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How to Promote Innovation in Your Organization

If you’re concerned with the state of innovation in your current organization, that’s not a bad thing. It’s definitely good to take a critical look around from time to time and examine ways to potentially improve things. At the same time, it’s not an easy process – it’s far from just clicking your fingers and calling it a day. Promoting innovation in an organization of any scale is an ongoing effort that requires patience, and a determined approach.

Leading by Example

And it starts with you. Don’t expect your employees to just blindly follow your advice to integrate some new piece of technology in their workflow, or anything along those lines if you’re not doing those things yourself.

You have to set a good example and make sure that you’re always personally using any kind of technology that you may be trying to promote internally in the organization. This might sometimes require you to change a lot about your working style, but at least you know what the long-term benefits are going to be.

Clarifying the Benefits

On a related note, you should also make it clear to everyone in the organization exactly why these things will benefit them, and how they could potentially see their work improved as a result of adopting them. Don’t expect that this will be obvious from the get-go – it’s often anything but. You should put the effort into explaining these things to everyone in the organization from top to bottom.

Ideally, you should hold meetings where you’ll get a chance to clarify the situation, while your employees and everyone else involved in the organization will be able to voice their concerns and inquire about the way their jobs are going to change in the future.

A Sense of Stability

Which leads us to another point that’s very important to address. A common concern whenever innovation is brought up is that it might affect the stability of one’s position in the long run. After all, can you expect that things will work in the same way – a way that’s convenient for you – some years from now?

In most cases, there will indeed be some major changes, and there’s no way around that if you want to see proper progress in the organization. But if you put your mind to it, you can easily instill a sense of stability in the organization as a whole, and make it clear to people that their jobs are not going to be affected in any negative way.

Innovation Through Skilled New Hires

Don’t ignore the opportunities that lie in hiring competent new workers that can bring some creative perspectives to your work as well. There is often plenty to gain from this, and it can be more cost-efficient than investing resources in the organization from the upper level. However, when you’re taking this approach, make sure that the people you’re hiring can be integrated into the company’s culture as quickly as possible.

Because that’s the main risk associated with hiring people for their creativity alone – you might realize that they clash significantly with the general culture of the organization itself. Sometimes creativity can go a bit too far in this regard, and you have to recognize those situations and stop them dead in their tracks.

Long-term Prospects

If you do everything right, you should see your company slowly but steadily adopting innovative approaches and integrating them into its workflow on many levels. This can eventually lead to various positive developments across the entire organization, but you need to carefully control this growth to prevent it from harming the company in some unexpected ways.

Make sure that you always maintain an open line of communication with everyone involved in the process of implementing these new solutions, and ensure that anyone who has concerns can voice them easily.

This is the number one thing that prevents innovation in many organizations or leads to negative effects as a result of attempting innovative approaches. You need to understand how this will impact the company in the long run, and prepare for those effects across all levels of the organization. If you take care to do that, you can expect to see some great results in the coming months and years.

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The Link Between Lean and Innovation

As lean methodologies have started to take over various markets by storm, we’re starting to notice some interesting trends regarding the connection between lean and other areas. As it turns out, there’s a huge overlap between lean thinking and innovation, and good leaders must be capable of spotting those connection sand taking proper advantage of them.

You might already be applying lean in your own work without even realizing it. It happens more often than you might imagine. But if you haven’t taken the time to familiarize yourself with what this methodology is really about yet, you should definitely sit down and learn a thing or two about it.

An Overview on Innovation

What is innovation in the first place? It’s not just using new things for the sake of using them. Analyzing proper innovative approaches usually leads to one conclusion – it’s about improving some aspect of the current situation that is not immediately obvious. In many cases, innovation is about tackling issues that people don’t even realize exist yet. It’s about addressing problems that will become more prominent down the road, but can be ignored for now.

And that’s why there’s such a solid overlap between innovative thinking and lean. Lean is all about optimizing the performance of a system by analyzing issues to get to their root cause, and that closely matches the kind of thinking that you’ll need to adopt if you want to be innovative as well.

How Lean Can Promote the Right Actions

Integrating lean methodologies into your work can be beneficial in multiple regards. For one thing, as we mentioned above, it will push you to analyze issues in detail and figure out what really went wrong in every problematic scenario. This will allow you to resolve problems much more efficiently, and without wasting too many resources.

On top of that, lean will constantly promote optimization within the organization. And the best way to optimize most aspects of any company’s work is to adopt innovative new approaches that address various issues in new ways.

A Slow and Gradual Approach

Keep in mind that adopting a more innovative approach to your problems won’t happen overnight though. It’s a change that impacts the whole company and will have strong implications on multiple aspects of its work, which means that it has to happen slowly and gradually. The good news is that there are lots of opportunities available for learning how this should be done, and it’s up to you to take advantage of them.

Work with specialists who already have experience in that as much as possible. This will allow you to minimize the time it takes to implement the necessary changes and will broaden your own horizons on that topic.

Controlling Innovation Properly

As we said above, not all types of new approaches are worth exploring in detail. Sometimes innovation is about waiting patiently for certain factors to play out, instead of adopting new technologies and solutions that you may not be familiar with. This is something that can take quite a lot of time to understand if you are still new to the field. On the bright side, once you have the basic concept down, you’ll find that it’s like second nature to seek out those problems and prevent them from happening in the first place.

You should have a critical approach to everything you’re implementing in the organization if you want to avoid some of the most commonly experienced negative effects of inappropriate innovation. Analyze every step in detail, and figure out how it’s going to impact your operations in the long run. You can often predict these things to a great extent, and it’s a shame that many leaders don’t put the effort into doing that.

Conclusion

Innovation is a double-bladed knife. It can bring solid progress to your organization, but it can also bring things down significantly. It’s all a matter of how you implement new solutions, and how well you’re able to analyze the potential impact of everything you’re doing. Be slow and patient, and remember to leave yourself some good opportunities for backtracking in case things go wrong. Because in the end, you can’t predict every single possible problem, but you can do a lot to prepare yourself and your organization for them.

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Why It’s Never Too Late for Innovative Approaches

One of the worst things you could do to your organization is to shy away from innovation because you believe that the company is too far gone for that. And while that might be true in a very small number of cases, those are usually extreme examples where the writing is on the wall for quite some time.

In most cases, you can never go wrong with considering a bit more innovation in your operations. And there are plenty of opportunities for that nowadays as well. You just need to keep your eyes open and explore what the market offers on a regular basis.

The Market Is Always Moving

It doesn’t matter what industry you’re involved in. The market you’re dealing with is likely highly dynamic and requires constant attention if you want to keep up with its trends. This means that you can’t count on today’s methods to still be viable tomorrow. That’s something many leaders realize all too late and end up pushing their companies in the wrong direction stubbornly until they can go no further.

You Can Always Benefit from an Improvement

This brings us to our next point. Even if you don’t see any point in innovating heavily in your current state, you can pretty much always benefit from improving things in this regard. Think about it – is there really a downside to improving production rates or decreasing the frequency of manufacturing errors? In most cases, there isn’t.

