Why Multitasking is Not Your Friend
Multitasking means doing several things at once. Individuals and leaders sometimes think this is a good thing because you are “busy”. However, it can be clearly demonstrated that multitasking is an inefficient process that can contribute to waste in any business. Learn more about the problems with multitasking and their solutions. Yellow Belt Table of Contents […]
How Kanban Improves Work Flow
Kanbans are a tool for structuring how work flows into the work-in-progress queues so that workers do not get overloaded and can use their time most effectively. Kanbans, and variations on them, are widely used in software projects (e.g. Scrum and Agile) and manufacturing (e.g. Lean and Six Sigma). Blue Belt
How to Double Your Personal Productivity in Under Two Weeks
There just never seems to be enough time in the life of a manager toget all the things queued up in front of you done. Do you know that feeling? It doesn’t have to be like that though. Two simple skills can make you up to 16 times more productive! Read on to see how you […]
SM4.0 Business Efficiency: Waste Reduction Introduction
Eight Types of Waste Business efficiency relies upon managing and reducing waste Here are 8 tested ways for doing this What is Waste? A straight forward explanation of waste is that it is anything that adds no value to the final product or service. This is something that the customer is not willing to pay […]
Business Success With Sprints
Speeding Up Success Business success is about innovating and reducing problems as quickly as possible. Traditionally, this has just been a journey with no clear end and no intermediate points where you check progress and reconfirm the direction is still correct. The software industry found this approach led to frequent delays and over-budget problems. They […]
C2.4.2 Optimise100 – Types of Waste
Waste is a term very widely used in the various optimisation methodologies like Lean. There are many types of waste. Take the time to read though the 12Faces material on the sources of Waste and how to record and reduce it. For example, experts usually talk about 8 types of Waste in general and well […]
Take Advantage of Agile / Scrum / Kanban to Increase Productivity
In a smaller business there is always plenty to do and many demands on a managers most limited resource; time. Often the owners time is the major bottleneck on the growth of the business (see the introductory article to Theory of Constraints). Plenty of other businesses have struggled with prioritising time before you and several techniques that are very similar have evolved. The three best known of these are named Agile / Scrum / Kanban. Various references cite improvements in team productivity ranging from 25% to 300% by using these methods. This article introduces these concepts and a way of using a free software app named Trello to manage the process. A mix of Yellow and Blue Belt introductory material.
What Parkinson’s Law Tells Us about Wasted Work
Northcote Parkinson, writing in 1955, semi humorously proposed his ‘law’ that “Work expands to fill the time available for its completion”. This is very true. Staff will often take as much time as is available to them to work on a project even though that might mean unnecessary embellishments. Even good staff do this because they want to seem to be busy and not slacking off. You have to learn how to judge been useful work and time-filling work. Yellow Belt