Article Archive

It is my firm belief that public services can be at the cutting edge of digital developments. In a previous blogs I eulogised about the savings in both customer time and actual cost that came from the Passport Office sharing digital information with the DVLA.  Yet despite so much excellent...

Entropy. “The inexorable tendency of the universe and any isolated system in it, to slide toward a state of increasing disorder.” When I work with organisations to bring about service improvement, I often fight against entropy. The size of the company, the number of years in service and changing messages from the top all collide...

It appears that innovation, while far from a new concept, is now the hotly sought after ‘ingredient’ that organisations are desperate to harness, adopt, nurture and grow. I have been immersed in lean thinking since 2005, and a couple of years ago I had a revelation about one of the...

Last year, Cardiff Business School launched its Public Value Business Strategy. It aims to be the first business school in the world to seek to deliver as much ‘social value’ as it does ‘economic’. This is a significant shift in focus for a business school to take; to seek responsibility to not only...

Is Lean Thinking Only Applicable to Manufacturing? Lean’s success has been tried, tested and proven in manufacturing and with the service industry constantly growing, many in the sector are also looking at whether or not the same principles can be applied with the same impact. Some are sceptical and argue that methodologies intended...