Even if it’s a small change, it can often impact your operations in a major way. You should not underestimate the potential of certain improvements for transforming the entire state of your operations in the long run. It starts with small changes, and they can add up over time.

Long-term Benefits Can Add Up Fast

And that’s another important factor to consider. Even if you don’t see any results in the beginning, you’d be surprised how fast those can stack up over time. Small changes can become very pronounced given enough time, and sometimes the right combination of a few small factors can completely alter your perspective on your production and other aspects of your organization.

Of course, this is not valid for absolutely every small change you can make. But with a bit of exploration and experimentation, you’re quickly going to find the right combinations.

Preparing for the Worst

Innovation is not just about improving your current performance. It can also be useful for addressing potential future problems within your organization which may not even be on the table yet. You might not even realize the need for some of those changes until it’s too late. But with the right approach, you can easily protect your company from many types of negative effects over its lifetime, and ensure that you don’t meet the same fate as some of your failing competitors.

On that note, make sure that you analyze the performance of other entities on your market as much as possible. You never know when you might spot an opportunity to prevent a major disaster in your own organization, and often this is about being vigilant and paying attention to how the market is moving.

Evaluating the Impact

If you’re still not convinced that you should make a certain attempt at innovation, you should do a study that evaluates the potential impact of your actions, and use that as a reference to figure out if it’s a worthwhile idea. You should take into account all current factors related to your operations though, not just the ones which have an obvious connection to whatever you’re going to attempt.

Because in some cases, there will be effects that will not be predictable, simply because they are related to patterns in the background that can be too difficult to decipher. Even with some complex analytical systems, you might still miss those connections from time to time. So to be safe, just factor everything you can into your calculations and ensure that you’re looking at the big picture as best as possible.

In the long run, you will never regret taking the time to optimize your operations and look into ways to innovate. But if you want to get the most out of this, you should be patient and consider all possible effects as carefully as possible.

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How Six Sigma Has Changed the Corporate Landscape

Six Sigma has been around for a while now, and its impact on various industries is already quite noticeable. It only takes a brief look at the current state of the corporate world to realize the huge changes that have been brought forward by the tight integration of Six Sigma practices into the standard workflow. And we’re likely only seeing the tip of the iceberg, too. There are many reasons to believe that we’re going to see even more changes in this area in the near future as companies continue to adopt and use Six Sigma in their work.

More Focus on Root Cause Analysis

Getting to the bottom of a problem has never been more important, and it’s likely going to become even more so. Root cause analysis plays a major role in Six Sigma, and it’s a fundamental aspect of its philosophy. Some companies might struggle to adopt these principles correctly in their work if they haven’t used them before. But once the dust has settled, it’s very easy to see the positive results of proper root cause analysis practices.

The Importance of Specialization

Companies are now also starting to wise up to the importance of having properly trained specialists in their ranks who understand the intricate details of working with Six Sigma and know how to apply it in the company’s specific environment. This is easier said than done, even when dealing with people who’re already familiar with Six Sigma to begin with.

Specialization is only going to become a more critical issue in the near future too, and it will be interesting to see how the market evolves in this regard. We’re already seeing a lot of attention towards Six Sigma specialists, and it will likely become even more pronounced not too long from now.

Improved Performance on All Levels

One of the best things about using Six Sigma correctly is that it can produce some very tangible improvements in the company’s performance on pretty much all levels. From the very top of leadership and management, to the lower ranks of workers doing various tasks, everyone stands to benefit from the integration of Six Sigma into their work.

And when there are some tools available that can actually measure that performance and provide the company with an adequate overview of how it has changed over time, things can get even better.

The Right Mindset

Six Sigma is not just about optimizing your company’s work and ensuring that work gets done as quickly as possible. It’s also about developing the right mindset for evolving the organization as a whole, and this is a skill that can take quite a lot of time to build up to an appropriate level. It gets even more complicated if you consider an organization with a very rigid structure that has gone through relatively little evolution in its thinking over time.

Clearly, when dealing with a situation like this, a different approach is needed. Developing the mindset required to successfully implement Six Sigma principles into the organization can take a lot of time, but once you’re there, you’re going to start seeing opportunities for improvement in pretty much every corner of the organization.

Improved Connection with Employees

Last but not least, a good Six Sigma implementation and the right adoption of those principles into the organization can result in a significantly improved ability to connect with employees on a fundamental level. This is more important than it may seem to some leaders, because various reports have indicated that these relationships have been on a decline for some time now in corporate environments, and things are only going to get worse over time if this is not addressed.

Thankfully, Six Sigma provides various tools for dealing with these issues, and it’s important for any leader to utilize them to their full potential. With time, you’re going to start seeing more and more opportunities for changing things in your organization to improve the way you’re working with Six Sigma. Until then, you should have a lot of patience and be prepared to go through some very challenging periods that might last for quite some time until you see results.

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Lean, Six sigma, quality control and manufacturing process management concept on virtual screen

Integrating Lean Six Sigma Principles in an Established Corporate Structure

Fighting against an established corporate structure can be an uphill battle in many cases, even when your goal is to improve the overall situation of the company. It can sometimes take serious convincing to get the message across and ensure that everyone is on the same page. And even then, you might still face resistance in some corners of the company, which can make things sufficiently difficult for you to get you at least annoyed.

And when it comes to something like Lean Six Sigma, you should often prepare yourself for an even more challenging battle. Because some of the ideas behind these methodologies are too unusual for people who are used to doing things their own way and haven’t seen a need to change that in decades.

Mapping the Current System

You should start by getting a good overview of how things are currently set up. This might take a while, especially in a larger organization. But it’s an important first step that will give you some much-needed clarity for how you’re going to progress afterwards. There might be some relationships in the organization that you’re not aware of because they are not immediately obvious. Bringing those to the surface with the help of a proper mapping is going to make a huge difference.

Identifying Bottlenecks

You will also need to figure out where any productivity bottlenecks might be so that you can start addressing them first thing when implementing Lean Six Sigma within the organization. There are some common places to investigate for this, and if you’ve done your homework with the mapping as we described above, you should already have some hints regarding possible performance chokepoints. Trust your intuition and start with these – but if you come across anything else along the way, make sure to follow those leads as well.

A Long-term Approach

Whatever you do, your solution has to work in the long run. Implementing Lean Six Sigma practices in an organization is not a one-time action that you can put to rest after it’s completed once. It’s something that requires continuous attention and you should therefore be prepared to provide that attention from the very beginning. Structure your approach in a way that allows you to retain control in the future, and pay attention to any changes that might impact your implementation of Lean Six Sigma into the organization.

Sorting Out Employee Concerns

As we said earlier, it’s very likely that people across various levels of the organization are going to have concerns regarding what you’re doing, and will probably be quick to voice them as well. You have to anticipate that and prepare yourself for it adequately. Try to figure out which issues may get brought up first, and prepare some responses for those.

