Communication is the Foundation of Leadership, of Business Performance and of High Quality Productive Processes

Welcome to the introductory page of the People-Process Performance digital book. This digital book, on the AGILEdge website, focuses on issues, ideas and tools for improving how you do things. This is critically important for an organization's success because how you develop and deliver your products or services also creates the people requirement and the resource requirements (costs) yet most organizations don't focus enough on their processes and on the HOW.

Consider the following:

• The more unpredictable things are in your organization, the more the opportunity you have for improvement.
• Most organizations operate between a 2 and 3 sigma level which means they create many thousands of errors, mistakes and undesirable issues for every million opportunities. Studies have found that between 20 and 30% of your revenues at this level can be wasted dealing with these issues.
• These same studies have found even while it's going on, leaders of organizations are oblivious to the opportunity.
• A big picture focus on how each person and activity affects the cycle from initially producing a customer solution until receiving payment for it can itself product big savings in costs and create growth opportunities.
• While in the very tangible manufacturing sector, there are 8 types of waste to focus on, in administrative and knowledge worker organizations, there are 20 sources of waste that once identified can be removed or greatly minimized
• There are 17 barriers to effectiveness in organizations that when focused upon can lead to tremendous growth opportunities
• There are 9 sources of innovation, that when focused upon can transform many organizations.

We can guarantee you that by inter-relating your organization's strengths and weaknesses with the opportunities from a systematic focus on the 20 sources of waste, 17 typical barriers and 9 opportunities for innovation, opportunities and threats, that large-scale opportunities to improve costs and create growth opportunities will result.  

Why focus on HOW?

• Drives which and how many resources we need (costs)
• Drives effectiveness and efficiency both
• You've been told you have to do it
• Speed
• Cost reductions demanded by customers
• Some form of chaos
• Cost challenges
• Past disasters and the need to avoid those in the future
• The need and desire to get better
• Late deliveries or lead times too long
• Difficulty in identifying underlying issues/problems
• Take the guess work out of the business
• Not seeing the results from improvement efforts
• Competition
• Errors
• Customer  (or other stakeholder) unhappiness
• More effective use of technology
• To automate repetitive tasks and streamline those that don't directly add value