee Consulting’s offerings is to help organisations develop knowledge management strategies to make the most of their internal knowledge and expertise.  Elisabeth Goodman’s continued work as Programme Events Manager with NetIKX enabled her to arrange a recent seminar with Chris Collison, which included a useful break-out discussion on introducing Knowledge Management strategies. 

Making the most of your team – achieving high performing teams and managers

Lucy Loh and Elisabeth Goodman have just finished an article for Business Information Review on team effectiveness during organisational change, and Elisabeth has also finished a chapter on team development for the Gower Handbook on People in Project Management.  We’ll share the details of these once published.  In the meantime, how to achieve high-performing teams is a recurring thread in Elisabeth’s work with her associates at Stronger Business Ltd where she has co-delivered on-site training for ‘first time’ managers, and will be presenting at a local seminar on ‘Stronger Business Management’.

Looking outwards – open innovation and collaboration as a way of supplementing what you’ve got

Elisabeth Goodman is continuing with her work as co-founder of OI Pharma Partners.  We’re looking forward to the upcoming workshop Open Innovation – a primer: An interactive workshop bringing insights from the life science and IT sectors, which will help participants to explore how they can introduce this way of working into their organisations.

Being flexible and resilient in experiencing and introducing change

Making the most of what we’ve got is also about being able to cope with all the change that we are experiencing, and being ‘savvy’ about how we introduce it to others.

Our upcoming one-day workshop on “Critical success factors for effective personal and organisational change”, being offered through CILIP East of England in November, is proving popular.  We are looking forward to helping participants discover a range of change management techniques to equip them with the necessary skills and techniques for effective and positive change.

We can help you make the most of what you’ve got

We are always happy to discuss options for enhancing team effectiveness, and making the most of what you’ve got. Please get in touch at info@riverrhee.com, or, to find out more about RiverRhee Consulting and what we have to offer see the RiverRhee Consulting website, the RiverRhee Consulting newsletter, or Elisabeth Goodman’s blog.

Many of us are coming to the end of our summer holidays and turning our thoughts to the autumn with renewed energy and determination!

We are particularly pleased by the range of workshops, courses and seminars that RiverRhee Consulting has been able to line up for enhancing team effectiveness over the next few months.

As usual, we are offering these through other organisations, so that individuals and teams from various sectors and professional organisations can benefit from them.

Here then is the line-up for the autumn.

Project Management for Charity, Voluntary, Not-for-profit, and Community based Organisations.

“Achieving Strategic and Operational Goals” is a 1-day workshop-based course that draws on established project management techniques to enable you and your team to develop a roadmap and the necessary components for achieving your current goals.  The course will also equip you with the essential skills and tools to tackle future operational and strategic projects.

We’re offering this course through Charity Funding Solution, on Friday 7^th October, in Huntingdon, UK.

Change Management techniques for Library and Information Management professionals.

We are offering two workshop style courses on this topic.

“Promoting Information Literacy for End Users” takes delegates through a step-by-step  ‘how to guide’ for promoting information literacy for their end users, tailored to their particular organisational environment. The ‘how to guide’ includes:

• A reminder of the essential components for information literacy
• Alternative approaches for educating end users and promoting information literacy
• A set of tailored next steps along with supporting materials for the delegates to take away with them

This is about our 4^th time of running the course, so that we have been able to continuously enhance it with reflections from previous delegates.  It is being offered through TFPL, on Thursday 13th October, in London, UK.

Our second one-day workshop on Change Management is being offered through CILIP East of England, on Wednesday 23^rd November, in Bury St Edmunds, UK.

Information professionals are experiencing perhaps one of their most challenging times in terms of implementing organisational change and experiencing it at a personal level.

“Critical success factors for effective personal and organisational change” will enable participants to consider the ‘journey’ of positive and negative change and to experiment with a range of change management techniques in a participative and practical way to equip them with the necessary skills and techniques for effective and positive change.

Process Improvement (Lean and Six Sigma) and Knowledge Management for Biotech, Pharma and other Life Science organisations.

Whether your business is already growing or you have plans in hand to make it grow, it is important that you have a foundation of sound business practices to ensure that you fully understand what your customers value, can deliver that value as efficiently as possible, and free up the talent within your organisation to continue to innovate and grow.  The process mapping and improvement techniques covered in “Smart Working for Business Growth and Innovation” provide a tool-kit for more effective focus on your customers and other stakeholders, and for boosting your team’s productivity, creativity and morale on an on-going basis.