And when someone comes to you with something that you didn’t plan for, make sure to take something useful out of that conversation, and prepare yourself better for responding to this type of question in the future. With time, you should be able to iron out any problems that people in the organization might have with your integration of Lean Six Sigma practices in their work.

Continuous Improvement

And all of this brings us to our final, but just as important point. As we mentioned above, this is something you’ll need to maintain over the long term, and you’ll have to put serious effort into ensuring that people stay on the same page. That’s part of the reason why continuous improvement is so heavily ingrained into Lean Six Sigma in the first place.

Adopting these principles correctly is going to take some time, but once you’ve done it, it will keep getting easier and easier to improve the state of your organization, and you’ll constantly recognize new opportunities for that as you’re moving through your respective market as well. It will take a while until you’ve reached proper adoption levels across the whole organization, but once you’re there, you’ll realize that all the effort you’ve put into it was well worth it. And from then, it won’t take that much to keep the company moving forward and to ensure that it stays relevant to the current market.

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Leveraging Six Sigma to Get a Better Overview of Your Operations

One of the best things about Six Sigma is the way it pays attention to the small details in the organization’s workflow, and how it allows managers and other leaders to get a precise overview of what’s going on under the hood. It takes some time to develop the appropriate systems for that, but once you’re there, the information will flow practically all by itself. It will take very little involvement on your part to keep things running, and you’ll eventually discover that your organization is feeding you more information about its status and performance than you might initially believe.

Basic Concepts

Collecting and analyzing data is one of the fundamental tenets of Six Sigma. It should be of no surprise to anyone who uses it in their organization that the methodology has various provisions for data collection practices. It’s a good idea to study those in detail before attempting anything in your own organization. Because it’s not just about collecting as much data as possible and calling it a day. You also have to make sure that this data is organized in a sensible manner that’s easy to revise, and that it’s easily accessible to anyone who might find it relevant.

How Six Sigma Can Help

To that end, Six Sigma can help you by providing you with a very good framework for collecting various points of data and integrating them into the company’s workflow. You will learn how to set up points for gathering information, where to best place them, and of course, what kinds of results you can expect from each data collection node in the long run. Six Sigma has gone through a very long history of evolution that has produced a variety of tools that can be extremely helpful in gathering information about your business and putting it to good use.

Why You Can Never Have a Good Enough Overview

At some point, you might be tempted to think that you’re done and you can call it a day. But that’s never the case when it comes to setting up data collection and analysis systems. You have to always keep exploring new opportunities, and always be on the lookout for new ways you can get put new tracing points in the company’s work. This is not easy, and it’s a skill that will take some time to develop properly. Once you’ve done it though, you’ll see for yourself why you need to always be thinking of possible improvements.

Tracking the Right Data Points

You won’t have unlimited resources for tracking data though, so you’ll have to think long and hard about what you actually want to collect and how you’re going to store it. There are some data points that make more sense to track than others, and you should start with them. But as you continue to develop your analytical systems, you’ll realize that you can’t follow the common trends forever. At some point, you’ll have to figure out what’s truly important for your own organization and focus on those specific points. This takes some time and experience though, so be patient and try not to rush it.

Changing Things on the Go

Six Sigma is also something that’s very open to changes on the go. The methodology can make it very easy to make the right kinds of improvements in your organizations if you follow the right principles. But at the same time, you have to set things up in advance for that to work properly. Not every kind of change can be implemented on short notice, and sometimes they might have implications for your whole organization’s performance.

Conclusion

If you do it right, Six Sigma can be one of the most beneficial factors in your organization’s workflow. It can provide viable long-term improvements, and can significantly streamline some parts of your work. But it takes time to get there, and above all, it takes a lot of patience. You have to approach this with the conscious idea that it will take you a while. But once you’ve reached that sweet spot, it’s going to be very easy to maintain your momentum and keep things going the right way.

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Lean Corporate Mindset: What Does It Take?

So you’ve started to come to terms with the fact that you need to integrate lean thinking into your organization. That’s certainly a great thing, but it’s not something that you just snap your fingers and see the results – you’ll have to put some actual effort into it. Developing the right lean corporate mindset will take some time, but once you’re there, you’ll start seeing patterns that you didn’t suspect existed before. It’s a life-changing journey that will leave you much better prepared in the end.

An Attention to Detail

You’ll have to develop a strong attention to detail – there’s no way around that. Part of being a successful lean leader is the ability to spot minor issues in the organization and address them on a fundamental level. You’ll need to be able to tell when there are minor inconsistencies in the way certain things work, or when they deviate from their norms. This won’t always be immediately obvious, mind you – in some cases, you’ll have to spend a lot of time looking for the answers to those questions. But if you start paying attention to the small details that matter, you’re going to have an easier time seeing the big picture as well.

Constantly Looking Forward

Another part of being a good lean leader is the ability to constantly look forward in everything you do. This is easier said than done, mind you – it requires a fundamental change in the way you’re approaching problems in your work. Sometimes, leaders are inclined to keep doing things the same way because it’s worked without problems so far. And while that’s sometimes an appropriate approach, that’s not always the case. You’ll sometimes have to take the more difficult approach of implementing something new and risky.

Integrating New Improvements Rapidly

Which brings us to the next important point. You’ll need to develop the ability for integrating new solutions into your workflow quickly and effortlessly, with minimal hassle. Since you’ll constantly be dealing with new developments on the market, it makes sense to develop a sense for how they can be integrated into your work more easily. While each such project is unique and will require its own approach, there are some things that will be common factors from one to the next, and you’re going to start noticing those patterns sooner or later.

Learning from Past Mistakes

Everyone makes mistakes. But what truly separates competent leaders from the rest is their ability to learn from their own mistakes and integrate that knowledge into their future work. This requires the ability to take a critical look at your own results, which not everyone has – but it’s an important quality for any lean leader nevertheless. You’ll also have to develop some system for keeping track of those mistakes and organizing them in a way that allows you to easily go through your history and see what you’ve done in the past. Modern technology can make this quite easy, so it’s in your best interest to investigate how that’s done.

Exchanging Knowledge and Experience

Don’t forget that lean and Six Sigma were built to a large extent on the idea of constantly exchanging knowledge and experience between specialists in those fields. This means that you should do your best to contribute to that system as well. Pay attention to the needs of other organizations, and try to be in constant dialog with them. You never know when someone might propose something that you’ve never thought of before, completely changing your perspective on your current work.

On that note, use the internet to its full potential as well. It’s full of useful resources that can come in great handy when you want to get up to speed with the latest developments in the fields of lean and Six Sigma. It also allows you to contribute your own knowledge and easily exchange ideas with others.

Conclusion

The main thing about being a successful lean leader is the motivation to constantly move forward and explore new grounds. This is something that every leader should have, sure – but when it comes to lean, it’s a fundamental requirement to implementing lean principles in your organization’s workflow in the first place. And you should start your journey in educating yourself on that topic as early as possible.

