Remember this from 27 July?
Geoscience Australia’s Mineral Potential Mapper project won an inaugural Institute of Public Administration Australia award for Innovation in the APS. An awesome and well deserved achievement for the team.
One of the results from the award was an invitation from the Hargraves Institute to attend study tours in Sydney in September. Unfortunately, the Mineral Potential Mapper team were not available on the dates provided and the Minerals Systems Branch Head, Richard Blewett, kindly offered an opportunity for me to attend in their place. I’m very grateful because it was an amazing chance to see some of the innovation ideas and processes underway in some private organisations and I undertook to return the favour by providing some notes and learnings from the experience. So here goes.
The first part of the Study Tour was on 13 September at the technology park in North Ryde with visits to CSR, CSIRO, and Microsoft.
If you have anything to do with construction or renovation you would likely recognise the CSR brand behind many building materials like plasterboard, roofing, and glass. Or you might know them from the baking aisle as the Colonial Sugar Refining Company that diversified into resources and construction from the 1940’s onwards. Into the late 1990’s CSR were in a bit of rut, the revenues were still good, but the operating margins and market share were decreasing. Manufacturing assets had been under-capitalised and breakdowns delaying supply were common. The separate business units, as you might expect, didn’t share much business knowledge and the business culture was largely reactive.
CSR tackled this across all the business units with an in-house manufacturing process that seems to draw on elements of Lean and Six Sigma. In essence, the company refocused on customer requirements and devolved responsibility down to the operational level in the manufacturing plants because that level of staff know best what needs improving and how to make it happen.
The funnel flows as:
- Engaging with customer expectations – an interesting example of this was a design centre where CSR have a dedicated team working with designers and architects to make the most of existing building products and to generate proposals for modifying existing products or developing new products.
- Product specifications – make what the customer wants (an example was the plasterboard used to only come in 3 metre lengths because that was the way it was manufactured – customers needed different lengths!)
- Manufacturing specifications – the ‘recipes’ for making the products.
- Capability – for assets, it is a close study of asset reliability driven in a risk management framework; for people, it is a lot of attention on getting the right people, willing to learn with a focus on training.
- Standardising processes – enabling capability and sharing of knowledge (there was one example of a factory where only one person knew how to run a particular machine and he would deliberately introduce a glitch in the equipment when he went on leave to prevent others from successfully using that machine. That sort of ‘personal IP’ is no longer tolerated and that person no longer works at CSR…)
- Engaging staff with the process to drive innovation. Some Lean concepts could be seen in ideas devolving responsibility to operational areas to tackle manufacturing issues. There were several numbers presented including a 30% reduction in manufacturing costs just from self-organised innovation at the factory floor.
A lot of the discussion was around how to implement innovation. The classic hierarchical approach is to have some form of idea discovery across an organisation, the senior managers decide which ideas to implement and some form of ‘innovation manager’ or ‘innovation office’ is given the job of implementing the idea. The emerging approach is having ‘catalysts’ where an organisation identifies and enables some key staff to be sources of information and aid for any staff to implement their own ideas. The Catalyst Exchange is one approach to setting these innovation catalysts up and Christine Oakley, from the Victorian Department of Environment, Land, Water and Planning spoke about similar Collaboration and Innovation Facilitators in a presentation at the recent APS Innovation Conference.
In setting up their own catalyst network, one interesting experiment CSR tried was an organisational network analysis, based on a survey asking all staff questions like “Who are the top five people you go to for help to get your job done?”. This approach recognises that any organisation actually functions through an informal network of personal contacts and senior managers in a formal hierarchy often have very little to do with implementing innovation (in fact there was plenty of discussion in the audience that the formal hierarchy often prefer the status quo and see innovation as threatening). CSR used the informal org chart to identify the key people making things happen across their business units and to offer them training and support to do it even better, with a particular focus on improving the implementation time for ideas.
What would an alternate org chart at your organisation look like?
On a philosophical bent, one of the presenters, Rick Terpstra, had a mantra which I’m going to put up on my wall:
Complex rules drive simple behaviours
Simple rules drive complex behaviours
The more complicated you make the processes, the more it becomes a non-responsibility tick-and-flick (see Lehman Brothers…) and the less likely that people will use their own knowledge, skills, and networks to develop better solutions.
What is the result of all this innovation work at CSR? One example is now a builder can go into a floor in an apartment building under construction, use lasers to measure out where they want the gyprock panelling to go, provide the custom specifications to CSR and have the bespoke panels delivered in labelled pallets, ready to be installed within two days. And they say Australian manufacturing is dying…
I’ll leave it for there for now. I’ll write about the visit to CSIRO and Microsoft soon.
