Tag Archives: Nigel Slack

233 – My experience of management thinking in local government – Part 1: The formative years.

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1000 words  (9 minutes reading time)                                      by Lancing Farrell

management experience pt 1

I was talking to a colleague recently, and I was asked about the management thinkers that have influenced me. It started me thinking back to my early days as a manager in my mid-20s and later when I completed a MBA in my mid-30s. And the lessons I had from starting and then managing my own business for a decade. Many management thinkers influenced me, and, equally, so did my opportunities to practice different ways of managing. This is quite a long essay, so I have split it into three parts.

I recall that before I was a manager, I had an interest in management. I wasn’t too sure what it was but I had read The Peter Principle as a student, and I knew that management was important in organisations if they were to be effective. For some reason I also remember that someone at the council where I started working was talking about Value Management. Now I know that they had obviously been to a course. Then I got a job as a manager. Continue reading →

132 – ‘A new theory of value creation for local government’. Do we need one? Part 3 – operations strategy.

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Posted by Lancing Farrell

Slack operations strategy

Image from Operations Management, 6th Edition, Slack, Chambers and Johnston.

In this third post in this series, I look at the concept of the operations strategy. Every organisation has one. Your organisation does, but do you know why or what it is? And how does it relate to the business model?

This series of posts is intended to make the case that local government needs a theory of value creation – a clear explanation of what local government does to create public value. That theory will require a reappraisal of the operations strategy and the role that operational capability can play in supporting the business model and strategy execution.

Hayes and Wheelwright describe operations strategy as guiding decisions about vertical integration (i.e. the extent to which the council owns the value chain), capacity planning (i.e. how variation in demands will be met), facilities planning (i.e. the facilities needed to deliver services), services technologies (e.g. information systems) and process technologies (e.g. batch or make-to-order).

The academics Nigel Slack, Stuart Chambers and Robert Johnston in their text Operations Management talk about strategy and the connection to operations Continue reading →

107 – Separate, relate and integrate. Redesign operations to meet services demands.

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Posted by Lancing Farrell                                                                              570 words

good cheap fast

Some basic tools are needed to redesign operations to improve performance. Many people charged with responsibility for managing services have limited skills in how to redesign and improve them. Here is a simple and effective approach – just separate, relate and integrate.

The separate bit is about understanding the different demands being placed on the system. Usually, a performance problem is masked by a mess of different demands that have been mixed in one or two delivery processes. The important characteristics of services demand are the expectations of people creating the demand and how the demand is presented. It is essential to separate each type of demand according to its performance objectives and characteristics. Continue reading →

105 – Some characteristics of services demands that are important.

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Posted by Lancing Farrell                                                              1100 words

operations typology 2

Image from Operations Management, 1998.

Some time ago I posted on high performance job design using four characteristics or spans; control, accountability, influence and support. At the time I linked the concept to the operations typology describing four characteristics of design of operations for high performance. This post picks up that discussion to look at the characteristics of demands that it is essential to understand if you want to design and manage your operations for high performance or excellence in local government.

A number of recent books on public sector management have discussed demands and how it is essential to understand them in public services because payment is not made at the time of service consumption and, therefore, price does not directly influence the amount and nature of demands placed on the system.

In his Vanguard Method John Seddon describes the importance of fulfilling purpose if failure demand is to be avoided. He also talks about understanding flow in relation to how work enters a system. Both of these ideas relate to demands. If purpose (i.e. the value sought by someone or their demand on the system) is not correctly understood the work system will not meet their need. They will come back.

Mark H. Moore includes operational capacity in his ‘strategic triangle’ concept linking decisions from the authorising environment to the public value provided. An organisation must have the operating capacity (or capability as Moore describes it in his earlier book Creating Public Value) to deliver on the political commitment to create particular public value. Continue reading →