News agencies across the country have been frothing at the mouth over the possibility of a triple dip recession. I have puzzled over this term for a while now, as headline-friendly economic analysis uses the same old this quarter/last quarter, this year/last year comparatives that drive me nuts. What then, does the UK’s growth rate look like when you put it into time series SPC charts? Continue reading
Tag Archives: systems thinking
What Poses More Danger To The NHS; Dirty Data Or Dumb Leadership?
Writing blogs on poor management of the NHS is like shooting the proverbial fish in the barrel, but two articles in the papers this weekend have raised the insanity levels higher than ever. The first piece brought forth the startling revelation that Jeremy Hunt wants to criminalise the gaming of targets Continue reading
Admirable Service
Failure demand – caused by the failure to do something, or to do something right, from the customer’s perspective. What does that mean then? How about a hypothetical example to help me explain: Continue reading
A room without a view
It’s probably not a good idea to blog angry, but here goes.
This was supposed to be about my own recent experience of NHS treatment, but that blog is now on hold after I went to visit my Gran in hospital today. She’s 92 and was in reasonable health until recently. Yes she was frail and had suffered a couple of falls, but her underlying health was ok. She was admitted due to a chest infection. Much to my regret, I hadn’t seen her for a couple of months and I really wasn’t prepared for the sight that greeted me, as I barely recognised the person I saw. Continue reading
Say cheese, but don’t smile
This blog post owes a debt to John Seddon’s excellent tale about chicken wings on the new Vanguard website. The reason for writing this is that, whilst in Pizza Express the other night, I found myself in exactly the same situation that Seddon outlined. Let me explain… Continue reading
Little Boxes Pt2 – Jigsaws Are Better
In part one of this blog, I concluded that repairs scheduling is fundamentally flawed. Maintenance companies try to shoehorn irregular shaped jobs into nice, standardised boxes and it leads to appointments being missed and repairs left unfinished. The company wants its’ customers to be compliant and flexible, but customers need the opposite to be true. So how do we fix the system? Continue reading
Little Boxes – a blog of two halves
The boxes you see below were a feature of all repairs services throughout the country in the last decade. As it happens, the photo was taken earlier this year, proving that they are alive and well in many services. Continue reading
Battleships
The recent blog by Systems Thinking For Girls about the Corporate Shame Avoidance Scheme brought back some exciting memories of pre-meetings and shame avoidance tactics we engaged in as repairs contractors in the Public Sector. Continue reading
Run for the hills; it’s Lean and Investors in People!
Two, true tales from the coalface today; Little Miss Lean and Mr IiP. Continue reading
Tales from the Private Sector; the rush to get the figures out
Month end is the dread of every finance department. The pressure is always on to “get the figures out”. The figures are normally based on monthly management accounts and contain some sort of variation on the “this month/year to date/same period last year” type analysis. For most companies, they are the single most important measure of performance and the only ones that are discussed consistently at every senior management meeting. They are also the only measure that financial backers tend to care about. Coincidence? Continue reading