This one-day highly interactive and practical course is being offered through One Nucleus, on Friday 21st October, in Cambridge, UK.

Other seminars and courses on the horizon

In addition to the above, we are developing a series of short seminars for local businesses, in Royston, UK on Communication, Management skills, and Business Development through Stronger Business Ltd; and three 1-day courses on topics relating to team effectiveness for Pharma students and practitioners in Turkey through Academy Anatolia.

Contact us to discuss tailored training and support to suit you and your team’s requirements

We hope one or more of the above will appeal to you.  If you are interested in how to enhance the effectiveness of your team, but are either unable to attend one of these events, or the description does not quite meet your needs, then do please get in touch at info@riverrhee.com.

We are always happy to discuss options for in-house courses or other forms of support for enhancing team effectiveness, or may be able to arrange an alternative off-site workshop.

To find out more about RiverRhee Consulting and what we have to offer please see the RiverRhee Consulting website, the RiverRhee Consulting newsletter, or Elisabeth Goodman’s blog.

Fifteen years on and RiverRhee Consulting has been hearing about and witnessing a not unexpected spread in the extent of adoption of Knowledge Management by organisations: some ignorance of what it’s all about combined with interest in finding out more, some skepticism about its value, a lot of continuing evangelism by information and knowledge management practitioners, and some organisations claiming that it is embedded in the way they work.

In this newsletter we’ll highlight a half-dozen insights or reflections based on the things we’ve been hearing and writing about, from events we’ve attended, presented at and facilitated in recent months.

1. ‘Knowledge Management is an ecosystem’.

Elisabeth Goodman shared a speaker platform with Mary Jensen (Baker Hughes) at IQPC’s SmartLab Exchange² in Berlin earlier this year. The conference delegates were at various stages in their adoption of Knowledge Management (KM) and so we reminded them that effective KM does rely on addressing all the components of a business ‘ecosystem’: people, process, content or information, technology and strategy (as well as compliance). There is still a tendency to focus on only one or two of these components.

2. Knowledge Management can enhance the implementation and embedding of other management strategies

This was one of the central themes of the SmartLab Exchange presentation, and also of Elisabeth’s presentation at IQPC’s’ Business Process Excellence³ conference in London in April. We discussed how KM can enhance the implementation and embedding of process improvement (Operational Excellence, or Lean and Six Sigma).  This is one of the pillars for achieving ‘high-velocity’ organisations described by Steven Spear⁴, and is at the core of RiverRhee Consulting’s offerings.

3. Communities of Interest / Practice amd After Action Reviews are as relevant as ever but there is a lot of ignorance about how to make them work

John Riddell and Elisabeth ran a workshop⁵ for the IQPC London conference introducing various KM techniques and it was Communities of Interest / Practice which delegates were especially interested in learning more about.  The topic of After Action Reviews also came up at our seminar for APM in May, which we are repeating in Norwich(6) in July. Although people recognize the value of these, they still find it difficult to ensure that they take place and that the learnings are effectively re-used

4. Sharepoint has a lot of potential as a KM tool and there’s a lot of valuable learning out there

SharePoint is an important and even core business tool for many organisations, and Elisabeth wrote a tweet-based blog (7) on some of the key points that arose during a recent NetIKX seminar on the subject.  From the comments of speakers and delegates alike, it’s obvious that the tool has a lot of potential for supporting internal and external sharing and re-use of knowledge but that library, information and knowledge management practitioners are still learning the best way of helping end-users with this.

5. Internal and external ‘clouds’ and ‘crowd-sourcing’ are important Knowledge Management tools

SharePoint and Social Media tools provide valuable platforms for collaborating and pulling ideas for innovation both internally and externally.  Elisabeth’s tweet-based write-up of the SharePoint meeting and her blog on another NetIKX meeting8 in January 2011 include references for how SharePoint and social media can be used to support collaboration, learning and development, and act as virtual reference sources.

6. Information and Knowledge Management practitioners can provide valuable guidance for the effective use of Social Media

As we wrote in our last KM newsletter in August 2010(9), social media tools and how they are used have a significant role to play in the evolution of KM, whether for business or leisure.  RiverRhee Consulting’s recent workshop for members of The Cambridge Network team(10), and Elisabeth’s article for FUMSI on LinkedIn(11) are examples of how we can use our insights of KM to help users of social media in general make the most of these tools.

