Category Archives: Priority

Helping A Great Team Think & Act Differently

Total Clothing wanted to involve people from right across the team to streamline their processes, to prepare in advance for another year of major growth. They asked Critical Action to help with building vision, identifying changes and putting a plan into action.

“We worked with many of our team, led by Keith, to identify bottlenecks in our processes and by voting on the most urgent issues, gave everyone a sense of inclusion and buy-in.

It has brought the team so much closer in terms of working towards common goals and also in the way they communicate with each other on an ongoing basis.

We are really thinking differently as a team about the way we operate and this is translating into actions and profitability.

Keith’s no nonsense, practical way of facilitating, managing and ensuring that tasks were completed by all has really helped us overcome some challenging issues and we are moving forward with some exciting times ahead.”

Jan Richardson
Managing Director, Total Clothing Ltd

https://www.totalclothing.co.uk

Supporting Prioritisation Across The Business

Bit of food for thought today.

We have been working with a client recently on a simple, clear way of prioritising both strategic and day-to-day demands on time (in this case for the IT department).

If It’s Too Hard, Abdicate It…?

At Critical Action, we’re great believers in the principle that managers and leaders can’t create two independent sets of priorities for strategic (“we must improve the business”) and tactical (“we must keep our users and customers happy”) activities, and abdicate to operational staff the balancing of the two in the real world. Continue reading →

Making Improvements: Can Simple Really Work?

Simple Tools...

One of our mantras is “keep it simple“, because we work in an area that is complicated enough to begin with!

When we look at how businesses can improve, it inevitably means having to maintain the big picture (where are we heading?) together with digging into the details (as they can often be the blockers). To drive simplicity through what we do, we evolved a very simple set of tools & reports, which we use to run projects.

Why simple, when we’re trying to analyse and solve complex problems? Continue reading →

Project “P”s – Three or Five

In a recent Twitter exchange with one of my friends (@eileenb), we were discussing productivity and planning. We covered things like the “5 Ps” (perfect planning prevents poor performance). As you might imagine, with a project manager’s hat on, things like the 5 Ps are stocks-in-trade for delivering the results clients need. My standpoint was slightly different though.

I suggested “3 new Ps” – Productivity, Priority and Purpose. Continue reading →

Managing Elephants in Rooms

Risk For The Rest Of Us – Managing Elephants in Rooms

Risk Management is a huge area with lots of specialist people, companies, books, qualifications and so on. So should we even go there if we’re not black belts…? And what’s this about elephants? Continue reading →

Perfectionism – Enemy of Priority?

Business improvement thoughts come to me in the strangest places…

We’ve just had a period of sunshine and rain that has been great for the grass in our horses’ field, but it has also caused the ragwort to sprout. Ragwort is poisonous to horses and needs to be thoroughly eradicated from fields (I think it may even be an offence to knowingly let it grow).

This means going out with a special fork to remove the plants including the deep roots. My wife asked me to concentrate first on the plants that had grown enough in the week to flower, to prevent them going to seed and exacerbating the problem.

Being my usual self, I set out with the wheelbarrow and fork, determined to clear every last vestige of ragwort from a 3 acre field. Continue reading →