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Why Six Sigma Is the Future of Complex Organizations

In the last decades, many different methodologies have sprung up for dealing with the complex structure of a large organization that spans across multiple departments. Some of those methodologies have proven successful, while others have fallen out of favor over time. Among all of them though, Six Sigma is the one that has established the most prominent name for itself, and it currently enjoys active use in many major companies across the world.

The Current Situation

Six Sigma is currently the most prominently featured methodology when it comes to handling complex organizational structures. Many companies rely on it heavily for their daily work, and some have even come up with creative adaptations of its main features that are more suited to their own workflows. Many companies have also contributed to the development of Six Sigma over the years, inventing new approaches in it and coordinating their efforts to create the perfect set of rules for governing an organization of that scale.

Wrangling Complexity in Style

One of the best things about Six Sigma is elegance. That’s one of the main factors of attraction for many of the companies that have adopted it in their work over the years, and also one of the reasons for many of the companies on the market to continue using it so actively. Six Sigma allows for a simple, streamlined solution to be developed for most problems that can arise in a company’s work, and that solution can then easily be adapted to other requirements as they arise.

Easy Adoption of New Trends

That’s part of what makes Six Sigma so powerful, too. Developing one solution often leads you to the discovery of other viable courses of action in the same domain, which may not have been obvious before. This can allow you to easily adopt new trends as they arrive to the market, instead of having to carefully assess each situation and moving slowly from one to the other. This is something that can, in turn, accelerate your typical workflow tremendously, and in the end, you’ll find yourself constantly at the forefront of adopting new technological developments and integrating them into your work smoothly and without any issues.

Working with Multiple Employees

Another common problem that major organizations tend to deal with frequently is the need to consolidate the situations of multiple employees, often split across multiple different departments too. This can quickly turn into a logistical nightmare for the unprepared, and it takes a special approach to deal with this kind of mess. Six Sigma can provide you with good tools to accomplish that, and the overall framework it brings to the table can give you very strong leverage in negotiating the implementation of those solutions. You’ll find yourself more easily talking to various different employees on multiple levels of the organization, and coordinating what everyone needs in a truly efficient manner that you simply were not capable of before.

An Established Track Record

Last but not least, Six Sigma is nothing new under the sun. It’s an established methodology with various strong principles, and it’s been in constant development for many years. This makes it the perfect candidate for companies that want something stable and trustworthy. With Six Sigma, you know that you won’t have to make any drastic changes to the way you’re using the methodology in your work, because it’s more or less established already. Sure, some things tend to happen from time to time that change people’s perspectives on Six Sigma, but the general principle stays the same.

Conclusion

There’s a reason so many major companies rely on Six Sigma to such a great extent on various levels of their work. It simply gets the job done, and it can provide a viable solution to your organization’s problems in ways that you never even suspected were possible. However, you have to get started with its implementation early on. Six Sigma is not something that can be integrated into an organization overnight, and it takes long years of conscious effort to get to a point where you’re truly comfortable with the way things work. But once you’re there, you will never want to look back and you won’t regret all the effort.

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Eliminating Waste in Customer Service

Waste is a major problem in many industries, and it can pop up in some surprising places from time to time. And if you’re not prepared to deal with it adequately, it can be very damaging to your company’s operations in the long run. Thankfully, we have various methodologies nowadays that have been specifically designed to address the problem of waste.

But implementing those in your organization is not a straightforward process, and you’ll have to pay attention to the small details along the way. Otherwise, you risk generating even more waste in the long run, as paradoxical as it might sound.

What Is Waste?

First things first though – what exactly is waste in the context of a company’s work? In general terms, it’s anything that does not contribute to the positive performance of the system. Waste is more than just a physical definition. An employee taking too long to walk to their workstation is a basic example of waste.

And with customer support, it’s not hard to find such problems all over the place if you just start looking. If you’ve never paid attention to streamlining the operation of your support centers, you likely have a lot of work ahead of you.

Getting to the Root Cause of Each Problem

Every source of waste can be traced back to some specific issue in your organization. The problem is that sometimes the cause of your problem is not close to the results that it produces. It may even be in a completely different domain. With that in mind, you have to develop a good methodology for tracing the root causes of problems in your organization and make sure that it’s applied properly whenever something comes up in your operations.

It will take a while to develop the right mindset for that, but it will be extremely beneficial in the long run as far as the overall performance of your company and its support sector are concerned.

Preventing Reoccurrence

Solving a problem once is one thing, but preventing it from ever coming back is a different story and requires a much more calculated, careful approach. If you want to prevent the reoccurrence of issues related to waste, that’s even more complicated in most cases. You have to constantly analyze the situation and collect enough data about the way things are working at the moment.

And whenever you notice some deviation from the norm, don’t delay the investigation into that issue. The more you wait, the more serious the problem is going to become behind the scenes, and it might end up affecting your business in some very unpleasant ways later on. When it comes to customer support, this can happen very easily.

Ensuring Everyone Is on the Same Page

Sometimes your employees will need a little extra push to ensure that they’re properly motivated to help you in your efforts to reduce waste. Not everyone understands the importance of doing this by default, so you might have to reorganize things a little bit to make the situation more appropriate for this kind of mindset.

If you have to, be strict – punish people for not complying with your new requirements and track their progress individually. It might seem harsh at first, but sometimes it’s the only way to ensure that there are no compliance issues in your organization.

Evaluating Customer Satisfaction

Last but not least, you’ll want to make sure that all of this effort is actually producing any viable results. To this end, make sure that you pay attention to your customer evaluation surveys and analyze the data coming in from them in as much detail as you can. Sometimes they can reveal some surprising insights into the way your company works as a whole, but in other cases, you’ll need to do some extra digging to make sense of the information presented to you.

Don’t be afraid to reach out to individual customers with your concerns in this regard as well. People are often more than happy to talk about problems they might be having with your organization, especially when it comes to customer support. And the more you talk to them on an individual level, the more positive their impressions of your company are going to be in the long run.

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Are You Meeting Your Customers’ Expectations?

Many companies suffer from a common problem – a misunderstanding of the expectations of their customers, and as a result, a poor understanding of how well they’re meeting them in the first place. It’s not hard to see examples of that all around us, and this trend can be traced back to a number of factors. Perhaps the most prominent one is that leaders simply don’t know how to evaluate their customers’ expectations, and how to adapt to any changes in them.

Times Are Changing

We’re going through some very interesting times right now in terms of customer service, products, and other similar factors. The expectations of people are changing fast, and it’s becoming more and more common to expect fast, reliable services that are delivered on-demand. On the other hand, not every company can meet these expectations in their current state, at least not without some serious changes in their operations.

Expanding Safely

Every company needs to keep an eye on possible expansion opportunities at all times. At the same time, it can be difficult to ensure that you’ll keep growing in the right direction and won’t have to face certain obstacles along the way. Safe expansion is even more difficult when you don’t want to compromise the results you’re delivering to your customers. You have to make sure that any sort of new development in your business enables you to deliver more reliable and consistent results, even if it means temporarily compromising another aspect of your operations.