Closing thoughts

The value and power of the whole Knowledge Management ecosystem is as obvious today as it has ever been.  New organisational dynamics, management strategies and technologies underscore its relevance and the benefits it can bring in fostering collaboration, innovation and general business growth and development.  Our challenge as information and knowledge management practitioners continues to be how we can help people to recognize and make the most of what Knowledge Management has to offer to enhance overall organisational goals and strategies.

Notes

1. RiverRhee Consulting enhances team effectiveness using process improvement, knowledge management and change management.  Elisabeth Goodman is the owner and Pricinpal Consultant at RiverRhee Consulting, and also the Programme Events Manager for NetIKX.  John Riddell is an Associate of RiverRhee Consulting.
2. SmartLabs Exchange, Berlin 28 Feb – 2 March 2011 Creating the right Knowledge Ecosystem to drive Operational Excellence. See write-up here: Operational Excellence and Knowledge Management in an R&D Laboratory Environment
3. Business Process Excellence in Pharmaceuticals, Biotech and Medical Devices, April 2011 -Part 1 and Part 2
4. The high-velocity edge, by Steven Spear, McGraw-Hill, 2009 (& blog)
5. Photographs taken during IQPC Business Process Excellence workshop on Knowledge Management, April 2011
6. Lean Six Sigma and Project Management – triangles and (virtuous) circles, APM, Norwich, 6^th July
7. 18 May NetIKX / CLSIG seminar on making the most of Sharepoint 
8. NetIK write-up: Using Social Media to achieve organisational goals
9. RiverRhee Consulting – August 2010 – Knowledge Management
10. Testimonial from The Cambridge Network for endorsing RiverRhee Consulting’s Social Media (LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook) workshop
11. LinkedIn: An awesome information resource for building your reputation, your connections and your knowledge.  FUMSI, 1st June 2011

The Myers Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI) is a tool that helps people understand and respond in a positive way to the differences between individuals.

RiverRhee Consulting already works with associates qualified and experienced in MBTI to complement its process improvement, knowledge management and change management approaches for enhancing team effectiveness.

Recently, RiverRhee Consulting Owner and Principal Consultant Elisabeth Goodman completed her own certification in the MBTI Step 1 instrument so that she could more fully appreciate and help her clients to make the most of the strengths of individuals within teams.

1. Individuals will engage in the formation of a new team at different rates and in different ways

Many of us are familiar with Tuckman’s model of team formation: forming, norming, storming, performing and a fifth stage: mourning (or re-forming as the old team comes to an end, or changes into something different).  We recognize that there is no set rate for these stages of formation, and that teams might sometimes ‘slip back’ into an earlier stage.

Different team members will not all be at the same stage at the same time and, being individuals, will have different needs and different responses with respect to the team leader and the other members!

Elisabeth Goodman will be delivering a course for “First Time Managers” in May with colleagues in Stronger Business Ltd that will be addressing this theme as part of developing individual, team and task based skills.

2. A team that collaborates successfully takes account of the needs and situation of its individual members

Some team members will value more opportunities to have full-team face-to-face interactions to build the team, whist others will prefer to receive information and ask questions on a 1:1 basis or through written communications.

Successful teams are either co-located enabling lots of whole team and 1:1 communication, or make skillful use of collaborative technology.  Agreed ways of working and some form of local facilitation complemented with occasional face-to-face meetings are critical success factors for effective collaboration between ‘far flung’ or dispersed teams.

One of RiverRhee Consulting’s case studies illustrates how we can help teams develop effective collaborative working.

3. Each individual will interpret and communicate information in different ways

Whilst some team members will value detailed descriptions of roles and responsibilities, objectives and plans, others will prefer to have more autonomy based on generally agreed goals.

Effective teams will therefore have a clear ‘charter’ and give team members an opportunity to contribute to and review this at the level of engagement that suits them best. The important thing is to ensure buy-in from all concerned and that they have sufficient commonly agreed information to be able to communicate it to others outside the team as needed.

Similarly, in the course of the team’s work, some will have a preference for examining problems at a greater level of detail, whilst others will prefer to take a more intuitive or ‘big picture’ approach.

We help team members to build a greater awareness and respect for these different individual needs and strengths through our workshops and 1:1 guidance, as in our recently recognized work with Porsolt, a CRO to the Pharmaceutical Industry based in France.

4. Individuals bring different strengths to problem resolution and decision making processes

Decision-making requires both logical thinking, and an appreciation of the impact of decisions on people and their values. Again, MBTI teaches us that whilst we’re all able to think logically and appreciate what people feel, one or the other of these ‘dichotomies’ will come most easily to us.

