Breakthrough Approach – Getting Input

Often people want and know what kind of improvements are needed to improve a part of the operation.  By creating teams with the authority to make changes, amazing results can be achieved.  Why don’t we listen to the people who do the work?  Often we are too busy t

Harvey Saying #12 – Keep It Simple

In the system business and consulting we have a great tendency to talk in jargon and acronyms.  Harvey really encouraged us all to avoid jargon and abbreviations.  In the systems business, many words mean different things depending on you point of view.  Thus using a pa

Breakthrough Criteria – Resources Available

Another important criterion for the breakthrough approach is that the resources, including money, people and technology be available.  This means that you have the money and the people and the approvals already in hand to do the project.  Without these items being in place,

Purpose of My Contributions

Recently I noticed a comment asking about the purposes of the Blogs on the Project X site.  As far as my contributions are concerned, I want to share some of our experinces in the consulting business and demonstrate some of the philosophy of Project X.  I like to think that

Gellman Hayward Get Together

The get together of GHP people and friends of GHP will be held on June 15th from 5:30 to 8 PM at Smokey Joes Cafe at 4899 Yonge Street on the patio if the weather is nice, inside if inclement.  Please let others know that you know.  I do not have a complete list. We will hav

Harvey Saying #11 – Operational Responsibility

You may think by now Harvey walked on water.  However that was far from the truth.   One thing Harvey didn’t take much interest in was operations.  Running the day to day activity was not his strength.  The way he dealt with this was to find others who t

Breakthrough Criteria – Benefit

One of the key criteria for a Breakthrough Project is that it delivers bottom-line benefit.  I have often found this challenging to achieve within the time constraint of ten to twelve weeks.  Often we can make real progress on a project but bottom-line benefit is harder.&nbs

Harvey Saying #10 – Keeping in Touch

One of the challenges we all have is keeping in touch with our netwark of associates.  I have always found it a challenge.  Harvey had many neat way of keeping in touch.  One was if he read an article that he thought some of his contacts would like to see he would mail

Consultant Effectiveness

Many years ago, I read an article Advice to Internal & External Consultants: Expand Your Client’s Capacity to Use Your Help, Robert H. Schaffer, Advanced Management Journal, Autumn 1976. Early in the article Bob talks about how much potential is lost to make business perform bette

Readiness Factors – Management Demands

A key factor in determining readiness of a person to change is the demands that management place on the person.  If the expectations of management are not clear or unfocused the readiness will likely be low.  An example is if a person in the accounting department is expected