Appraisals aren’t about the work anymore
I just got an email from a friend of mine who works in the public sector. He says,
Oh my good god! I have just received an email sent round our department offering a short course on how to fill out our appraisal forms! How crap is that? That it comes down so [...]
NHS A&E target "risks patient safety"
The BBC website reports what the chairman of the College of Emergency Medicine, Dr John Heyworth recently said about the 4 hour waiting target,
“We’ve had nurses reduced to tears. We’ve had very senior consultants in emergency medicine threatened with a disciplinary process.
“This is an outrageous misuse of the standard.”
That this is being said is no [...]
Total Recall: The Toyota Story
I just watched the BBC2 Money Programme episode about the recent problems for Toyota, which you can now watch on iPlayer (though readers not in the UK may not be able to see this). It seems it will be repeated on 31st March 2010.
The programme described the current travails of Toyota, telling of the accidents [...]
Toyota Recall Story on TV
At 21.00 on 25th March 2010 on BBC2 (a UK channel) there is a programme entitled ‘Total Recall: The Toyota Story’. Here is an extract from the description:
Special edition of the Money Programme investigating Toyota’s recall of millions of cars. How did this happen to a company synonymous with reliability and customer satisfaction? [...]
Get good at the current macro system
There is a story on the BBC web site: Whitehall reorganisation ‘cost £780m in four years’, it tells how government departments are created, destroyed, merged and split at incredible speed and frequency. The same story could be told about the NHS, education, transport and within many other departments over the last 20 years. It seems [...]
LocalGovTV focuses on all the usual red herrings
I got an email from LocalGovTV asking for case studies, the extract is below.
Your efficiency case studies wanted for LocalGovTV
As local authorities prepare for the Budget announcement on 24th March, and the possibility of more spending cuts, LocalGovTV is looking for your efficiency case studies.
How is your council countering the recession by innovating new [...]
Local Government Association bans 250 words
The Local Government Association in the UK recently published its annual list of 250 words and phrases that local councils should not use. Some of them are great:
clienting (What is that?)
trialogue (When three people talk I suppose.)
predictors of beaconicity (Is that a disease?)
But some of them are quite ordinary words:
output
priority
capacity
I suppose they are asking councils [...]
Article for Qualityworld magazine
Qualityworld, the magazine of the Chartered Quality Institute (CQI), asked me as a Lean Service expert, to contribute a reply to the Help Desk section of their March 2010 edition. The Help Desk question was:
I’ve heard about lean in manufacturing, but how can I use this tool in a service environment?
My answer was:
Taiichi Ohno said [...]
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