Looking for ideas for improving delivery performance can sometimes be difficult. If it wasn’t, it would more common that everyone was delivering on time.
Can you remember the famous insanity quote?
“Insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.”
If we clearly need to do something different, to achieve different results, what can we do?
Two questions
I have two questions that I often ask, that often produce some interesting ideas:
- What would make the customer go ‘wow’ if they could see us doing it with our planning and scheduling?
- What would be ‘slick as hell’ for progressing our projects and orders?
Both questions are variants of the ‘what does good look like’ question that is my mainstay for defining operational ‘visions’ to direct effort effectively.
Imagination helps
When you start to think through these questions, you take the pressure off having to know the answer and start to let your mind wander about other situations you have seen and experienced. Small improvement ‘fragments’ surface in your mind, and you can add them to other ideas or build upon them.
If you haven’t seen the ideal situation previously, that you could mimic, then using your imagination to pull together a solution is a good approach.
Then take action!
If either of the above questions sound sensible, brainstorm some ideas with your team, prioritise them and then act.
Everytime I have asked these (or similar) questions, simple, practical actions have surfaced. It has never been hard to take action (at least) on the initial comments.
Try the questions out on your team and see how you get on.
I hope you enjoy playing with the ideas.