As the year draws to a close, it is good to reflect on the past year and in doing so, it is clear that the business landscape continues to adjust and re-adjust to the new economies of 2010 and beyond. During September this year Michélle attended the TenStep Global Conference in Stockholm, Sweden, and in October Michélle and Annelize attended the Women’s Forum for the Economy and Society in Deauville, France. These conferences highlighted the need to do more, better, at less cost and with higher value to customers.

For Pétanque these new economies make our portfolio of services more relevant than ever before. To this effect our guest writer, Gina Abudi, underscores the importance of using project management to deliver value, and how, in so doing, a project focusing on process improvement, could bring about optimal benefit.

Project Management Approach for Business Process Improvement

Gina Abudi, MBA

Overview
Business process improvement initiatives are frequently key projects within an organization – regardless of the size of the organization or, frankly, the size of the business process improvement initiative. Even if a business process improvement initiative is targeted at an individual department, the impact of the change will be organization-wide. By ensuring that the initiative is managed as a strategic project, there are increased opportunities for success.

Process improvement initiatives are continuous. As organizations grow, they need to continuously analyze and refine their processes to ensure they are doing business as effectively and efficiently as possible. Fine-tuning processes gives an organization a competitive advantage in a global marketplace.

Process improvement is a strategy and a tool to help an organization meet its long term goals and objectives. One key goal for all organizations is to meet the demands of their clients – both internal and external. Clients’ needs change – whether due to economic factors, new product introductions, mergers or acquisitions, expansion or contraction. Continuously reviewing processes for potential improvements and efficiencies enables companies to adapt effectively to their clients’ changing needs.

Sometimes improving one process may inadvertently have an adverse affect on other processes. For example, let’s say a company changes its sales order processing. Once that process is improved, it becomes apparent that the improvement in that process has created a backlog in order fulfilment in the manufacturing department. A project management approach would address such issues as part of the risk planning, and the order fulfilment process would have been reviewed as an extension of the sales order process. Or, the initial project would have been assessed to determine if making changes to the sales order process would be beneficial to the company as a whole, given investments needed for other parts of the company.

Read more

Business Improvement 2.0

Justin Siljeur, B.Com (Hons)

I recently spent some time assisting a family run business in an effort to optimise their performance. Our discussions centred on removing inefficiencies as these often result in bottlenecks, and well, chaos. We focused on their challenges and difficulties and it soon became clear that many of these were related to process inefficiencies.

This illustrated a clear example of a low process-maturity level company. A low process- maturity level is characterised by processes that are:

• Ad hoc – they are improvised by staff and their managers, and
  
• Not rigorously defined, followed or enforced.
  

On the other hand, organisations with a high level of process-maturity have:

• Processes that are defined, documented and constantly improved;
  
• Process descriptions that are consistent with the way people work; and
  
• Ways of measuring various aspects of their product(s) and processes, and then making constructive use of these measurements.

In this article I have outlined the “4 critical steps” that must take place over the next few months in order to optimise performance, which, in turn, will also move them to a higher maturity level.

Read more

Business Improvement: A lifestyle

There has been so many requests for Business Improvement Projects lately. Whether it is a case of being in vogue, or whether it is the result of the recession, is not always easy to say. Be it as it may, these projects undoubtedly add value. Yet, the question remains: what is going to happen after the project is completed? Is the ‘now what’ or ‘so what?’ question always taken seriously?

Read more

Introducing a new member to our team

Suzan McCreadie, born and educated in the Netherlands, has joined Pétanque as Chief Communications Officer.

Read more  

VizSchool® Accreditation

In June 2008 Pétanque initiated a BootCamp Accreditation project. This was a key project as the success thereof would enable us to offer a SETA accredited training course in VizPro® / ProcessStep™. Now, a little over 2 years later, we are proud to announce that SETA has awarded us the status of Training Provider with Provisional SETA Accreditation.

Green

Carbon Footprint indicates the amount of gaseous emissions associated with human production or consumption activities that are generated by a person, or a group, within a period of time and that will have an impact on climate change. Each of us generates a Carbon Footprint daily, simply by living our lives. A footprint consists of two parts:

Read more

Offices

The Colosseum
Foyer 3, 1st Floor
Century Way
Century City
Cape Town
Tel: 0861 PTNQUE (786783)
(international: +27 21 5260473)

You can download the directions from our website.