Tag Archives: Teams

Case study – Cooperational Excellence within a small consultancy team

Can you create excellence through teamwork in a consultancy environment? The best way to see if something works is to try it. So that´s what I did last year, with help of my colleagues: a pilot within the team that I was a part of at the time. Could we increase the quality of our individual assignments by applying the concepts of Cooperational Excellence? Read my in-depth case study in the White Papers section.

Summary
Consultants help each other, by contributing on each others projects. In a project, there may be activities that the consultant doesn’t like doing, or isn’t very good at. The solution is NOT that the consultant asks help with these activitiesIn a project, there may be activities that the consultant does an average job of – good enough, but he doesn’t excel in it. While this same activity is something that a colleague does excel in. The project will benefit if this colleague helps with this particular activityThe idea is, that every consultant has his own unique abilities – or their own activities they excel in – and the whole team will benefit if each consultant can make more use of their unique abilityWhen every consultant asks help for his/her project, based on the unique ability of the consultant he/she asks for help, the average time that each consultant uses his/her unique ability will increase

 

Conclusion

In those instances where it was possible to find a match between an activity and a unique ability, the pilot showed that this concept works

The difficulty lies in finding enough matches, so that everybody benefits

More details and quotes from participants can be found in my White Paper: Cooperational Excellence in Consultancy

New White Paper: optimal team size

Lean and Super7 Operations work with small, autonomous teams. Exactly how small should our small autonomous teams be?

This is the question the manager of the central back-office of a large Dutch retail bank asked me, when I proposed the idea of autonomous team to him. At the time, I was working on a project to introduce customer focus and to realise same-day processing in his organisation. I came up with an innovative organisation design, in which small teams are responsible for their work for that day, i.e. all customer request of a certain type that the bank had received that day. After successful pilots, the organisation wanted to introduce this way of working for all (ca. 400) employees. That’s when this question came up…
 
From experience, I knew that the teams shouldn’t be too big: the pilots were done with teams of 5 – 7 persons. However, factual substantiation was needed. A quick search showed me that a lot of research had been done on Agile / Scrum teams, so that’s where I started. And this article is the result: a literature search on the optimal team size for autonomous teams.

My conclusion is: Organisational design isn’t an exact science. As an engineer, I would have loved to have found statistically sound measurements on the effectiveness of teams of different sizes – but in truth, I think that team size isn’t the main driver for team effectiveness. However, if your customer, the type of work your customer asks you to do, requires your organisation to work in small teams, I would suggest – as I did to the manager of the banking back office: small teams consist of 5 to 9 persons. Or, If the flexibility of your workforce allows this, as it did in the case of the banking back office: flexible team size, ranging from 5 on slow days to 9 on a busy day.

At the moment of writing, the banking back office has implemented the new way of working, and has asked me to do a ‘check-up’ on effectiveness of the new organisation. I can’t wait to start: Ï wonder what I will find, but I bet that it will be inspiration for several articles on CoOperationalExcellence.nl!
 

White Paper: Optimal Team Size

Team targets or individual targets? Does in matter for Operational Excellence?

Team targets are essential for making Lean, Lean Six Sigma and Super7 Operations work.

Despite the increasing popularity of Six Sigma as an effective improvement methodology, many Six Sigma projects fail to deliver expected savings. The topmost reason why Six Sigma projects fall short of expectations is a lack of management engagement at the right level of the organization.

While a lack of commitment and sponsorship is the leading cause of project short falls, there are several other important reasons for project short falls, including:

  • Lack of team cohesion and leadership
  • Lack of effective project monitoring mechanism such as setting of targets and monitoring
  • Difficulty leading distributed teams
  • Improper motivation to associates
  • Differences between employees
  • Non cooperation in both horizontal and vertical due to individual targets

To overcome above mentioned problems and to achieve six sigma targets and benefits top management has to set up group targets and incentives accordingly with the help of HR team, yearly appraisals, bonuses and individual key performance indicators (KPI’s) metrics also should have reflection of team achievements. Hence all major organizations are setting group targets and group incentive plans to achieve six sigma goals and targets.

Cooperational Excellence: what’s in a name?

Cooperational Excellence: People working toghether in small teams to create excellence in your operation. This may be nothing new under the sun for manufacturing and assembly plants: mini-factories, autonomous teams, u-cell manufacturing, quality circles etc. have become the standard in the last decenia. Especially in automotive, where off course Toyota still sets the standards (Toyota Production System).

In creating Service Excellence, these methCooods and organisational principles haven’t been applied so widely. Recently, I have implemented autonomous teams in a back-office of a large financial service provider, with even for me unexpected success: costs are down, queues and ‘inventory’ have almost completely dissapeared – which means waiting times for the customer times have also – and employees and management are enthousiastic about esponsiblitly on the ‘shop floor’ instead  top-down management control.

I have named this, the application of manufacturing-style teamwork in administration and service, cooperational excellence: working toghether in small teams in close cooperation, to achieve operational excellence.

If you want to know more, contact me, or just check regularly for new posts on this website!