Elisabeth Goodman’s work with Pelican Coaching and Development has helped teams to graphically appreciate the strengths that individuals can bring to a team to ensure a good balance of both approaches to decision making.

5. Individuals will have the greatest insights and expertise on their (part of) the process

A key principle of Lean and Six Sigma implementation is to involve the individuals who do the work as they will have the best knowledge of the problems to be resolved and the possibilities for resolving them.  Involving them from the start will also be a strong guarantee of gaining their buy-in for change.

Tapping into, and developing this individual (tacit) knowledge can be a real asset for continuous improvement, as well a challenge.  John Riddell and Elisabeth Goodman ran a very positively received workshop on this topic at the recent Business Process Excellence for Pharmaceuticals, Biotech and Medical Devices, conference in London and will be sharing notes on this as part of a fuller conference write-up during April.

6. Each individual has the ability to act as an opinion leader for change

Elisabeth Goodman introduced the ‘change model’ in a recent workshop to help a University Library team centralize some of its workflows as a response to, and also a driver for organisational change.  The model is based on Elisabeth Kübler-Ross’s five stages of grief, and is a vivid way to help professionals understand their own, their colleagues’ and their customers’ reactions to apparently less traumatic change, be it perceived as positive or negative.

How we respond to change individually, our own knowledge and credibility, and the networks that we each have with colleagues and customers will be strong factors in how each individual within a team influences change².  These individual perspectives will be something that Elisabeth Goodman will also be including in the UKeIG course that she and Shaida Dorabjee will be running in May.

Notes and further reading

1. RiverRhee Consulting enhances team effectiveness using process improvement, knowledge management and change management.  Follow the links to find out more about RiverRhee Consulting, and about Elisabeth Goodman and John Riddell
2. Influencer – The Power to Change Anything, by Kerry Patterson et al, McGraw Hill, 2008
3. Effectively influencing Stakeholders: powerful techniques for marketing AND change management (UKeIG) 18th May, London http://ow.ly/4i7QA
4. Introduction to Type and Teams, by Elizabeth Hirsh, Katherine W. Hirsh, Sandra Krebs Hirsh. CPP, Inc. Mountain View, Califormia, 2003, 2^nd Edition.
5. Personality Type and Project Management – with reference to MBTI http://wp.me/pAUbH-3S
6. Intuition revisited: how it could be important to a business environment (Part 1 of 3 blogs) http://wp.me/pAUbH-39
7. How people (individuals) are integral to business process improvement In: Supply Chain Management in the Drug Industry: Delivering Patient Value for Pharmaceuticals and Biologics, by Hedley Rees, Wiley, 2011 pp. 372-376

1. Effective Lean and Six Sigma implementation is about behaviour as much as the tools

Elisabeth Goodman, Owner and Principal Consultant at RiverRhee Consulting, is part way through reading ‘Influencer’²: VitalSmart’s insightful overview about how to successfully implement change.  Like VitalSmart, we believe that changing behaviour is central to effective implementation of change.  For Lean and Six Sigma, a key behavioural change is people’s willingness to relentlessly address problems as they arise, rather than simply work around them.  This is one of the core competencies that RiverRhee Consulting has been coaching one of its clients on through a series of improvement projects. Once people have committed to changing their behaviour in this way, then the tools come into their own. Without this change in behaviour, training in Lean and Six Sigma tools is simply academic.

2. Integrate Lean and Six Sigma into organisational strategy and core methodologies

As delegates attending Elisabeth Goodman’s presentation at IQPC’s ‘Business Process Excellence in Pharmaceutical, Biotech and Medical Devices’³ conference will learn in April, Lean and Six Sigma implementation will be at its most effective when integrated into the organisation’s strategy and goals.  Without that, it will just be another initiative with an associated short-term life.  What’s more, if an organisation has a core methodology which is integral to its way of working, then integrating Lean and Six Sigma into that will also increase it’s chances of success.  This is a theme that Elisabeth Goodman, and RiverRhee Consulting Associate John Riddell will be exploring in a workshop with the APM (Association for Project Management) that is being scheduled for the spring.

3. Make sure all leaders and managers are engaged with, supporting and reinforcing Lean and Six Sigma

Although it can be tempting to start applying Lean and Six Sigma in a bottom-up approach, our experience is that it is well-worth the effort to engage middle and senior managers. Not only will their engagement facilitate the implementation of ideas and improvements, but, by modeling and reinforcing associated behaviours, they will cause an exponential adoption of similar behaviours by others.  Without the engagement of middle and senior management, adoption of Lean and Six Sigma will flounder and die.