Analyzing Your Progress

How well are you currently doing? Many business leaders tend to have some misconceptions about that, often thinking that they are moving in the right direction when they are not. This is why it’s so important to constantly analyze your progress and see how well you’re doing in objective terms. Don’t just guess – this is the fast track to making wrong decisions. At the same time, try to look at that data through a slightly critical lens as well. Sometimes data won’t reveal the full picture, and you’ll have to rely on your own experience and expertise to fill the gaps.

Improvements in the Right Areas

You need to make sure that any improvements you’re making are hitting the right areas of your operations. This is not as easy as it sounds, especially if you have a larger organization that is involved in multiple different operations. You have to make sure that all of your actions actually boost your future prospects. And when you’re using proper data analytics and collection as we described above, you should be able to spot the areas for improvement much easier than if you’re working with any other kind of data.

Preparing for the Future

It’s hard to predict the future, especially when it comes to a complex organization with multiple departments and fronts of operation. But it’s important to have at least some vague idea of how things are likely to develop a few years from now, maybe even longer. Because this will determine to a large extent how you’re changing your company’s current state, and that in turn will become extremely important later on when you’re trying to adapt your actions to the current state of the market.

If you’ve been doing well on the data collection front, you should have a lot to work with. But your job is not done yet – you have to also ensure that you’re aligning any trends in that data to your current situation. In other words, some details that you’ve gathered years ago may no longer be relevant in your current situation, and it’s important to have the capacity to tell when this is the case.

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Data Analysis and Customer Service

The strong link between customer service and data analysis has started to become quite apparent in recent years. It’s no longer about collecting simple metrics like call duration and other similar points. We now have the capacity to analyze customer service interactions on a much deeper, more complex level, and the benefits of that are starting to manifest themselves in many areas of the industry. And we’re likely only seeing the tip of the iceberg, as well.

Integrating Data Collection

You have to start by integrating data collection systems into your current operation. This can be done in multiple different ways, depending on the exact specific details of your operations. When it comes to customer service, there are multiple viable points for collecting data which can then be analyzed in detail. And it’s a good idea to dig as deeply as possible, ensuring that you always have as much as you can of the bigger picture.

Analyzing Efficiently

You also have to make sure that the analysis you’re performing is actually efficient and up to date with your current requirements. Sometimes you might spend a lot of effort on something that will ultimately prove fruitless. Directing your efforts in analysis is going to be very important when you want to ensure that your customer service stays at a top-level at all times. It’s true that our analytical power is increasing over time, but this doesn’t mean that it’s okay to use it inefficiently. You’ll have to direct your approach very carefully in fact.

Revising Your Situation Based on Findings

Sometimes you might come to the conclusion that it’s necessary to make some changes to your current situation based on findings that you’ve made in your analysis. And in some cases, the changes necessary are going to be very minor. But in other situations, you’ll need to completely throw some of your established ideas out of the window. This can take a lot of time and effort, and you should be confident in the quality of your findings if you want to ensure that you’re not wasting your resources on something that will ultimately prove fruitless. When your actions are backed by solid data as we described above, this will be much easier.

Expanding Your Collection Practices

Data can be collected in many different ways, and it’s a good idea to study the range of available options in detail if you want to be sure that you’re not missing any points that could be relevant to you. Don’t just focus on one or two analytical positions – try to study as much as you can about your current situation, and hook those analytical systems up to different places to see what kinds of results you’re going to get. If you notice that one of your collection systems is not producing any useful information that you’re applying on a regular basis, it might be a good idea to consider cutting down on your expenses in that area.

Complex Analytical Systems

As the complexity of your data collection grows, so should your analytical systems as well. It’s important that you’re able to process all of the data you’re collecting adequately, instead of just piling it on. Otherwise, you’re only going to make things more difficult for yourself in the future, when you find yourself working with large data sets that are practically impossible to wrangle int heir state.

As long as you pay attention to the data that truly matters to the operation of your business, you should be able to improve your customer service significantly by just collecting and analyzing as much information as you can about the way things are currently running. And before you know it, you’ll be a market leader in terms of customer service and satisfaction.

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Remaining Efficient in Customer Service as the Company Grows

While every business must always strive for expansion, it’s not that straightforward to maintain the right kind of progress on all fronts of the organization. Customer service and support is especially tricky and has to be approached very carefully if you want to avoid seeing your company crumble under its own weight.

The good news is that the modern market offers plenty of solution in this regard, and you have various options for creating adequate service channels that will keep all your customers happy. It’s just up to you to get started with applying these ideas in the first place.

Requirements Will Change

As your company grows, the requirements of its users are going to change. In some cases, that change can be significant and can impact various aspects of your operation in unpredictable ways. You have to stay on top of that and anticipate these changes as they come out. More than that, you have to stay in touch with the way your customers think, and always know what they want at any stage of your operations.

This might sound straightforward, but one of the biggest problems many companies tend to experience with regards to their growth is losing touch with the needs of their customers. If you want to prevent this from happening to you, you’ll need to very carefully study the changes in their requirements.

Six Sigma Can Be Useful

Six Sigma has established itself as a solid tool for addressing various performance and optimization issues. And it should come as no surprise to anyone that it’s also quite useful when it comes to improving a company’s customer service capabilities. It can take some time to integrate the ideas of Six Sigma into your workflow properly, especially if you lack the appropriate specialists at the moment. But in the end, it’s going to be one of the best changes you can do to your organization in order to maintain its efficiency at a high level.

Efficiency Has Many Forms

Keep in mind that you have various ways of being efficient in servicing your customers, and you shouldn’t always go for the low-hanging fruit. In some cases, you stand to gain a lot from making people pay more attention to your self-service options, for example. In other cases, you should think about delivering accurate results over solving problems fast. Some industries have a very heavy demand for speedy customer service, but in other cases, you can gain more from improving the accuracy of your results instead. It’s highly individual for each industry, and you have to pay attention to the specific requirements of the field you’re working in yourself.

Setting Your Priorities Straight

This brings us to another very important point. You’ll need to prioritize different aspects of your customer service in different situations if you want to ensure that people stay satisfied in the long run. And it’s also going to take some experimentation until you discover which parts of your operations should receive the most focus in those cases. But in the end, those results will be very valuable, and you won’t regret taking the time to sort things out on that front.

This will be especially important later on when the scale of your company might prevent you from making the right decisions because you won’t have access to the full picture. Knowing what your priorities should be from early on is going to be crucial in that case, and it can be of great help in optimizing your operations overall.

Expansion is something that can be very dangerous to an organization if it’s not handled correctly. At the same time, it’s also something that you will have to go through sooner or later, and there’s no way around that. And it’s obviously much better to approach it with a prepared mindset, rather than scrambling to figure out how everything works in the last moment. The only companies that manage to survive their major expansion periods are those that have taken the necessary precautions to prepare for them in the first place. The rest are bound to get swept under, but in the end, that’s how the market works in general, and it’s something you should always be prepared for and anticipate.

