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Friday 13th November 00:10 (UK)
Friday, May 9th, 2014
Alastair Ross will be speaking on law firm differentiation at a LexisNexis webinar on 6th June 2014 from 12.30-1.30pm. He will be discussing the use of innovation and re-engineering approaches to enable firms to develop new offerings and price competitiveness. For more information and to register, go to:
Monday, May 13th, 2013
Process mapping has been around for many years – indeed it has been part of Work Study activities in industrial businesses for a good 50 years. The emergence of Lean thinking in the West in the mid 1980s created a resurgence of interest with the focus on ‘Value Stream Mapping’ to identify and eliminate waste activities as part of a Lean transformation. The ability of process mapping to draw a clear picture of how a complex series of tasks (such as the process from receipt of an order through manufacturing to delivery of a product) is performed has proven to be very powerful. Process mapping achieves the following:
Mapping professional services
But process mapping had little use or impact in Professional Service firms until comparatively recently. Why is this? Simply because process thinking is not applied in most professional service firms. The culture in professional service firms is practitioner-focused and typically does not see the service provided as ‘a process’. However this is changing due to increasing competitive pressures over the last 5 years. Firms are under increasing financial pressures driven by price-focused clients and alternative providers (some enabled by deregulation as in the UK legal market; some by the internet and others by globalisation). They are having to improve their efficiency – ‘doing more with less’.
‘Doing more with less’ has often been a synonym for redundancies rather than any systematic approach to improve efficiency. Indeed an unstructured approach to redundancies in a service organization can backfire with service quality being impacted and professional morale lowered.
Process mapping makes the invisible, visible
A first powerful step to improving efficiency is looking at how work is performed today and to determine what improvements in efficiency could be made. This is the so-called ‘AS-IS’ phase of a re-engineering programme. In our re-engineering work with major UK professional service firms, the process mapping stage is a key element in giving a shared view of how things are done today. This is especially important in a professional service environment as the process (be it a client service or a back-office activity such as client inception or billing) is not immediately visible. In a factory a process can be viewed by simply walking across the shop-floor. However a tour through a law, accounting or consulting firm’s offices will not unearth much evidence of processes among the employees, desks, computers and (usually) lots of paper. Process mapping makes the ‘invisible’ processes in professional service firms visible. Once processes are visible they can be analysed and improved. So mapping is a key foundation for improvement.
Keep it simple
Effective process mapping is performed collaboratively using paper and pen – rather than computer – as this enables easy collaboration. Effective mapping requires the involvement of representatives of those personnel who perform the process/service being mapped. The objective of the ‘AS-IS’ mapping is to capture the process as it is actually performed today. In a service environment it is important to identify key tasks, who performs them and the amount of chargeable and elapsed time consumed. It is also important to include those routinely performed activities which represent waste – such as delays, reviews, corrections, duplication and different methods used by teams and offices. Once the paper-based model has been completed, it can be captured by digital photo or better still converted into a software-based model using a tool such as Microsoft Visio – this enables easier modification, distribution, review and archive.
Realising the value from your process maps
Process maps have little value unless they are put to work to support improvement activities – such as a Re-engineering or Lean programme. Ways of using process maps in your improvement activities include:
Mapping brings real benefits
We have used process mapping with a number of professional service firms covering processes such as: Bid to Bill, Client Inception, Matter Management, Probate, Commercial Property Purchase, Insurance Claims, Inquests, Employment Tribunals and Commercial Due Diligence. This mapping has been a key foundation for a re-engineering or Lean programme. These programmes have delivered the following benefits:
Process mapping is a powerful tool for business improvement and professional service firms need to add it to their improvement capabilities.
For further information on how you could use process mapping or re-engineering within your firm contact us at www.codexx.com
Friday, January 4th, 2013
Goodbye 2012. Hello 2013.
A New Year represents renewal and the chance for a fresh start. Many of us will take the opportunity to make resolutions of personal improvement – to become fitter, get thinner and be better in some aspect of our lives. Some of us will even deliver on those resolutions too…
So what resolutions might you make in your own business? New Year resolutions for business? And why not? The start of a new year offers the opportunity to look at your business afresh, to start new initiatives and to retire old ones. All seems possible with the whole year ahead. In this spirit I offer three ‘2013 Business Resolutions’ that you could make that would stimulate and challenge you in the grey days of early January and if followed through would make major improvements in your business – with little investment other than time (and the courage to make change):
1. I will encourage more ‘crazy ideas’ within our business.
Crazy ideas? At a time of austerity do we really have time for such things, you might ask. Shouldn’t we be focusing on more grounded matters such as efficiency improvements and cost reduction – not on fuzzy, nebulous stuff like this? The simple answer is that you need to do both (more on efficiency later). ‘More of the same’ can only go so far. As Edward de Bono, the father of lateral thinking said, “You can’t dig a new well by digging the same hole deeper.” Truly getting ahead means doing something different.
