The drive towards greater operational efficiency has adopted many routes over the last 40 years. Early approaches focused on ‘time and motion’ studies. This approach initially had a dramatic impact on management thinking and achieved a step change in operational performance. However, once the initial gains had been achieved many organisations discovered that it became counter-productive to manage employees exclusively by aggressive performance indicators.  Business process reengineering (BPR), Lean, six-sigma and other methods of process improvement soon followed, providing management with valuable tools to eliminate costs, drive quality and streamline ways of working. Alongside these ideas has been a drive to build the culture and behaviours that underpin successful organisations and there has been a growing recognition of the need for a ‘holistic’ approach to operational improvement; management control needs to effective, the operational activities need to be optimised and organisations need to encourage the behaviours that underpin shared objectives, best practice and collaboration.

Our work encompasses all three aspects of operational improvement. We help teams implement effective management control, develop improved processes and in particular, build the behaviours/culture that support motivated, innovative and effective organisations.