We come from the premise that the biggest opportunity for improvement resides within the organisation’s processes (the System) and not the people who have to work within them. (Deming suggested that the ratio was 95 to 5%)

In contrast to conventional wisdom, (the org-chart perspective) if we take an “outside in” view of the organisation, from the perspective of our customers, a very different set of opportunities presents itself. This must be done in isolation of the “false” boundaries of organisation, department, revenue stream, or functional specialism, etc., and in acceptance of the fact that

By focusing attention on doing those things that the customer truly values (exceptionally well), and eliminating or at least reducing those which are not valued, we find that service improves, costs fall and delays are reduced.  What is more, the people involved in delivering the service have better visibility of purpose and their contribution towards it, they are engaged more of the time in value adding activity and spend less time being frustrated by those activities that we know are a waste of time.

The concept of costs falling as a result of delivering a better quality of service is both counter-intuitive and a direct challenge to conventional management norms, but if we are able to change the way we think, we have the opportunity to realise benefits far in excess of those we imagined possible with a conventional way of thinking.

It is essential that the nature of demand is well understood right up-front in the improvement intervention. Unlike manufacturing, in service the customer is involved in production – the result of this is that there is much more variety in demand. Understanding this and the extent to which the organisation can influence it, is highly instructive in shaping the improvement approach.

Our improvement work is always focused on end-to-end processes that deliver a definable outcome to the client or customer; we understand that improving sub-processes rarely delivers as much benefit; indeed “islands of optimisation” often cause overall performance to deteriorate.

Identifying and delivering significant improvement is, in the majority of cases, only achievable through an adequate understanding of process capability and variation; process behaviour charts offer an entirely different dimension to our interpretation compared to tabulated data. Unlike other variation reduction approaches (like six sigma), they are simple to understand and easy to use

Process performance measurement and improvement must be in the hands of the people who do the work – not hidden in IT systems and reviewed long after the event by the upper echelons of management.