5 steps to business planning
Well, it’s that time of year again, the Christmas songs are out and I’m already out of Whamageddon, having heard that damn song “Last Christmas” on the very first day of December! All far too early for me! In the words of another famous singer, Mr Lennon, “Another year over and what have we done?” […]
SWOT analysis
The SWOT analysis is probably the archetypal marketing or business planning tool, the origins for which seem have been lost in the mists of time. Some credit an American business thinker, a guy called Albert Humphrey, who worked at the Stanford Research Institute (now SRI International) for its invention. However, whilst he developed other tools, […]
Porter analysis
When to use it Porter’s Five Forces Model is another well-known, top-level, battle-hardened, often deployed tool for analysing the external competitive environment a business faces, but whereas PESTEL works at the macro-environmental level (looking at the issues beyond the control of the company), Porter works at a level below that, where, very significantly, given the […]
PESTEL analysis
PESTEL analysis is probably one of the most well-known, top-level, battle-hardened and frequently deployed business planning tools – a great tool! PESTEL being an acronym for Political, Economic, Socio-cultural, Technological, Environmental and Legislation. When we first came across the tool (some 30 years ago) it was simply PEST analysis: the EL has been added along […]
Taming complexity, problem solving and introducing Ishikawa
If you have a serious problem, it’s critical to explore everything that might cause it, before you start thinking about solutions. Ishikawa, or cause-effect analysis, is a brilliant tool for doing just this. Cause and effect Most of us assume that the relationship between cause and effect is both simple and direct as in the […]
The Pain – Parchment and White Gloves
“Ab antiquis ad novum, ad augendam scientiam et intellectum, et adoptionem in vitam” Translated from Latin as “from old to new, to increase knowledge and understanding, and adoption into life”. We often find organisations with documented management systems almost written on parchment and baring no relation to what actually happens within the organisation. In […]
The Pain of Non Conformance
Whether a non conformance is raised as part of a third party assessment visit or internal finding, it often means additional work for the person assigned with closing the issue. As non-conformance isn’t an everyday occurrence, it’s not always easy to complete. I’d like to take this pain in bite size chunks, looking at: What […]
The Pain of Not Enough Time and Not Enough Knowledge
We can’t all be experts at everything, no matter how hard we try. One of the biggest issues we come across is the pressure on resource, both from a time perspective and also the specialist skills required to support a management system. Splitting the two points, lets look at each individually and identify what is […]
Beyond ISO – leveraging processes
In my final year engineering degree project, I fronted my dissertation with a quote from a guy called Lord Kelvin. He used to run about Scotland a couple of hundred years ago measuring the temperature of the water at the top and bottom of waterfalls and as a result came up with the Kelvin scale […]
Practical ISO implementation
As some of you know I used make diamond tools for a living. This involved mixing not very sparkly diamonds in even less sparkly clay. We would then make the mixture very hot and squeeze it very hard to make an “insert”. And of course, we didn’t want our finger burnt so, we let the […]
