Insights

Background Work teams or front-line teams (to distinguish them from project teams) are responsible for executing the day-to-day transactions of the organisation and are usually found at the lowest level…

Why is it that many newly appointed Team Leaders and Mid Level Managers receive little formal training in the hard skills of effective and efficient resource management, either before or…

For those of us who have worked in the manufacturing and industrial sectors, the question posed in the headline would seem strange if not bizarre. Managers in those sectors take…

Most Service and Knowledge-Work Organisations are Pre-Lean and by that I mean, the core skills and disciplines of Operations Management, the operations management fundamentals, are weak or absent. This weakness…

Sometime back, while working with the Resource Teams in a large Information Technology  client, a dispute arose amongst the resource team leaders, around how well the Project Management Office (PMO)…

Measuring and Improving Service Productivity There’s a generally held view in the research literature that improving service productivity is a challenging if not elusive goal, in the main due to…

McLaw & Associates and Xpertivity Limited were both founded by Alex McDonnell and Paula Lawton. Paula and Alex have now brought both companies together under the Xpertivity brand with the…

There’s been a lot of feedback on my earlier post on Ryanair supporting the post but also pointing out the great things that Ryanair has achieved for society such as…

Ryanair is Europe’s largest airline and is probably the first modern day organisation to build a successful business model based on despising its customers, its people and its suppliers. It…

In Ireland, where I come from, we have a tradition of folklore, mystery, tall tales, “sayings” and proverbs that cover every possible life situation, one of which is “whistling past…