To increase your differentiation from your rivals you need to create radical ‘do different’ products, services or ways of working. Only by allowing time and space for your employees to ‘think outside of the box’ are you likely to get some ideas that are truly revolutionary. Create the right conditions for this with space and time for innovation, clear management support and direction-setting together with a recognition and reward structure. Google’s well known ‘20% of time available for personal projects’ for its engineers has been a key element of its success in innovation. Separate out ‘ideation’ from implementation. Allowing space for ‘crazy’ ideas without the immediate application of rigid evaluation criteria allows opportunity for ‘crazy’ ideas to evolve into radical but nonetheless feasible business ideas. ‘Get crazy, get real’ is the approach to follow. Establish a simple process with some seed funding to enable controlled experimentation and prototyping of ideas. Then take the most promising ideas forward.
By the way, this doesn’t mean that ‘do better’ innovation such as incremental improvement is any less important to your business. This is the core of business innovation, accounting for 99%+ of improvements and needs to continue and indeed accelerate in these challenging times. But a business that is effective at innovation will operate a balanced portfolio of innovation activity including some radical/risky/’crazy’ projects as well as the more ‘sure’ projects.
“To have a great idea, have a lot of them.”
Thomas Edison
2. I will pick three key customers and go and give them a good listening to.
You might think you do this already – but are you simply telling them about your products/service offerings and listening to them within the confines of your existing offerings? To truly listen to them, try and stand in their shoes and understand their key business issues. Work to truly appreciate their underlying challenges which may be so accepted by them that they are not questioned and may not even be recognised. You can then determine their root cause limitations to their business. Then you can investigate how you could potentially reconceive the service you provide to them (or at least greatly improve it) to help them address their limitations and thus increase the value you provide to them.
In my work with professional service clients, I have found that the all-pervading ‘client satisfaction’ survey is almost a barrier to true client improvement. These surveys offer little insight on real client problems and give little value to clients. This is because they do not seek to understand the client’s business, but only the client’s view of the effectiveness of your service transaction. I have found it much more useful for Partners and Executives to meet with clients and talk specifics – about their business. Clients will always be pleased to talk about their business – if they know you are truly listening.
At the very least you will improve your working relationship with your client in working this way. You will also stand apart from your rivals who are stuck in the traditional ‘broadcast selling’ mode of doing business….
“All the innovations that have powered the company’s success have come from listening
to its customers and watching how their lives are changing.”
Terry Leahy, ex-CEO Tesco
3. I will identify opportunities for dramatically improving efficiency in one of our key services.
And by ‘dramatic’ I don’t mean five or ten percent improvement. I mean twenty five to fifty percent improvement. This is the level of cost reduction that can be achieved by radical re-engineering (I have seen this myself with many clients) – where you take a clinical look at your processes and services to dramatically reduce waste and increase value. From my experience over the last 20 years working with clients in service and industrial sectors, most businesses operate with inefficient processes for delivering services to clients or for supporting employees. In good times such waste is tolerated and then simply accepted.
There is a vast amount of waste in today’s businesses – despite all the investment in IT and other technology. Waste exists in unnecessary process steps, in time spent in inspection, checking and rework, in delays, in unnecessary variation, in ineffective technology systems and in performing work with over-skilled employees.
Lean thinking is highly effective in identifying and reducing such waste – if it is utilised. Business Process Re-engineering can drive dramatic improvements through process redesign. These are not new techniques. The foundations of Lean thinking originated over 60 years ago and re-engineering is nearly 20 years old. These are well proven improvement methods. So why do so many businesses operate with so much inefficiency? What are the barriers that stop these techniques being effectively employed to tackle this mountain of waste?
Lethargy could be one explanation. But really it is Fear.
