Accelerated Performance ImprovementTM is an entirely new way of producing performance improvement in business. It is the fermentation of ideas that have been growing for the last ten years through the work of Avangarde Parkar of Avangarde Consulting Ltd.
Working as Consultants in South America and with drilling companies in the North Sea, Avangarde was able to develop ways of creating performance improvements. The Accelerated Performance ImprovementTM process is the amalgam of that experience, formalising Avangarde's approach into a repeatable model. This model is now available to the wider business community.
The Accelerated Performance ImprovementTM process starts from a very simple assumption:
"Everybody wants to do a good job."
There are few, if any, people who start work wanting to do a bad job. People want to be proud of what they do, want to be able to say "I did that".
The cruel reality is that there are frustrations and obstacles holding people back from wanting to do a good job. For example, if every time we have a good idea at work someone else steals it, or we are ignored, or simply told "You're not paid to think", then we very soon stop having good ideas - or at least putting them forward.
This behaviour actively discourages individuals from making further positive contributions to the business and - depending on the individual - can lead to damaging consequences.
The first consequence is stress. If nobody will listen to an idea that is going to be of benefit, it is very frustrating for the person who has the idea. The harder they try to be heard, the more stressful it is for them. Absenteeism is likely to increase, and they may even have to take time away from work through stress related illness.
The other consequence is an individual's own defence against stress. It is called apathy. In this context, stress is actually a function of caring. If we care and can do nothing about it, we become stressed. Our defence against stress is to cease to care. And when we stop caring, we become apathetic. Perhaps we go so far as to take pleasure when the business starts to fail: it serves them right! "If they had listened to me, none of this would have happened."
We want to do a good job but these obstacles frustrate us.
The key to the process is ownership. Ownership is not something you can give to people. But what we can do is create the conditions that will allow people to take ownership.
In one example, using the Accelerated Performance ImprovementTM Process over a three month period, Avangarde took a team said to be "A silent intimidated front line workforce" to what was later described by the same commentator as "Knowledgeable and Proud".
In that time, the workforce created a four hundred percent performance improvement in one process over three weeks. They then sustained that improvement. In another process, they equalled the world record by making a fifty percent improvement over two weeks. Again, they sustained their new performance with ease.
In yet another, they rewrote the operating instructions and removed a potentially deadly failure from the procedure.
Being allowed to take ownership created these changes. The performance improvements are a result of that ownership.
Avangarde had been called to South America because the Operator had told his contractor that if performance did not improve, they could ship out all of their equipment and go back to Europe. Three months later the same Operator was telling his other suppliers that if they did not start to match up to Avangarde's client, they too could pack up and leave the country.
On another occasion, this time in Europe, the workforce saved their Operator £3.9 Million - some 27% of their annual operating budget.
These savings were the result of behavioural change: and the emphasis of Accelerated Performance ImprovementTM is on the team maintaining this change themselves. This means that the saving is repeated in subsequent years and is added to by the workforce who, as "owners" of their work, continue to create improvements after Avangarde has gone.
Accelerated Performance ImprovementTM works. Similar extraordinary performance improvements are available for any business using a facilitator trained in the method.
- The Accelerated Performance ImprovementTM process concentrates on creating ownership.
- It actively creates opportunities to give recognition to the workforce.
- The process produces decisions and progress through transactional change.
- Through feedback and recognition, the process removes frustrations and obstacles, thus producing the transformational change that is ownership.
- That ownership produces amazing performance improvements.
- The coaching that accompanies the model concentrates on building skills into the team that will allow the process to be self-sustaining when the facilitator leaves.
- The documented performance improvements that result from this process makes it very easy for the organisation to want to carry on when all can see the savings that result.