Contents of ‘Productivity Knowhow’ Revisited

Contents

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1. Productivity overall:
   • Why productivity – the panacea for growth
   • Why so important for people, organisations, nations
   • Current management views

2. Scope to improve:

• Distribution of productivity levels
• The ‘S’ curve
• Scope per sector

3. The Productivity revolution:

• Evolution of revolutions
• Agricultural, Industrial, Service, Communication revolutions
• Globalisation, Knowledge, Leisure revolutions

4. Productivity drivers:

• Management
• Invention & Innovation – Investment
• Competition – Luck

5. Productivity improvement process:
   • Five stage process
   • Steps for improvement
   • ‘Ratchet effect’

6. Corporate plans:

• Why have a plan?
• Aims, Products & Services, Markets & Customers
• SWOT analyses – Action plans 

7. Cardinal measures:

• ‘Good’ and ‘Bad’ measures
• Balanced Scorecards – KRAs
• Cardinal model – Current measurement gaps

8. Financial cardinals:
   • Traditional financial measures – Tangible and intangible assets
   • Unit costs – Economies of scale
   • Investors’ criteria – Stock market cycles 

9. Customer cardinals:

• Customer satisfaction v dissatisfaction
• Quality sieves, internal & external – VFM
• Price, Quality & Service Indices – PI, QI, SI          

10. Productivity & Waste cardinals:

• Why and where to measure
• Productivity ratios – Outputs/ Inputs
• Waste measures – Resource AUE% 

11. Employee Motivation cardinal:
    • Motivation impact
    • Popular theories –, Maslow, Theory X v Y, Herzberg, Hawthorne
    • Motivation Index – MI – Job design & working environment factors        

12. Corporate Knowledge cardinal:

• Corporate knowledge (K) – Intellectual Property (IP)
• Brawn v Brainwork – Knowledge workers – K ladder – K grid
• Knowledge Index – KI = K AUE% 

13. Targets:

• Reference periods (RPs), Budgets
• Best practices (BPs), Waypoints, Goals, Dreams
• Target setting – Pitfalls 

14. Productivity Analyses:

• Gather facts & opinions – Scope to improve?
• Review options for improvement – CBAs
• Select specific projects

15. Special improvement projects:
    • Set up – Terms of Reference, Timetable, Team selection
    • Solve – Fact find, Pareto, ‘Critical Examinations’, Develop solutions
    • Implement changes – Communicate, Instal, Nurse    

16. Organisation level improvement:

• Products & Services – Ideas, Failures, Prototyping, Diversify, Divest
• Markets & Customers – Existing & New market penetration
• Management – M&As, T & D, WFH, Pay levels

17. Process level improvement:

• Production v Services – Process differences
• Process reviews – Cut waste, Optimise existing, Invest in new
• OCTs, SPC, 6ơ, OR, WS, MS, Workflows, Outsourcing, ICT, AI 

18. Task level improvement:

• Right outputs – Volumes, Quality
• Right methods – Task times – ‘’Pin factory’ debate
• Right input resources – Labour, ‘Baumol effect’ – Materials – Capital 

19. Continuous improvement – CI:

• CI projects – ‘Quality Circles’
• Employee suggestion schemes
• CI benefits 

20. National productivity:
    • Why important nationally
    • National Outputs/ Inputs – GDP/ (Labour, Materials, Energy, Capex)
    • National productivity, prosperity, wellbeing

21. Global productivity:

• Prosperity gaps
• Foreign aid
• Global action needed