Fear of change. Most importantly fear of leading change. Someone is needed to stand up and take the lead. To champion change. To challenge existing methods, to encourage others to participate in the programme of change, to apply the tools and then to persist in making the required changes in ways of working. And most importantly to simply start. Pick a business process or a service that is important and clearly needs improvement. Put a team together – with people who know the process, with people who are change-leaders, with users or customers served by the process. Help them apply the core techniques of Lean and re-engineering. And truly persist. For change always takes longer than you expect. Then use the results of improvement to engage others and your now-experienced team and start on other processes. But that is for next year.
But for this year, focus on just one process. And just start.
Read in December 2013:
So, what happened? Did you make your resolutions? Did you work to realise them? Did you successfully engage others in achieving them? Can you see the benefits? Perhaps you did not achieve as much as you would have liked. But did you achieve more than if you had done nothing? You should celebrate successes. But a good motto for leading change is “To be pleased, but not satisfied.” There is always more that can be done. Time to make your resolutions for 2014…..
“All life is an experiment. The more experiments you make the better.”
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Friday, October 5th, 2012
Standardisation has a bad name in the professional service community. It is seen as another name for ‘commoditisation’: the de-skilling, devaluing and ultimately the de-profitisation of services. So it is typically a four letter word in a law firm, accountancy or consultancy seeking to provide high-value services. But is standardisation really such a bad thing?
Standardisation certainly shatters the work paradigm in place at most professional service firms, where the individual ‘craft’ approach to work is applied. Experienced (and highly paid) professionals deliver services such as due-diligence, audit and business improvement using methods which are typically highly individualised. From a client perspective, professional excellence is of course valued. But inconsistency in service delivery between offices and between partners is not helpful. And in today’s tough economic times, high prices have to be justified.
I would contend that standardisation is actually a key stepping stone to raising service value. On the surface this seems counter-intuitive. But bear with me. Many professional services are repetitive in nature – e.g. commercial due diligence, audit, probate and are simply tailored for the client. Others have significant repetitive work elements in them – e.g. ‘discovery’ in litigation, ‘data gathering’ in management consulting projects. Repetitive work is is the rich soil in which standardisation can flourish. By codifying and standardising repetitive elements of work, it can then be effectively performed by a less skilled person (e.g. a paralegal or administrator). Of course this has benefits in reducing service cost – aiding service firms as they seek to respond to severe price-down pressures from clients. And of course it then frees up the most valuable (and expensive) employees to work on more complex (and profitable) activities for the firm – raising protitability. But it also has major benefits in two areas of service innovation:
1. It frees up the time for high value employees to spend on innovation – to enhance existing services and develop new services to add more value to clients and differentiate their firm from rivals. Service firms are waking up to the need to become more innovative, but are challenged in finding the available time from their fee earners.
2. Standardisation of a service (or service element) is the first step to enabling effective continuous improvement of that service using Lean techniques (which are increasingly on the agenda of professional service firms).
So standardisation is not a word that should be feared by service firms. It is simply one of the key methods which firms need to embrace as they streamline themselves for the emerging new era of highly competitive, deregulated, globalised and internet-enabled professional services.
Alastair Ross
Director
Codexx Associates Ltd
Friday, December 23rd, 2011
How can law firms respond to increasingly tough business environment, deregulation and the march of internet-enabled business models?
We advocate the application of ‘Smarter Working’ – an approach that embraces re-engineering and innovation to address both value and cost. Codexx has been applying Smarter Working methods with major UK law firms since 2005.
To help change leaders understand this we have just produced this short video ‘Smarter Working – helping law firms find their mojo’:
Wednesday, December 9th, 2009
Lean manufacturing techniques enable companies to dramatically improve their customer service, reduce their costs and improve their quality. The origins of Lean Manufacturing are over 50 years old, Toyota first started developing the new thinking and methods that became Lean in the 1950s. Toyota has used Lean to help it become the largest automotive company in the world, overtaking Ford and GM in the process. (more…)
Friday, June 27th, 2008
Codexx is pleased to announce that Grundfos A/S, the world leading pump manufacturer, has achieved a World Class level of manufacturing practices in its Danish factories according to the PROBE model. Alastair Ross, Director of Codexx, who led the recent benchmarking assessment at Grundfos said: “I have led regular best practice benchmarking assessments, at Grundfos since 1996 and have witnessed first-hand the major improvement effort and results achieved by their people. Their focus and sustained resourcing of improvement activities should be a lesson to all manufacturers. It has been a pleasure to work with Grundfos and apply methods such as benchmarking, world class manufacturing and Lean, to gain measureable and major improvement.” Grundfos A/S won the EFQM award in 2006 and continues to drive improvements across its manufacturing operations.
Energizing Change
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