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Paul Anderson - AMS Associate | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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aba anderson business administration“Your partner in improving your business” aba, and its principal Dr Paul Anderson, is a boutique business improvement consultancy blending a passion for business creativity with a mischievous capacity for critical thinking. aba applies fresh and original thinking to a client’s pressing leadership and management concerns, motivated by the desire to make a difference for the client and to make money. Dr Anderson works with business owners, CEO’s and their Executive Management Team. “If you always do what you always did, you’ll always get what you always got!” Anon About abaIntroduction aba’s consulting focus blends a unique mix of creative and critical business thinking supported by The Management Practice’s (TMP) Action Management System (AMS) business improvement software tool:
aba uses the AMS framework as a launching pad and works with clients to:
Having documented the reference business system, aba works with senior management and staff to constructively challenge old assumptions, theories and practices with the goal of uncovering and exploring previously unimagined commercial possibilities for the client. Leadership & Management Philosophy A key tenet of aba’s consulting philosophy is that ‘trust in the workplace ultimately costs less in the long run’. Dr Anderson sees the AMS framework as a tool to practice that philosophy. AMS is a pragmatic tool to encourage and empower employees to make better operational decisions, leading in the long run to increased revenue and reduced costs for the owners. This is achieved through sharing knowledge with employees about key actions of the business, and how their work habits and choices impact results. It is argued that employees will reward the greater level of respect and trust shown, with the extraordinary performance needed for the business to prosper in uncertain times. A fully implemented AMS creates a single business wide structured view of all actions and becomes a reference point for all staff. Possessing a ‘business-on-a-page’ and their job 5x5, all staff will understand that their personal performance is an integral part of the big picture and that their performance does make a difference. Management can expect to see staff more appreciative, aware and sensitive of their role and less preoccupied with demarcation and rigidity. The following table encapsulates aba’s conceptual argument (Whiteley et al, 2005):
The hierarchy is deliberate moving down from the conceptual to the practical. AMS is a practical tool for ‘extraordinary’ leaders who believe in the value of releasing and nurturing human ‘spirit’ in the workplace. The table, its contents and associated comments on tight and loosely coupled systems is elaborated on in the section on transparency. Range of Services aba does not offer standard off-the-shelf solutions. Each client and assignment is unique. aba does recommend and will lever off an Action Management System implementation. An AMS installation creates a knowledge platform opening the door to serious performance and business improvement. Proposals can assist a client with a whole-of-business improvement process or just part of, and cover:
As well ABA has a number of unique tools - grounded in AMS - covering:
Ethics aba operates with only the highest ethical and professional standards and will never compromise on integrity. This means that you can rely on aba to deliver what we say we will and not to take on any assignments where a conflict of interest may occur. CredentialsDr Anderson has extensive experience in the development and implementation of a variety of innovative business improvement ideas across a range of administrative functions, businesses and industries (see detailed career profile later). His experience also extends to having carried out original academic research in the area of business modeling and strategic alignment. Other Accreditations Dr Anderson is accredited with Cognitive Edge www.cognitve-edge.com including certain complexity and storytelling tools such as ‘Future Backwards’. The Power of Transparency: Issues of Trust, Respect, Control andLoosely Coupled SystemsTransparency Transparency in the workplace is increasingly seen as an effective management style in complex dynamic work settings. It is logical that staff working closely with the customer or in strategically important roles should have a more than basic appreciation of the dynamics of the business and how their work impacts short and longer term results. Training, education and immediate on-line access to business and job based knowledge about the business provide such a foundation. The AMS is a tool to create a transparent workplace. AMS achieves transparency as follows: • core strategic functions are documented creating one business wide structured view of the business depicted as follows:
• the key actions beneath each core function are then mapped including performance expectations, forming the business “DNA” 5x5x5. Actions are then risk assessed as depicted below:
• job 5x5 roles and tasks, responsibilities and accountabilities for specific business actions are linked to the business DNA
Fundamentally, the AMS framework facilitates business improvement by engineering transparency across day-to-day business operations. The process is called ‘structuring the business’. The business 5x5x5 and Job 5x5’s modules capture that structure. Further transparency is achieved linking business dna and 5x5’s to an on-line knowledge directory of ‘how to’. An incident management module is added to track and resolve underperformance. A business improvement audit and associated project management feature are available (see below) enabling further critical and creative thinking directed at continuous improvement.
The task begins with the business owner or CEO transferring to paper their vision of the business, what has to be done and how well they want it done. The steps in that process are as follows:
Making core business actions transparent to all staff, at the business and individual level, introduces a new and effective way of developing teamwork and making staff more fully aware of the importance of getting it right. Everyone should be singing from the same sheet of music. Loosely Coupled Systems Having documented the three systems – processes (Business DNA 5x5x5), people (Job 5x5) and knowledge database - management’s challenge is to ‘couple’ the systems in the most effective way to encourage continuous improvement to heritage systems. The AMS book cover depicts the idea
The AMS framework builds a detailed strategic blueprint which on reflection appears to ‘tightly couple’ actions, results and accountability, potentially dampening performance improvement initiatives. Tight coupling systems operate best where there is certainty in the environment and clear agreement on the how work is to be performed. Change is usually slow and incremental. However, as uncertainty grows in the industry setting and environment, agreement on actions and how work should be performed can change quickly, driven by the requirements of the marketplace. In such complex adaptive contexts, management should pursue ‘loose coupling’ where flexibility and adaptability - the capacity to accelerate performance improvement in a systematic way – is highly valued. Built into the AMS framework are the tools to achieve such ‘controlled revolutions’ - the Improvement Audit and Incident Investigation modules. Both are used to record and interrogate quality incidents and identify improvements to the DNA and 5x5 sub-systems. Importantly, the output from improvements audits are linked back to the Business 5x5x5 using a proper change management process. In summary, AMS builds and tightly couples the business blueprint (Business DNA & Job 5x5) and goes one step further. As customer expectations morph and there is less agreement on how work should be performed, AMS encourages staff to redefine best practice. The logic is depicted below (adapted from Napoli et al, 2005):
aba’s Serviceaba’s unique services provide innovative solutions and ideas for clients based on the following model.
The Creative component generates new and unexpected ideas, with obvious applications in areas such as operations management, business improvement, strategic planning, marketing planning, etc. Meanwhile, the closely related Critical Thinking component typically takes an existing proposal or situation and asks “what if …?” This approach has strong applications in reviewing strategies, risk management, improvement audits and incident investigation. Combining these two dimensions can provide powerful advantages and benefits in a broad range of consulting situations. The Creative and Critical Thinking service components, together with the range of Tools principally the Action Management System, provides aba with a portfolio of three interlinked offerings. AMS is the bedrock of aba’s management toolkit enabling the creative and critical thinking services.
Management Tools (Including but not limited to)
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Paul Anderson |
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