Articles for business leaders

August 2004

Welcome to the 3rd Quarter issue of FAST News.
In our 3 Value adding articles this issue, we discuss..

the $ 3 Mil. business case for improved Meeting Productivity
an introduction to the 4 principles of the Balanced Scorecard, and
a case study on Core Business Process Improvement.

A precise' of articles is below. Just click on headings to Read More.
Hope you find something worthwhile, and until next quarter

Best wishes

David Pointon
Managing Director
DaPo Pty Ltd

Outline of Articles

1. Improve your Meeting Productivity; Plugging a $ 3 Mil Hole in Costs

I was pretty good at Maths at school, but I just can’t seem to make head or tail of these numbers. There seems to be a $ 3 Million loss occurring in most businesses, and this cost 'hole' does not show up on any Annual P & L.
What is the cost in question? It is the unrealised return from the $ 6 million dollars invested in meetings each year (for a 1000 person organisation)

Until now no-one has presented a business case for improvement.
Fortunately, 2 areas of low cost investment create immediate improvement in the ROI of business meetings. These will plug your $ 3 million hole and also add significant value through a meeting process that generates consistently high value adding outcomes.

2. Balanced Scorecard - Driving Formula 1 Strategy on all Four Cylinders

Driving strategic change in an organisation requires the focus and energy of a Formula 1 racing driver. It also requires the best engine.
One engine that can drive fast, effective strategy implementation is the Balanced Scorecard.

Yet for many leaders, a limited understanding of the scorecard leaves them aware of it’s potential benefits but unable to see or extract its full power.
Just as an F1 engine runs on four cylinders, the scorecard drives strategy implementation with four powerful principles.

Understanding and harnessing all four simultaneously is like fine tuning an engine to get maximum thrust. Without good strategic engineering, many leaders get limited traction with strategy implementation. Or users of scorecard conclude that the engine just doesn’t work.

3. FAST Track core business processes

Core business processes are the modern ‘chain gangs’ of organisations, responsible for delivering key customer outputs fast and efficiently. These can be likened to the old time railway chain gangs working fast to get the rail tracks laid, so that new trains could roll through on time.
Despite the vision of fast, clean, end to end technology driven processes nowadays, the reality is often far removed. Slow, error filled delivery continue to let customer's down and slow the core business engine. If our processes were about laying rail tracks, there would be plenty of derailments.

New methods of process re-design based on cross function collaboration, rapid knowledge sharing and FAST meeting tools can drive more robust and high performing FAST Track processes.