“It’s no good innovating round the edges if the heart of the operation is failing” Sir David Brailsford
Sir David Brailsford once said, “It’s no good innovating round the edges if the heart of the operation is failing”. By this he meant that there is no point focussing on marginal gains if there are more fundamental changes that would have a bigger impact. For example, if a cyclist is on a 13 year old bike, is unfit, overweight and has horrendous technique, a new state of the art Carbon Fibre Tour de France dream machine ain’t going to be the best bang for your buck. The same is true for Organisations.
Whilst improvements in technology, systems and data support all have the potential to improve performance and efficiency, if the person using the systems does not know what they are trying to achieve then the outcome will always be compromised. For example, when a piece of equipment fails it is down to the human operators to decide how important that work is and they will then have to prepare and execute that work.
Instead of focussing on a new maintenance dashboard, smart analytics, handheld tablets or RFID tagging, many mature organisations would make larger steep changes in performance by examining the basics of how their workforce is actually delivering their work management process:
Is the working prioritised in the right way to ensure that time is not being wasted on low value adding activities?
Does the entire organisation understand what the business is actually looking to achieve, and what they specifically have to do to help achieve it?
Does the work being executed actually support in meeting the company objectives or not?
How much risk is the organisation carrying?
If the business is unable to execute all the work it needs to does it understand why that is, and by that I mean truly understand and not just assuming that they don’t have enough resource?
If an organisation doesn’t know what it’s measures and KPIs are telling it then a new live touchscreen driven dashboard simply means a business can be confused with real-time data as opposed to data that is a few hours old. If an organisation has a huge backlog of equipment to be repaired that is no longer in service, installing the latest condition monitoring software only serves to tell the operator that something is going to fail before it does which in turn only serves the purpose of providing advanced notice that there’s a piece of work you’re not going to do. Both the dashboard and conditioning monitoring tools in this example would be of huge value to some organisations, however, to others they are simply a distraction and a waste of money.
Within most organisations there is a strong desire to continuously improve. There is also often a deep fear of missing out (FOMO). The combination of these can be a powerful driving force for organisations to seek out new approaches, processes, tools and technology to get better at what they do. This driving force is further aided by the fact that anything new is interesting and alluring. There is a lot of good that comes from these behaviours that should not be dismissed, however, organisations have to be careful that the desire for the new and shiny does not turn into an obsession like Gollum’s desire for The One Ring. An all consuming desire to obtain the object to the detriment of everything else. Organisations often fall into this trap by focussing too much on the new and shiny when they could get far more value focussing on the basics.
The key for organisations is to be brutally honest with themselves across all aspects of their delivery, brining in unbiased independent resource for this if necessary. Only once the heart of their organisation is strong will the full benefit of new technology be realised. The most exciting option isn’t always the most effective, neither in cost nor outcome.