Recent programs (last 13 weeks) in London, Dubai, Bangalore, Cape Town, Auckland, Sydney and Pune have qualified 93 new BP Group CPP Masters® - (CPP Levels 1 thru 5 inclusive!) Hearty Congratulations go out to (photo's below): |
||
| Abhijit Vijay Shaha Abhinava Pratap Singh Ahmad Gharaibeh AJ Reekie-Mayne Akash Banerjee Akshay Bhagat Albertus Lim Alexandre Nevski Alpana Thakar Amit Arvind Pande Ammar Mohammad Al Ghazu Amogh Rudra Amudha Kumar Balan Andre Buys Andrew Pratt Anil Kumar Anushka Soma-Patel Anver Daniels Apurva Pandey Arun Kumar K R Asad Rehman Ashwini Patil Axayya Rudra Bo Andersen Carly Wernich Charles Lewis Coen Zuidema Dave Alldredd Debra Fouche Dezre Desai Dirk Kotze Divyesh Vasani Dudley Atapattu Ernst Hertzog |
Geert Calcoen Gerhard Basson Ghazal Fassaie Haadiey Osman Henrik Frydenlund Henry Spijkeman Ian Hancock Ian Singleton Jackie Passman Jerry Ball Keegan Alexander Kevin Thomas Kirsty Heron KrishnanKumaran L Murugappan Laura Duquemin Lawrence Wood Laxman Murugappan Leletu Ndlakuse Lisa Dunn Llewellyn Daniels Lufti Bafagih Maghmoed Joseph Mahmood Gharaibeh Mark Johnston Mohammed Hajjout Mohammed Jafer Morne Owen Mukhtar Dharsey Naresh Tanwani Nelis Putgieter Nigel Coutts Nihal Suliman Elsayed Ismail Nomvelelo Makwetch |
Nora Regina Alawneh Patrick Kadalie Peter Carruthers Peter Keller Priti Bhagat Priyagee Rudra Raghunandan Reddy Richard Downes Rita Murugappan Alagammai Palaniappan Rovina Colaco Rudy Kriel S Rajasekar Santosh Sawant Sarfaraz Ahmad Serle Shuman Shahla Nazar Ahmed Shirish Patil Shueyb Vally Sridharan Parthasarathy Tamaryn Whittle Tulsi Murugappan Upendar Kasam Venkatachalam Subramanian Venkatasubramanian Narasimhan Vijaymadhur Papabathini |
    |
||
 Synopsis The world of business is undergoing dramatic change. Driven by a number of factors organizations are needing to realign themselves to adapt and evolve. This transformation is global and reaches into every business sector impacting how companies create, deliver and sustain their products and services. This three part article introduces the reasons for the change, the size of the challenge and how some world leading trend setter companies are achieving dramatic success in this new order. The current challengeAlmost without exception anyone in business these days learned their trade during the Information Age which arrived with the advent of mainframe computers in the 1960’s. The transformation of the way work, especially in services industries, was radical and gave birth to new ways of doing things that had remained largely unchanged since the invention of the steam engine. Alongside this information revolution a change came about in the way we organized business in order to exploit the advantages offered by automation. People talked of software and hardware; information systems; bits and bytes; system development; data processing. In fact this new way of doing work influenced every aspect of our lives and we adopted a predominantly a left brain structured approach to organizing ourselves. The very way we designed work became dominated by ‘structured approaches’ for systems development and management. Subsequently this information age mindset grew its influence into work areas such as human resources, sales and marketing, operations and all the other ‘functional areas’ we are now very familiar with. The specialists in each of these respective functions, take Accounting for example, thought of their world through a lens provided by the information Age which ensured a structured methodical approach to change that would indeed harness the power of computers. Everything became information centric. Think about this for a moment. What is the language you use in your particular discipline? For instance in Financial Management the talk may be of Activity Based Management systems, Budgetary control, Accounts reconciliation, purchasing, Cost Codes and such. All these things are underpinned by ‘systems’ and we draw structures that represent information processing. Companies like Oracle and SAP prosper in helping companies understand these functional controls and databases. The things we do as work can also be represented as processes and these are conceived, developed and distributed through the information age lens. Swim lanes, functional hierarchies, business process management systems, process modeling languages and much more. Where has this all taken us? To put it bluntly away from the customer who is, let’s not forget, the very reason why our businesses exist in the first place. If you are involved in creating processes or systems think about the designs you produce.  Where is the customer in those ’pictures’ and designs? Customers are frequently an afterthought and at best at the ‘beginning’ or the ‘end’ of a process. We draw organization models as pyramids and talk about the ‘front line’, interestingly customers are usually placed at the foot of the organizational pyramid. Our very ways of thinking isolate us from the customer and many can pretty much carry on with their functional objectives often without even thinking of the real customer as anymore than something at the beginning or the end – nothing to do with them.Where we have taken time to think about customers we have created ‘Customer Relationship Management (CRM) systems’ which are frequently islands of automation not fully integrated with back-offices – what is that the ‘back office’? Groups of people remote from the customer, processing information and occasionally needing to deal with other parts of the organization. Sometimes the apparent disconnects between different functional areas result in another initiative to ‘outsource’ work that is regarded as not being part of a core competence. Customers then end up talking to remote people sitting on the other side of the planet with mixed results. Some people may argue that they do in fact deal with customers – those internal counterparts in other functions. We establish customer-supplier relationships, negotiate Service Level Agreements and busy ourselves with negotiations and agreed targets. Competition for scarce resources is the name of the game as we go into the annual round of bidding and corporate in