I work with resources, energy, industrial and government organisations on execution: technology that gets adopted, improvements that hit the bottom line, an operating model that holds, and objectives that reach the people doing the work.
Most engagements draw on more than one of these. They run the same way underneath.
Opportunity identification, prioritisation and implementation planning through a clearly defined framework. Lean and Six Sigma applied where they earn their keep, not deployed as a programme for its own sake.
Operational improvementInnovation portfolio design centred on technology and commercial readiness, technology roadmaps, stage gates and open innovation. Delivering technology from interesting to installed, with the governance to decide what to back and the discipline to stop what is not working.
Innovation and transformationManagement operating systems, accountability and decision rights, process architecture and documentation. The structure that determines whether anything else holds once the project closes.
Operating model designTranslating strategy into objectives people can act on. KPI architecture and OKR cycles, cascaded from board level intent to a frontline measure, with the review rhythm that keeps them live instead of filed.
Strategy deploymentAcross mining, energy, materials technology and heavy industry
Accountable for bottom line uplift delivered through improvement and innovation portfolios
I am an engineer by training who has spent more than fifteen years in Western Australian resources and heavy industry, on both sides of the advice. Before moving into innovation and improvement I ran an international contractor’s Australian operations with full profit and loss accountability, which means I have been the person receiving improvement advice as well as the one giving it. That shapes how I work more than any methodology does.
Most of my career has been spent building the machinery of improvement from inside operating businesses: the programmes, the operating systems, the measures, the technology roadmaps. Not advising on them. Building them, and then being held to whether the numbers moved.
These four areas usually get treated as separate disciplines with separate owners. In my experience that is the main reason change stops holding.
Implementation rate over idea count. I would take a register of forty ideas with twelve built over five hundred ideas with twelve built.
With the team, not around it. Where an improvement function already exists, it keeps ownership of the work. If your people finish an engagement less capable than they started it, I have done a bad job, whatever the numbers say.
Stopping is a decision. The projects that slowly absorb budget for three years do more damage than the ones that fail in three months. So everything I set up gets a stopping rule at the outset.
Through delivery, not up to the report. Diagnosis is the easy part. Most of my time on an engagement is spent after it.
The first conversation costs nothing and usually takes half an hour. Tell me what is not working and I will tell you honestly whether it is something I can help with.