Welcome to the July 2010 edition of Strategic Innovation newsletter, a free monthly newsletter on leadership, strategy and innovation. Delivered on the first Tuesday of each month.

Back issues are archived for free downloading at www.DanielLockConsulting.com.

Tips for improving business processes

• Interruption is enemy of productivity: organise your surroundings to eliminate distractions.
• Emulate chefs: great processes, just in time inventor (food goes off), brings together everything for multiple plates at the same time.
• Speed changes everything: when all else is equal, speed is the deciding factor. The quicker you can respond, and take someone out of the market, and respond the more you will be valued. This requires being organised, resourced, with systems and processes thought about in advance.
• The right time doesn't exist: you'll never be ready, it will never be the perfect time, sometimes you just need to launch and figure it out, aim for the 80% level and then launch.

Conquer project complexity:

Bill Gates, in his book, Business at the speed of thought, quotes a study that 42 percent of all business re-engineering projects were abandoned prior to completion. This survey was conducted in 1996, and based on my experience I’d say this would pretty much hold true now.

Gates goes on to say "Projects of only three to four months’ duration aregoing to have much lower failure rates.” It was true when he wrote thebook in 1990’s as it is now.

"With short projects you are forced to make important trade-offs that will drive you to simplicity and focus. You’ll end up with goals that can be executed.”

Strategically, simplicity and focus, are critically important.I often come across six sigma people who want to rid the world of variation, and find statistical correlation between activities, and revenue generation where logically none can possibly exist.

Fore example, I’ve been helping a banking division foreign exchange sales team improve their sales throughput, the common question was how to manage the volatility of the market which causes spikes in inbound customer demand. The short answer is you don’t. It cannot be done.

Instead simplicity is the answer. Maintain a buffer of resources available on any given day in-case there is a spike. Maintaining a buffer is certainly more expensive; however is more than off-set by the increase in revenue by being available during peak periods of demand.

Projects sometimes fail.This is because projects – especially re-engineering projects – are dealing with uncertainty. Much of the work has never been done before.It’s a bit like renovating a house; building principles are known, but you don’t know what behind the wall your about to knock down. Finding out may change the entire project or stop it all together.

Breaking down projects into smaller chunks gives you strategic agility to manage uncertainty, allowing teams to make changes quicker, and prevent resources being allocated to a doomed project.

Gates articulates it well, "If short projects fail—and a few do, for a variety of reasons—your loss in time and money is much smaller. It’s far easier psychologically to pull out and redirect your development team when people haven’t spent a year of their lives working on a project that is now going down the tubes.”

Breaking down projects has another benefit: it makes planning easier by reducing uncertainty. In report on factors contributing to BPR success said"Participants overwhelmingly indicated that the planning stage, where scope and roles were set, was the most important phase in the project.”

If you’re about to embark on a large re-engineering project, or involved with one now. Consider breaking it down into 3 to 4 month intervals.Focus on delivering value during these periods, giving a two-fold effect of usable value sooner and less risk overall.

Technique of the month: Onboarding new staff

People are expensive, the most expensive, non-capital assets in a business. The imperative to get them productive quickly is paramount.

Here are 3 questions (along with the making sure the 3 rights of the worker are taken care of) to ask your new hire, from day one:

End of every work day, ask them to take 5-10min to do an update, any longer is too long.

• Jobs I did today and the results I got.
• Challenges problems that came up
• Questions I have for you

With in 30 days you will have a good understanding how his person is working out.