fighting. Sounds familiar? Well you are not alone as this is the way of the Information Age mindset. Work has become so complex with the interconnection between people and systems that we seem constantly to be reinventing projects to ‘sort the mess’ out however our efforts are stilted by this very complexity with unfulfilled promises of new systems and improved ways of working. It just gets even more complicated. The is a New Way - The Unified Theory of Business Customer Expectation Management is a business framework and system for creating and sustaining successful organizations. It’s central tenet is that all organizations should be built and designed ‘outside-in’ with a focus to achieving Successful Customer Outcomes. In industry and business no one invents anything completely new. Rather people see how existing ideas fit into new frameworks. The components of a new idea are usually floating around in the milieu of business research and discourse prior to its discovery. What is new is the packaging of these components into a cohesive whole. Similarly the idea that all business should be oriented to achieve Successful Customer Outcomes and ‘Outside-In’ is not entirely new. It has been floating around in various forms for some time. But is has not yet assumed its rightful position at the centre of business theory and practice. Ironically some of the pioneers, both business leaders and theorists, of ‘Outside-in’ thinking and practice had a notion of how best to align businesses to achieve success. In 1985 Paul Strassman in ’Information Payoff The Transformation of Work in the Information Age’ discussed how information technology changes the very nature of work and why we do it …. he didn’t use the words Successful Customer Outcomes or Outside-In but he was thinking along the same lines. Since the mid 1980’s, terms such as customer centric, business process management and the agile organization, have grabbed the minds of business leaders and academics alike. They all refer to related ideas. For example, in 1993 Hammer and Champy in their book ‘Reengineering the Corporation’ proclaimed the need to ‘start over’ and rethink the way work is done. Writers and Consultants such as Charles Handy , the leading European authority, academics Kaplan & Norton , author Peter Fingar , Dr. Tom Davenport and many more of written, theorized and in some cases pointed out the pivotal role of the Customer for all organizations. What has been lacking is putting these disparate ideas into a coherent and practical framework. This I argue has not been done before and is precisely what Customer Expectation Management (CEM) is all about. While successful ‘outside-in’ organizations may not explicitly call their approaches CEM the principles, methods and application are there and accessible by others. In Part Two we will ‘look into’ some of these success stories including Virgin, South West, Best Buy, Citibank, FedEx Kinko, Zara plus others and examine emerging best practice and its implications for everyone.  If you wish to explore the subject further immediately you can:  Download the Customer Expectation Management Toolkits (there's six) Join us at one of our mentoring & professional coaching sessions and qualify as a Certifed Process Professional® Review Steve's fifth book "Outside-In The Secret of the 21st century leading companies" http://bit.ly/OutsideInTheSecret Successful Customer Outcomes (SCO’s) About the AuthorSteve Towers, Co-founder and Chair of the BP Group (www.bpgroup.org) and founder of Towers Associates, is an expert on process and performance transformation.Steve founded the first community focused on business process management in 1992. Steve has bases in Europe and Colorado. Meet Steve at http://www.bpgroup.org/bp-group.html Copyright 2012, Towers Associates |
Open my eyes, that I may see glimpses of truth thou hast for me; place in my hands the wonderful key that shall unclasp and set me free.
Enjoy the video and open your eyes ;-) 
Hello Kindle Fire, bye bye Waterstone’s? Amazon launched Kindle Fire last week, a tablet competitor to the iPad. Poor old Waterstone’s: is this the last nail in its coffin? Kindle Fire  Kindle’s technology means that books can be bought instantly,many of them for 99p and £1.99 instead of the £20 you might pay for a hardback in Waterstone’s. And the fact that the new $199 Kindle is in colour means that users can browse magazines and picture books, giving booksellers yet another reason to worry. Waterstone’s, the UK’s largest chain of book shops, has experienced similar woes to the US’ Barnes and Noble, losing out to online sellers and supermarkets. New Waterstone’s boss James Daunt acknowledges that Amazon is tough competition but asks: “Why wouldn’t you want to spend half an hour in a really nice bookshop?” His plan is to turn the 300-strong fleet of stores into a collection of friendly, local venues in which readers can comfortably browse and buy. The idea has merit. Of course people don’t want to go to another identikit Waterstone’s in Leeds or Birmingham or Manchester. Foyles had the idea of the ‘destination event’ bookshop long ago and its overhaul saw it win bookseller of the year for 2010, among other gongs. But can chummy staff and a frapuccino work for such a large chain? The job to pull Waterstones’ stores up to standard is a big one in itself, but to do it in so many locations with such tough competition is mammoth. And even those who love browsing through bookshops have to admit that it is much simpler to ping a request through cyberspace to get the latest read sent to them for a fraction of the cost. Recent reports from UK publishers suggest digital book sales now account for around 9-10% of their overall book sales compared to 4-5% last year. That still leaves 90% of the book market sold as actual books.  There are takers out there for the ‘book buying’ experience. Daunt has to find a way of get them through his doors, and fast. What do you think? Can the book shop survive? Let me know what you think by email or post to our blog at www.closequarter.co.uk/blog. Best wishes John Corr Close Quarter Limited, New Bond House, 124 New Bond Street, London, W1S 1DX, UNITED KINGDOM |
