For leaders of existing organisations
Finding it hard to get things done?
You’ve fixed problem after problem and invested in new systems, yet new issues keep appearing. The business is getting harder to manage, and your people and your clients feel it. Instead of another patch, redesign how the parts fit together so the next fix is the last fix.
Does this sound familiar?
Does this sound familiar?
01
The same work gets checked, corrected and redone, and it uses up capacity without improving the result.
02
Decisions sit waiting between departments, because nobody owns the whole result from start to finish.
03
Customers and employees fall into the gaps between departments, even when each department is hitting its own targets.
04
Costs keep creeping up: more management, more technology, more controls, more coordination.
05
A major investment in a new system hasn’t delivered what was promised.
06
Growth is making all of it worse, not better.
In the organisations Alex has worked with, a large share of people’s time goes on working around complexity, chasing, checking and correcting, rather than on the work itself. Removing it has typically delivered improvements of 30–40%.
Why the fixes don’t stick
Why fixing problems one at a time doesn’t work
The problems are connected. Fix one part in isolation and the pressure moves somewhere else.
Many organisational problems arise not because expertise is missing, but because the right expertise enters decisions at different times. Alex calls this accumulating cost of how work really gets done operational debt.
Make the next fix the last fix.
The better way
Understand the business as it really works. Define what it genuinely needs to accomplish. Then decide which structures, processes, technologies and roles should be kept, redesigned or replaced. Redesign it right, once, instead of patching it again.
The question at the centre of it: “Who needs to make this decision together, and what information do they need to make it well?”
Results
Proven in more than seventy organisations.
Alex has led improvement programmes at more than seventy organisations across many sectors and sizes, typically delivering 30–40% improvements in operational performance.
Who you’ll be working with
Experience from the inside.
Alex has held senior executive roles at Ericsson, Dell and Eircom, and has advised leadership teams across technology, healthcare, government and financial services.
At Eircom, Ireland’s national telecommunications company, he cut software testing costs by 30%, maintenance and support costs by 25% and desktop support costs by 35%, then led operational excellence across 4,500 staff as Director of Business Excellence.
He is a certified Lean Six Sigma Master Black Belt and completed MIT Sloan’s executive programme in Business Dynamics.
Further reading
Who Designed Your Organisation?
Who Designed Your Organisation? shows how founders and established organisations can reduce operational debt, improve execution and build the strength to grow.
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