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Optimizing any process should start with a careful, critical look at its weaknesses. If you put your mind to it, you can probably identify many issues with pretty much every aspect of your organization. And when it comes to customer service, there is no shortage of things that can go wrong. What’s worse though, is that it can sometimes be very difficult to know that you have a problem.

Customers might be reluctant to speak up if they have issues with your services, and even when they do, you can’t trust the accuracy of the information. It will always be presented through a certain perspective that might not be completely aligned with the truth.

Placing Data Collection Points in the Right Places

Identifying weak points in your customer service should start with appropriate data collection practices. Data is all around us, and it’s important to harness it properly if you want to see good results in your operations. We’re more capable than ever to analyze the things that we work with and to identify interesting patterns in them. And it’s in your best interest to start collecting data from as early as possible.

At the same time, if you don’t know where exactly to place those data collection points, you risk generating a lot of noise. Just because certain data exists doesn’t mean that it has to be necessarily captured, and you’re going to have to develop a filter for the right kinds of data that you should be focusing on.

What Is a Weakness in Customer Service?

You might also discover that you’re not completely aware of the exact issues that can arise in customer service in the first place. This is especially true if you’ve never paid any serious attention to your company’s performance in this regard, and if you’ve just recently started to look for weaknesses, it can be difficult to filter out the good points from the bad.

It’s also highly individual, which is another problem that many companies face. You can’t simply follow what others are saying in this regard, and you have to pay attention to the individual needs of your own customers and organizational structure. A weakness in your company will not look the same in another context, and this can make it difficult to identify them correctly.

Addressing Shortcomings

Once you’ve identified the points that need work, you’ll obviously also have to think about how you’re going to address them. There are many ways to deal with the various kinds of issues you might experience on the customer service front. Improving the speed at which you deliver certain services is one of the best things you could do, but it’s far from the only one.

You should also communicate directly with your customers if you want to improve your results in this regard. You will never know if you’re making the right kinds of changes unless you actively seek out feedback from your users. They might sometimes be reluctant to provide it, and it’s important to give them the right kind of motivation if you want to see good results.

Gathering Internal Feedback

Feedback can also come from the inside, and that’s another important point that you should pay attention to. Your own employees will likely have a thing or two to say about the way you’re approaching your customer service, and you should not disregard their opinions, just because they’re not actual customers. Pay special attention to those who’re at the forefront of dealing with the issues of your users, because they will often have the most interesting insights into your situation.

With enough practice, you’re going to learn to spot weak points in your customer service very quickly. And while it can take some time to develop this kind of sense, it’s going to benefit you a lot in the long run when you’re trying to improve the quality of your operations. Because in the end, the way you’re dealing with the issues of your customers is going to be the main defining factor in the success of your company. Keep that in mind at every step, and you’re going to see good results sooner or later.

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The Growing Importance of Customer Service

Customer service has always been at the center of many companies’ work, but it was not until recently that we started to truly comprehend its important in the grand scheme of things. As a result, many companies have started to completely change their approach to servicing their clients, and various new trends have cropped up on this market as a result. It’s not only interesting to follow those developments but important too if you want to see your company growing properly in the long run.

Markets Are Changing Fast

A lot has happened on the general market in the last few years, and we’re probably just seeing the tip of the iceberg too. Various developments are coming up on the horizon that could have major implications on the way the market will work in the future.

Customers now demand faster, more precise and personalized services, and this demand will likely only continue to grow in the coming years. It’s especially problematic when you consider certain sectors that did not have practices of immediate response rooted into their work, but have had to rearrange that in the last years.

The Internet Has Improved a Lot on Both Sides

Still, the advance of the internet into our lives has changed a lot, and it’s enabled companies to be even better and more precise in the services that they deliver. There have been various improvements for both users as well as the companies themselves.

While people are now able to find information that’s relevant to them more easily and filter it for the things that they truly need, companies can also use these technologies to provide a more direct, personal approach to their customer support. And the fact that it’s now completely reasonable to expect the average person to be constantly connected to the internet and aware of the important trends online has been very helpful as well. As a whole, the situation is moving in the right direction for both companies and their clients.

Immediate Service

The rise of the on-demand market is also hard to ignore. People are now used to getting their hands on their newly purchased products and services much faster and without any intermediate hassle. Streamlining these processes has become the main activity of a large number of companies, and many of them have already started to see remarkable results in this regard. But it will likely take some time before immediate services start to become truly commonplace on the market.

Until then, it’s still important to work hard on evolving your services in this direction, and ensuring that you’re able to provide your customers with an immediate response to their queries. It will not only save time in your support – it will play a huge role in improving the impressions people have of your business.

Outsourcing or Expanding?

Outsourcing customer support services is becoming increasingly commonplace for many companies. It’s easy to see why too – it can significantly optimize the way a company utilizes its resources and can open up various new possibilities for them in their regular work. At the same time, outsourcing customer support comes with an inherent cost – you’re sacrificing some of the control over the process. Consider carefully if that’s worth it in your specific circumstances.

But the benefits of outsourcing are hard to ignore as well. You will get access to much faster, more competent service providers who know exactly what your customers expect to get from their support inquiries and know-how to deliver the right answers. This is something that you can develop internally as well, sure – but it will take a lot of time and effort to get there, and outsourcing is a great shortcut through all that.

Make sure that you measure your progress as much as possible as well. It can be difficult to know that you’re moving in the right direction sometimes. Unless you’re actually measuring your data and confirming that you’re hitting the right milestones, you might have some serious misconceptions about how well you’re doing at the moment. There’s a reason why some companies put so much focus on their data collection practices, and it’s not a bad idea for you to consider that as well.

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4 Concepts of Six Sigma That Can Help You Achieve Your Objectives at Work

Trying to achieve your objectives at work without a proper roadmap or plan in place is pure insanity. This is the same as going into a battle expect to emerge victorious without taking any weapons with you.

There are 4 concepts of Six Sigma that will help you emerge victorious in battle and this article will talk about them. Not only can these concepts be used to make improvements in how a person works, but they can also be used to achieve personal objectives as well.

Have a clear picture of the necessary improvement you need to make

When you say to yourself that you want things to be better this year, just simply saying it won’t cut the mustard. Some tough questions need to be asked like “what areas do you want to improve?” You have to set a realistic goal that has a starting point as well as an end.

If you are working in an organization, do you want to increase revenue? If you are very specific with what you want to achieve, you give yourself a big chance of achieving your objectives.

Don’t have a tunnel vision, expand your mind

There is a very famous expression that says knowledge is power and for anyone who wants to achieve their objective, having a tunnel vision doesn’t help. It means that you won’t be able to see the bigger picture and by expanding your line of sight, one is able to gain more knowledge.

If you are running a successful business, you should be able to measure things like labor cost, revenue as well as customer satisfaction metrics. If the goal of the business at the end of every year is to make more profits than previous years, you need to be in a position to evaluate all the things that will make you achieve that objective.

