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.  

In summary, this material focuses on ideas and tools to minimize cost and create growth opportunities by addressing how things are done inside organizations. The key is always to balance HOW(process) and WHO(People) issues and the discussions that follow in here will attempt to do just that.

Please feel free to register and contribute content either through comments or pages in this book.