4. Start with some Lean and Six Sigma champions to lead the way and show how it will work

In any organisation, there will be some people who are more eager to explore new ideas and ways of working than others.  Rather than spend a lot of time and energy at this stage trying to convince the skeptics, we’ve found it best to start with a handful of people who will help to lead the way in exploring how Lean and Six Sigma can bring benefits to their work.  Others will become curious about what their peers have been doing, and the word can then start to spread through the champions’ internal networks.

5. Start with some high profile and quick win Lean and Six Sigma projects

This point builds on the earlier ones.  Pick early projects that support the organisation’s strategies, are endorsed by middle and senior management, are led by champions, address something that people care passionately about and will bring some early tangible results.  Our 1-day UKeIG ‘Getting Better at Everything You Do’⁴ workshop for Library and Information Professionals, helps people to identify just these kinds of improvement opportunities.

6. Recognise that people will have different styles and preferences in their adoption of Lean and Six Sigma

Elisabeth Goodman is part-way through her MBTI (Myers Briggs Type Indicator) accreditation and it has confirmed our experience so far that people will take to the Lean and Six Sigma tools and approaches in different ways.  For example, some will enjoy the clearly structured step-by-step DMAIC (Define, Measure, Analyse, Improve, Control) approach, others will want to make more use of their intuition or of their creativity. Elisabeth has summarized many of her earlier blogs on this topic in the recently published “How people (individuals) are integral to business process improvement”⁵ See also her most recent blog on intuition and Lean Six Sigma⁶.

7. Recognise that organisations will have cultural differences in their adoption of Lean and Six Sigma

Each organisation has its own distinct culture and our experience is that cultures will differ between countries (we have experience in the US, UK and France in particular) and between different kinds of organisations (e.g. international vs. local, corporate vs. small or medium, private vs. public or government).  So we’ve found it important to try to put aside assumptions about how Lean and Six Sigma will be adopted and certainly to avoid using the ‘jargon’ unless this is what an organisation wants, and look for ways again to integrate with the language that the organisation uses.

8. Encourage your organisation to keep records and measures of impact and benefits of Lean and Six Sigma projects, and to prioritise them accordingly

Once people start realizing the power of Lean and Six Sigma, there can be a rapid proliferation of improvement projects.  We’ve found it important to work with middle and senior managers to prioritise these projects and assessing the potential strategic benefits of the projects can help with this.  We encourage participants to define measures (both tangible and intangible) to monitor the actual impact of their improvements, and also to keep a central record that again will help with the wider communication to the organisation.

9. Ensure that there is ongoing communication to engage the wider organisational community in Lean and Six Sigma

Our experience is that there can never be enough communication, and that this needs to be in as many different forms as possible to ensure that people a) receive the communication (see it, hear it etc.) and b) absorb it in a way that will lead them to either reflect or act upon it.  Small group, face-to-face communication with opportunities for discussion always seem to be more effective for example than mass e-mail communications. Our clients have also used local displays with updates on work in progress and visual summaries of forward plans or targets to be achieved as a way to help with engagement.

10. Create Communities of Practice and other knowledge sharing approaches to help sustain Lean and Six Sigma in your organisation

This last theme is one that we will be exploring in our pre-conference workshop for IQPC in April³, and also one that Elisabeth Goodman will be speaking about at IQPC’s SmartLabs⁷ conference in Berlin.  Knowledge Management techniques have a lot to offer Lean and Six Sigma practitioners to learn from each other’s experience, continuously improve their skills in applying the principles and tools and generally sustain the application of Lean and Six Sigma in their organisations.

If you have any views on this newsletter, do let us know.  And if you enjoyed it, feel free to pass it on to others, and/or sign-up to make sure you don’t miss future issues on http://riverrheeconsulting.wordpress.com