This includes things like offering customers good quality service, retaining existing customers and offering them discounts on products or services.No matter the chosen method, it has to be broken down into factor that will drive you to get the results you are looking for.

Make sure everything is put in a logical way or manner

Take ATM machines, for example, their main purpose is to give customers money after they have made a withdraw. When a large number of withdrawals are made in a day or the money runs out, the bank moves quickly to put the money back.

This is the same approach one needs to have to achieve their objectives. Just like how things move smoothly with the bank, one has to aim to follow suit and make sure everything is done in a logical way. Applying six sigma gives you the biggest chance to achieve your objectives.

Reduce any waste that’s in the way

A major goal of Six Sigma as a method is to cut downtime that is wasted while trying to achieve your objectives. When waste is reduced, you will notice that the way that things are done in your organization will speed up. It is used to make things better with the help of what is known as the 5S.

Sort – Look around the workplace to see if everything is ok and if something is off, dispose of it very quickly.
Set in order – When that is dealt with, look at what you have left and place each item in its place.
Shine – This involves systematically cleaning the space you have whether on a weekly, daily or even monthly basis. If you are low on stock, make sure you restock because the two goals in this step are to keep things clean and have a clear view of inventory.
Standardize – You have to make sure that you put things where they belong after using them while making sure that work colleagues do the same.
Sustain – Make sure that you schedule a 5S review all the time so that it comes naturally to everyone.

Conclusion

The 4 concepts of six sigma when used well will easily help achieve your objectives at work because you will go into things prepared. Going back to the analogy of going into a battle expect to emerge victorious without taking any weapons with you, Six Sigma ensure you are armed and ready for battle.

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Customer Service and Six Sigma – The Fundamental Link

With all the talk about Six Sigma and its benefits for various organizations in the last few years, it’s important to understand its implications on some specific areas, like customer service. There is a lot to gain from optimizing your processes with the help of Six Sigma methodologies, and if you’ve never put any thought into streamlining your customer services before, you have a lot to gain.

Keep in mind that this is a gradual process though, and it’s going to take a while before you see proper results. But as long as you’re persistent and keep your eye on the prize, you should be able to leverage the potential of Six Sigma for some pretty impressive results.

Modern Customer Service Requirements

The requirements for customer service have changed a lot in recent years, and they are quite different today from what they used to be in the past. Various new trends have come up on the market, and all of them have to be addressed carefully if you want to ensure that you’ll stay relevant to your customers. For example, you will often have to think about improving the speed at which you provide that service, or give your customers alternative options for getting through to your support.

Companies have started to experiment with some interesting approaches to improving their customer service in this regard, but many have realized that Six Sigma is one of the best ways to go about that.

The Evolution of Six Sigma

Six Sigma itself is not static – far from it. It’s gone through some serious development in recent years, and it looks quite a bit different today from what it used to. That said, the core principles remain the same, and it’s still a great tool for optimizing and streamlining processes. One thing that Six Sigma does especially well these days is wrangling processes with lots of unknowns in them.

That’s because the system is more universal and developed to be used in a broader set of circumstances. A lot of effort has been put into this specific aspect of it in recent years, and we’re already seeing some great result.

Connecting the Dots

Putting everything together, it’s easy to see why Six Sigma enjoys so much popularity among companies looking to improve their service quality and to connect better to their customers. It’s a great methodology for optimizing an arbitrary system, and considering the complexity of your typical customer service situation, it’s a perfect fit for addressing some of the common problems in this area as well.

You have to be careful though – you will need an experienced approach for this. Six Sigma is a complex field in itself, and applying it incorrectly can easily backfire on your operations if you’re not prepared. Make sure that you’re aware of the implications of utilizing Six Sigma in your workflow fully, and only work with specialists when you’re trying to integrate it into your own company.

Anticipating the Future

A lot can happen in the future, especially judging by the current state of the market. And while it’s impossible to predict tomorrow with complete accuracy, you can certainly pay attention to the way some trends are evolving and establishing a position on the market. When it comes to customer service, the trends are already pretty obvious, and it’s just a matter of following them and integrating them into your own workflow correctly. And with the help of Six Sigma, you can focus on the aspects of that workflow that truly matter in the end. It will likely take some time, but you’ll eventually be in a situation where you’re completely prepared for the developments of tomorrow.

The link between Six Sigma and customer service is starting to become more and more obvious, and many companies have started to realize this recently. If you want to be at the forefront of these developments, you should take some time to study what Six Sigma has to offer, and how it can be integrated into your own workflow. You’ll likely quickly come to the realization that it carries more benefits than you can initially see on the surface, and you’ll find many ways to integrate it into your company’s work.

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Developing Proper Relations with Your Customers

Some entrepreneurs underestimate the importance of developing the right kinds of relations with their customers. And in the end, this only comes back to bite them at some point when they realize that they’ve undermined a significant portion of their company’s potential. Developing those relationships is like a fine dance, and you have to be very careful in the moves you’re making on your end.

But if you do this right, it can benefit you a lot in the long run. There’s no substitute for having good relations with your customers, and if you apply the right techniques to those situations, you can see some significant improvements in the future.

It Starts Slowly

You have to be patient. Developing good relations with your customers is a time-consuming process, especially at first when there’s little trust on both sides. You have to give them some space to determine whether they are actually interested in working with you. On the other hand, you have to also make sure that anything you do is aligned with the idea of improving those relationships in the long run.

Small things can matter a lot in this regard. Don’t underestimate the potential of random acts of kindness, especially if you want to ensure that your customers will keep coming back to you after checking out your business once. And once the pace has picked up, you’ll find that every small action can contribute a lot to the grand scheme of things.

Anticipating Needs

Sometimes customers themselves won’t know what they need. This is completely normal, and it’s up to you to address that problem by helping them make the right choice. This can be done in various different ways, but using modern AI technology to its full potential is probably one of the most effective approaches. You can get a lot out of trying to anticipate your customers’ needs with the help of advanced analytical tools, and you can potentially learn various important details about the way your organization works in the long run as well.

Keep in mind that you’re also going to need the right underlying system for actually acting on those needs once you’ve discovered what they are. This is an important detail that sometimes gets overlooked. But it doesn’t make much sense to be talking about addressing problems when you don’t have the capacity for that in the first place.

Gathering Feedback

It should go without saying that you aren’t going to get very far without the ability to gather enough feedback and to analyze it appropriately. You can learn a lot from what your customers have to say, but sometimes their feedback will also generate a lot of noise that you’ll have to learn to avoid. This is also something that can largely be addressed with the help of modern solutions.

But on the other hand, you can also learn to spot these invalid comments on your own, and this can go a long way towards helping you improve the quality of your customer service, and connecting to your customers on a deeper level.

Opportunities for Improvement

You’ll likely spot various opportunities to make things better here and there. You should take your time and plan your approach for each of them carefully though because you can waste a lot of resources trying to address points that are largely irrelevant to most of your users. The best approach is to figure out exactly what your customers want, and improve on those areas. This might sound obvious, but there is no shortage of companies that are following a more brute-force approach in these situations.

