Performance Improvement

Whether you are a commercial business responding to fast changing and highly competitive global markets, or a public sector body under intense budgetary constraints, it is likely that you face the same challenge; continuously delivering more for less! This challenge has never been more significant and urgent.

Regardless of the trigger, you will typically face tough choices about how you deliver performance improvements, in terms of the approach you take to analysing the organisation, the way you identify improvements, and the way you engage with staff to implement changes and secure lasting benefits.

Whether cost-out, productivity increase, quality improvement or customer satisfaction, our starting point is always the business results required. Being clear about what the change must deliver in hard numbers is essential in building a robust and clear business case.

Our Performance Improvement work consistently delivers significant benefits (often 30-40% in either hard savings, freed up space or other added value) without recourse to major IT systems developments. While many consultancies acknowledge the need to address the three aspects shown below, our view is that the effort and focus should not be equally applied to all three circles:

Most organisations and consultancies pay less attention to the management of change through their people than is required. Systems and processes can be more easily defined and measured although it is the people that ultimately affect success or failure in the longer term. Our 'hard' and 'soft' approach ensures that changes are driven through client teams in a way that challenges and excites them.

We are expert at gaining buy-in and participation across the organisation whilst creating the impetus for significant change. Our bespoke programme design enables us to tailor the solution and interaction between people, processes and systems to best fit the organisation drawing on the best that lean, six sigma and other techniques have to offer. This 'play to your strengths' mindset, plus the expertise of our consultants, creates a programme of work that improves performance in an engaging and participative way.

The key elements of each design are:

• The organisational results required (hard numbers)
• Key process mapping, optimisation / redesign and workflow streamlining
• Management system optimisation (the way decisions are made, the data used and the information flow across the organisation. It includes IT systems)
• Skills transfer (building the capabilities of key staff to ensure sustainability once the work is finished)
• Change management (managing the change culturally)

We always work to transfer skills to our clients and to involve them as much as possible in the implementation of change. The combination of a tailored and holistic approach, coupled with skills transfer, means that we avoid two common pitfalls. We don't simply shift the problem elsewhere and we create a sustainable solution rather than a short-term fix.

For further details on Performance Improvement please email allen.knight@berkshire.co.uk or call 0118 932 3580.