Notes

1. RiverRhee Consulting enhances team effectiveness using process improvement, knowledge management and change management.  Follow the links to find out more about RiverRhee Consulting (http://www.riverrhee.com), and about Elisabeth Goodman (http://www.linkedin.com/in/elisabethgoodman) and John Riddell (http://uk.linkedin.com/in/johnriddell)
2. Influencer – The Power to Change Anything, by Kerry Patterson et al, McGraw Hill, 2008
3. Business Process Excellence for Pharmaceuticals, Biotech and Medical Devices, 6th-8th April, London (running workshop and presenting) http://www.bpe-pharma.com/
4. ‘Getting Better at Everything you Do’ UKeIG course, Tues 28th June 2011, Birmingham, UK
5. How people (individuals) are integral to business process improvement In: Supply Chain Management in the Drug Industry: Delivering Patient Value for Pharmaceuticals and Biologics, by Hedley Rees, Wiley, 2011 pp. 372-376
6. Intuition revisited – implications for process improvement and Lean Six Sigma (Part 2 of 3 blogs)
7. SmartLabs Exchange, Berlin 28 Feb – 2 March 2011 Creating the right Knowledge Ecosystem to drive Operational Excellence http://ow.ly/3VNVE
8. Readers may also be interested in: Lean and Six Sigma in R&D and Service Delivery – opportunities and challenges; Employee engagement – some interesting data and perspectives for Lean and Six Sigma practitioners; and High performing organisations: interweaving process improvement, knowledge management and change management.

The usual posting order of blogs is in reversal chronology, but these newsletters were transferred from a previous site, hence the actual chronological order!

RiverRhee Consulting, enhances team effectiveness through process improvement, knowledge and change management. Follow the link to find out about how RiverRhee Consulting can help your team to work more effectively for greater productivity and improved team morale.

Simplifying and streamlining the way teams work is one of the 4 areas that Elisabeth Goodman’s consultancy, RiverRhee Consulting, focuses on.  She had the honour of chairing IQPC’s recent conference on Business Process Excellence in Pharmaceuticals, Biotech and Medical Devices in London.  She also wrote an article for the Medical Information and Pharmacovigilance community (PIPA) on this subject, and have written a few blogs about it in recent months.

Some of the main themes for Elisabeth out of all these experiences include:

The importance of tying the work we do to organisational goals and customer value.

This is something she emphasized in her paper for the IQPC conference: “Managing cultural change in business process improvement” , and it also comes out strongly in the 3 blogs that Elisabeth wrote based on the books: “Fake Work”, “Predictable results in unpredictable times”, and “Chasing the Rabbit”.  See more on these below.

The need to engage everyone in the process.

Anyone who has worked within, or with an organisation as Elisabeth has to introduce continuous process improvement will be absolutely convinced that total engagement is the only way to do this.  It came out as a strong theme in the IQPC conference, and again her blogs echo this.

The value of a structured approach to underpin this way of working.

The DMAIC (Define, Measure, Analyse, Improve, Control) approach to Lean and Six Sigma, the identification and elimination of wasted time and effort, the reduction of variability in the quality of our processes and outputs, and building these capabilities into the organisation lie at the heart of continuous improvement. Elisabeth covered some of these in her article for PIPA, and these themes are again echoed in some of herblogs.

So, a quick word about some of Elisabeth’s related blogs:

Fake work – a real opportunity to enhance team effectiveness

Common examples of fake work, described in Brent Peterson and Gaylan Nielson’s book by the same name as: “effort under the illusion of value”, are meetings with no clear purpose, e-mail threads copied to all and sundry, aimless use of the internet, generation of reports and metrics that no-one pays any attention to.

Tying what work is done to organisational goals; keeping a critical eye on how we are spending our time; questioning activities with no clear purpose and role modeling a more effective and efficient approach are all ways that can help us address this potential drain on time, money, and energy.

Achieving more value with less

This blog was based on Steven R Covey, Bob Whitman and Breck England’s book:  “Predictable results in unpredictable times” and also reiterates the importance of identifying and focusing on the organisation’s one, two or three ‘wildly important goals’.  It echoes comments Elisabeth has made in previous reflections about the importance of understanding what customers value, and of empowering and supporting employees’ efforts to align with both the organisation’s goals, and customer priorities.

Problems are the consequence of complex systems and imperfect people

Elisabeth uses this concept when teaching people about process improvement.  It echoes the words of one of her previous managers, who maintained that every problem should be treasured.  It takes away the risk of blame and defensiveness, and encourages people to find and address problems as they arise, and share the benefit of the new knowledge gained with the whole organisation.  This concept is also at the heart of Steven Spear’s book: “Chasing the Rabbit”, which I reviewed in my blog “High performing organisations: interweaving process improvement, knowledge management and change management”.

Do let us know if you have enjoyed these reflections.

Our mix of clients reflects the 3 niche ‘markets’ that we have been targeting:

We hope to have opportunities to talk and potentially work with you as we move into our second year.  Do get in touch if you wish to explore such opportunities.