The more effort you put into this, the more it’s going to pay off in the long run. Improving customer relations is not just about making your current customers happy. It can also have some great results on your operations in the long run, generating more traffic as word starts to spread. People love to comment on positive experiences they’ve had with businesses, and you’re going to get a lot of exposure by just ensuring that you’re doing things right when working with your customers. All the initial effort will be more than worth it once you get the final results.

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4 Concepts of Six Sigma That Can Help You Achieve Your Objectives at Work

Have a clear picture of the necessary improvement you need to make

If you are working in an organization, do you want to increase revenue? If you are very specific with what you want to achieve, you give yourself a big chance of achieving your objectives.

Don’t have a tunnel vision, expand your mind

Make sure everything is put in a logical way or manner

Reduce any waste that’s in the way

Sort – Look around the workplace to see if everything is ok and if something is off, dispose of it very quickly.
Set in order – When that is dealt with, look at what you have left and place each item in its place.
Shine – This involves systematically cleaning the space you have whether on a weekly, daily or even monthly basis. If you are low on stock, make sure you restock because the two goals in this step are to keep things clean and have a clear view of inventory.
Standardize – You have to make sure that you put things where they belong after using them while making sure that work colleagues do the same.
Sustain – Make sure that you schedule a 5S review all the time so that it comes naturally to everyone.

Conclusion

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How to Build Relationships With the Forming, Storming, Norming, Performing Model

The Forming, storming, norming, performing model was created by Tuckman and it is a concept that is used by many Six Sigma professionals across the world. They use it to predict as well as explain how their team is performing. Each of the 4 steps plays a massive role in team development.

How is this model applied to build relationships on an organization

Forming

This is the first stage and it is where people in a team are getting used to each other as well as the idea of working together. The team is still in its teething stage and are yet to establish any level of cohesion. As a team leader, you might notice that the team will not respond as expected and will need to be motivated.

This comes with the territory when it comes to dealing with teams, members will need to be pushed and inspired to work together. Being a team leader of a team that is forming is not easy, however, you can deal with things by giving the members space and time to settle, introduce them to one another and not delve into any important details from the get-go.

Storming

The step that follows forming is storming and when this stage rolls around, the team members know each other a bit better and take the first few steps towards working as a unit. As the members all start to understand each other pros and cons, there will be conflicts, egos will be hurt, communication breakdown and tempers flarings.

When you are leading a group of people, you have to anticipate these things as it is inevitable when a group of people are told to work together in a team. To calm the storm, as a team leader you need to know what everyone brings to the table in terms of their strengths and weaknesses.

When you fully understand the good and the bad of each person, it is time to educate them. Lead by example and help them understand the importance of tolerance and encourage them to settle conflicts in a civil way.

Norming

Acceptance is very important when it comes to this stage and team members here start to accept, encourage and tolerate one another. The team even goes as far as encouraging the behavior and thought of each other because they are all aligned to a common goal.

The realization that they are in it together makes the contribute wholeheartedly to make the team better. During the norming stage, it is important for a team leader to have a good feedback system where thoughts are discussed openly and everyone feels important.

Team members need to know their roles by having defined roles assigned to them by the leaders as well as promoting a culture that encourages the team to think outside the box. If a team is given a level of freedom to think outside the box, they are able to come up with diverse ideas to deal with any work-related problems.

Performing

Performing is the final stage and it is where the team starts to carry out their duties and are able to achieve goals without being supervised.all the members are motivated to do well, are very created and knowledgeable.

In order to see massive success during this stage, leaders need to take a back seat and not monitor and control their team constantly. It allows them to stand on their two feet makes them feel valued and will do everything they can to perform tasks assigned to them properly.

Conclusion

It is important to remember that Six Sigma is not just a method, it is a state of mind as well. When all the four steps above are followed religiously, one will be able to create a team that pulls in the same direction and deals with conflicts in a civilized way when they arise. The principles of this model should act as a building block for success.

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Define, Measure, Analyze, Improve, Control is better known by its acronym DMAIC and this is a 5 phase problem-solving technique that is part of Six Sigma. DMAIC allows management in an organization to plan their projects well in advance and have a series of steps that will help things go smoothly.

DMAIC history

When Motorola came up with Six Sigma, DMAIC was not part of the original concept way back in the 1980s. They called it “Six-Step to Six Sigma” back then and the steps included

Highlight the service or product being provided
Know who the customers are and what matters to them
Highlight the things needed to provide them with good service
Know the process needed to get the job done
Make improvements while eliminating anything that brings about waste
Always seek to improve all the time by controlling, analyzing and measuring

While the steps above do have similarities to the process of DMAIC, it is clear to see that it is a very important component of Six Sigma. This method has played an important role in helping organizations across the world maximize their production, improve what they offer to customers and most importantly, achieve long term results.

Advantages of DMAIC

Increase revenue

When an organization manages to cut out production processes that are not needed thanks to DMAIC, they will experience high levels of production. When production is increased, mistakes are few which brings in plenty of profits

Reduction in cost

An organization that is not on top of things will not realize the number of resources and time they are wasting until it’s too late. The process of DMAIC helps an organization to reduce wasted resources and time which ultimately saves them plenty of money long term.

Max production

The main reason why organizations use Six Sigma is to reduce cost and this will increase how much an organization produces because they are able to use fewer resources.

How does the process of DMAIC help an organization maximize production

Define

During this very important phase, an organization has to ask themselves some very crucial questions like what are the flaws in the production process and what how have any problems affected business operations.

When these two key questions have been properly addressed, an organization can define its goals and make sure their production process is effective. They do this by looking at all their available resources and formulate a plan.

Measurement

An organization here needs to look at their production system and see what’s working and what isn’t. When everything is measured up, an organization is able to know what the root cause of their production problem is and start looking for ways to solve it. Having a data collection plan is very useful when conducting this phase.

Analysis

During this phase, an organization needs to analyze what they have gathered during the measurement phase about their production process. When data is analyzed by the management, an organization is able to narrow down the cause of their production problems and figure out ways to maximize things.

Improvement

When the production problem is well understood by everyone, it is time for everyone in the organization to start brainstorming ideas on how to make things better. This is the stage where an organization tests and implements all their ideas in terms of improving production and makes any changes if needed.

Control

Implementing the chosen solution to the production problem is only the beginning, an organization has to make sure that they maintain it. This is the last stage of the continuous improvement process and it is all about coming up with strategies to maintain high levels of production all the time.

Conclusion

Overall the process of DMAIC is all about improving while making as little mistakes as possible. Six Sigma wouldn’t be the world-renowned model it is today that delivers concrete results if it wasn’t for DMAIC.

It helps businesses find solutions to their problems as it acts as a roadmap. When a business uses DMAIC the right way, their production quality improves and customers, the cost is reduced and revenue is increased.

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