Tuesday 26 April 2011

Update on creating actions and following through

An update on my personal actions and creating a value tree.
Seems to be working well so far created a few events of true value through my own actions that have lead to new actions.
An advert I placed has worked and seem to have got a booking. This alone would pay for the advert so any more bookings is a bonus. Just have to work out if I would have got them anyway.
Weight loss/fitness training going well. Have introduced HIIT training (High Intensity Interval Training), lost some weight straight away then seem to put some back on. I have been told by a personal trainer this will be due to the body retaining water and glucagon following such a session and will take a few days for it to even out and drop this excess. Apparently this is your body's way of protecting itself following intense physical activity, incase it has to do it again.
Realised that some of my web sites didn't appear on the Bing or yahoo business directory's following a search on another subject. This was an accidental piece of value added from another action, but nevertheless still a valid point, I have added my web sites to both now and this may increase the chances of visitors and business. This was an easy action free of cost just time and it will hopefully bring money in. As Bing is getting more popular it is essential to make sure this search engine is also covered.
Another one of my actions was to create adapted CVs and covering letters per job I applied to in the future. This seem to be real working as had 3 interviews in the last 4 months in the previous 4 months zero interviews. I realised I would go to great lengths to sell business cases and justification in my job to my superiors, but wouldn't do the same when applying for a new job. I would just send a generic CV and cover letter in the hope they could some how pick out the potential and the good bits. As said previously thisnew adpated CV and cover letter has already lead my to a new job. Plus I had an interview last week for an even better job that was closer to home. The interview went well I did very well on the behaviour and competency questions as you image for someone into NLP. I was a bit rusty on the technical side, but tried to employ as much objection handling as possible. We shall see what happens next.
A few of my actions have lead to immediate dead ends. This isn't an issue in some cases they were just one off actions. In others they were investigation that hit a blank or no result which is good as recorded and I now know I can't create any value from these activites.
I shall carry on to see what happens next. I hope to see actions create actiosn creating value and more actions etc.

Tuesday 12 April 2011

Turnaround

Some great news for me today. I recently changed jobs at the end of December and took over two teams.
The teams where failing against their SLA and KPI targets. The latest stats through show both teams now in SLA.
1 team was only 10% off and the other about 25% off target before I took them on.
Managed to turn it around by doing the simple things, getting the basics right.
1) Set a clear remit of the team and the boundaries of interactions with other teams.
2) Defined the processes of team
3) Defined the daily tasks to ensure the work got done.
4) Set reports in motion to find root cause of the issues and trend analysis. This showed us where the issues lied in the team and how to address it. Could measure the success and un wrap the layers of problems one at a time to gain constant improvements.
5) Begin to gain trust by following through on the actions and feedback.
Have turned around the teams in 3 months. I have learnt what I could have done better. Next time it will only take 2 months!!!
My lessons are chase the i.t. quicker as a full month before I had any reports which is the foundations of measuring success and finding failure.
Listen more, people had raised issues that I didn't act upon as quickly as I could have, probably lost a couple of weeks.
Integrate quicker with peer managers.
Met team quicker. Unfortunately with it being late December and the snow this one was out of my control.
Overall happy.
Lots of other improvements still in the pipeline I wonder what the next 3 months will bring.

Monday 11 April 2011

I am BACK

I am back. I haven't posted for a long time, but have decided recently to start again.
 
What am I up to.
I have always been good at work in keeping alist of actions and ideas and following them up. I have drivena lot of benefit and value be simply following through and actioning these ideas.
 
However, I never do this in my outside work interests. I have decided to start an extra list around these outside work interests. As part of new lists I am tracking the value it creates and what it leads to. I had this idea of a tree type diagram showing how one idea creates another how the pathways of value are created. I am going to call it the "tree of value" or the "path of value". I will keep the blog update with how it works.