Robin Barnwell

I read a lot of our client’s feedback, pages and pages of comments and thoughts. I use this information to align our processes and improve our customer experience. Let me touch on one area. When I read comments from people who think highly of us a single word appears repeatedly – Responsive and its visa-a-versa […]

The curtains were drawn the room was dark. The man tied to the chair could not escape. The kidnapers were out negotiating the ransom. The man spied his iPhone on the table. He shuffled the chair forward inch by inch. Leaning forward he activated his iPhone with his nose. He managed to start e-mail and […]

It’s been awhile since my last post. In October 2010 I secured a new role in our institutional asset management business in the City of London. Ever since I’ve been head-down learning the business and working furiously to pass my investment management exams so I can appear credible and add value. My role is front-office […]

It’s been a while since I blogged, I have been working for just over a year on a huge IT project to pay the invoices for our property and motor suppliers via XML. Job done and I am moving into a new role.   I am joining Aviva Investors – our Asset Management division – […]

We home educate our children and one approach we take is to think up and solve problems. When solving one of these, “how can you measure how tall a tree is?”, the Tan-o-meter was born! The maths is straightforward. You measure yourdistance from the treeand the angle to the top of the tree. Multiply the […]

A new project team forms to solve a business problem and asks the simple question, “What is the current process?” A little digging around yields a dusty old process document, but it is so out-of-date. The project team (in their element) run a brown paper process mapping to get the true current process. Detailed analysis […]

The most famous example of right-to-left planning I can evoke is – That the United States should set as a goal the “landing a man on the moon and returning him safely to the earth” by the end of the decade Powerfull stuff, no messing around, but with a budget of $19.6bn you get a […]

I am spending January travelling around the country running process workshops. This means lots of travel and time to ponder on the dynamics of the meetings.……. Cross-functional Teams A group of people with different functional expertise who work toward a common goal, it may include people from finance, marketing, operations, research, engineering, and human resources […]

There are five hats, two Black and three White. In a room sit three people, two can see and one is blind. The room is darkened and a hat is placed at random on each person’s head. People can only see the other hats not their own. The first person on seeing the other two […]

I have always thought the toughest parts of DMAIC are I(mprove) & C(ontrol). One of the reasons for this is that to deliver a sustainable solution means asking people to change. The opportunity to resist change and revert to status-quo being one of the challenges faced. What early indicator can you use to measure if […]

How do you describe a process to a team? There are lots of tools in the toolkit including value stream mapping, functional swim lanes, context diagrams and SIPOC to name a few. But I find they can be “a little cold” for a non-technical or cross-functional team and I want to “bring it to life”. […]

Organisation in chaos? Emergencies erupting? Been blind-sided by the unexpected? Project a few years late and still does not work? Need to get things under control? Make way for the Corporate Fire Fighter. (Phew!) This trusted pair of hands hits the ground running….makes rapid assessment of situation….. takes urgent action …… reports an outstanding success […]

Over the last 5 years I have invested considerable time & energy in trying to become a skilled continuous improvement practitioner. I am a strong believer in continual learning via direct deployment experience. Over this same period, continuous improvement has become a main-stream product. Any business without an Operational Excellence, Process Improvement, Process Excellence, Continual […]

In our BB training we use the terms Divergent & Convergent thinking during the Improve phase. We cover a raft of brainstorming & lateral thinking techniques to encourage people’s divergent thinking. So please take a few moments to answer this question: How many uses can you think of for a Brick? How many did you […]

Picking-up on Sue’s recent Homeblog, I’d like to talk about my recent experience at home. Over this weekend my wife and I had “words” about the work I do helping on the home chores. There were a number of areas such as cooking, washing dishes, ironing, cleaning toilets, shopping, washing clothes, making beds, tidying-up, planning […]

I thought I would share my views on a question frequently posed by newly trained belts. I imagine you to may have encountered this situation. I do not have a clear answer but have come-up with a theory. Could be right, could be wrong. We talk about the discrete sampling equation used to calculate minimum […]

In my last blog, Targets, I covered the situation of hitting time targets in a services environment. I thought I was onto something but wasn’t sure just what…….. Just to recap, people are targeted on delivering work within a certain time frame e.g. reply to a customer letter within X number of days. There was […]

Targets appear in all shapes & sizes. Sometimes seen as positive, “we operate a target-driven culture” and sometimes negative, “targets drive the wrong behaviour”. So what is true? Given the sheer diversity of targets, I want to focus on a specific area, daily work targets in a services environment. Let’s look at a scenario. Imagine […]

Happy New Year! Today, rather than talk about something deeply insightful I thought I would share one of the tools I like to use. Ever had to arrange a project meeting? Did you need to get say 10 people’s diaries aligned, usually at short notice? Was it fun? There are many ways to approach this […]

This is just for fun and to win a real prize you need to have been very good all year and have a generous expense account. Good old Santa wants to give you a Christmas present. He’s checked if you have been naughty or nice and the news is not good, so you have to […]

I used to work in the IT business and we were always on the look-out for the next “big thing” to cash in on. It was things like moving from mainframes to open systems and onto Microsoft Windows, relational databases, business intelligence systems, OLAP reporting and CRM systems. Sowhile I was travelling home from Sydney […]

You invest 4 months of your life. You work in close co-operation with the operational teams. You gain buy-in and agreement on an innovative solution to enhance business performance. You build sustainability into the solution. You identify clear benefits in terms of financial, process, people and customer. It’s a text-book project. So return in 6 […]

When I started in continuous improvement (CI) four years ago it was via the traditional Six Sigma DMAIC route. I was indoctrinated into the Six Sigma world and have earned my ASQ CSSBB and can do impressive stuff with statistics. Lean was not even on the radar for me, it was just another approach that […]

I recently bought some registry cleaning software on the internet using PayPal. My mistake, it was a scam. I made contact with the PayPal Dispute Resolution team to see if I could get my money back. Followed the highly efficient process (no human interaction) and made repeated attempts to contact the supplier before escalating to […]