Beating the credit crunch with improvement and innovation

Market and Knowledge Newsletter August 2008 The onesixsigma.com Market Newsletter for the Six Sigma and Lean Professional

Welcome to the onesixsigma.com Knowledge newsletter for August.

Whilst we continue to be pummelled with news of how the credit crunch is heading towards a full-blown recession in the US, improvement programmes will come under more and more pressure from the beady eye of auditors and cost controllers. It is therefore one of the most important things for all practitioners and leaders to ensure that their programme is on-course, healthy and the best it can be.

Training is an intrinsic part of both personal development and the maintaining the health of an improvement and innovation programme. Whether it be creating, complimenting or improving a skillset, increasing awareness or providing the tools for the organisation, it all comes down to transposing knowledge into the workforce to improve productivity.

These facts aren’t restricted to the improvement and innovation industries of course. According to a survey of more than 79,000 employers by the Learning and Skills Council, a record £38.6bn was spent on training in the UK last year; an increase of 16 per cent compared with two years earlier. Over two thirds of the country’s businesses spent a combined total of 218 million days training their workforces, spending an average per employee of £1,750 in 2007.

That’s an awful lot of time and money. It seems within the business improvement sectors , however, that the focus tends to be on increasing the individual’s skillset. Whilst this is undoubtedly important, it invariably does not take into account the practitioner’s organisation: where it is in the journey, and what its’ needs are. Training courses aimed at driving successful deployment programmes are relatively thin on the ground compared to the wealth of Belt-training opportunities.

Just as likely to come under pressure during these tough economic times are innovation programmes. The International Monetary Fund has warned against stifling innovation and therefore making “the credit crunch worse”. Training plays just as important a part in creating and maintaining an innovative culture; it is more than giving people room to be creative, just as training Black Belts is more than providing a toolset. It is about assessing and aligning the organisation’s health and strategy so that both improvement and innovation is intrinsic.

As ever, we will be publishing articles in the next few weeks to support your programmes, as well as continuing to update our training calendar, and thus giving you the information, tools and opportunity to beat the crunch!

Recent articles you may have missed:

"We’ve driven some quite spectacular improvements" - interview with Peter Evans of Virgin Media - http://www.onesixsigma.com/node/8993 Doctor’s orders for Six Sigma excellence - http://www.onesixsigma.com/node/9126 Lost in translation: how Lean is being condemned in public services - http://www.onesixsigma.com/node/8972 Harness the power of Lean Six Sigma - http://www.onesixsigma.com/node/9125

As ever, if you would like to share your knowledge, stories, success, opinions or anything else in the world of improvement and innovation, then please feel free to get in touch. We're always looking for people to interview, articles to publish, programmes and companies to profile and case study. I can be contacted by using the "Contact Us" link at the top right of the onesixsigma.com homepage. I look forward to hearing from you.

Best regards

Matthew Moore

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Beating the credit crunch with improvement and innovation