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Fi’s desk
When I got back to my team, Fiona, Dave and Suzy were in. Fiona however was running around frantically trying to organise herself.
I tried to sound chirpy; “Morning team! Trust you all had a good weekend.”
“Are you sitting at my desk Gordon?” Fiona liked order. Perhaps being that bit older, she was more set in her ways; she liked what worked for her and tried to keep it that way.
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Key “Theory of Constraints” concepts:
Maximising Throughput
Elevate the constraint
Dangers of expediting and reprioritising
STOP EXPEDITING! I hear you asking “how can I possibly stop expediting or re-prioritising. I do it every day. How else would I get to my to-do list?”
Most of us will have been on time-management courses where we learn the importance of prioritisation, to-do lists and being extremely organised. Reading “The Goal” it becomes abundantly clear that there are limitations to doing this. Think of your workday as a process with tasks coming in, you dealing with them, and providing the service to the customer. If you use the Theory of Constraints, then terms such as bottlenecks and Herbies are great ways to understand what is really going on.
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Category : Uncategorized
New contract for a bank, creating the Outcome Ones and printing (R)evolutionary all have kept me pretty busy in May. Hope you find the latest release from “Breaking the Bottleneck” useful. Smiles.
“If you want “real” performance you reach it by many, many little improvements everywhere. This is one philosophy. There is another one…the silver bullet”
Dr Eli Goldratt1
The “Theory of Constraints” is put forward as that silver bullet: the identification and elevation of the biggest constraint a company has. In doing so, it purports to point out why many organisations fail to achieve the expected results through more incremental quality or continuous improvement processes. Whilst elements of the Theory may complement Cost Accounting, Total Quality Management, Activity Based Costing or Just In Time processes, it is very much based on the belief that if you identify the key issue, the seemingly impossible becomes possible:
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Category : Uncategorized
Got my first comment today. Alas it was spam. Get a life. User and comments are filtered and spam is removed.
11th February 2008, Monday morning meeting 8:20 a.m.
“Morning Andy”, I enthused. “How was your trip to the States?”
“Morning Gordon. We’ll cover that in a moment. How was your weekend? Ready for all those unexpected challenges?” Andy strode across the room, his energy and stature belied his years – he must be due for retirement in a few years, but probably wouldn’t – lots of good years left! I responded to his light hearted question.
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Category : Feeling stuff, General feeling
Normally, I awake to the noise of the very first international flights lining up between 4 and 5am over SE London, some 20 miles from Heathrow. Today I awoke to the sunshine instead. 
I’m sure that when we’re on a plane we are all too excited about where we are going or coming back to that we don’t consider the noise polluton we contribute to. At least for a few days, the millions of people under the flight path will have sounder sleeps and cleaner air, and the roads around the airports are quiet.
It’s also an ideal day or two to sell an airport-affected house, which is exactly what my parents are doing, having put their place on the market 3 days ago….
Category : Book notes, Thinking stuff
Some notes on “One up on Wall Street”, by Peter Lynch