About Us

SSOCM (Systemic and Systematic Operations Change Management) is a specialist operations change management consultancy firm, which approaches change management and productivity improvement from a Systems and Lean Thinking perspective whilst appreciating the needs of your customers and stakeholders.

Any desire to investment into improving effectiveness, efficiency, and customer service is to be applauded; however there is abundant evidence of improvement and change initiatives failing to achieve their anticipated outcomes.

Across many sectors, whether it is the application of: Total Quality Management, Business Process Re-engineering, Lean, Six Sigma, or Balanced Scorecard, these initiatives have failed in many organisations, and yet succeeded in others. Did the organisations which tried and failed set out to fail? Of course not – so it is worth taking some time to ask – Why has it worked for some organisations and not for others?

SSOCM believes this happens for three main reasons:

• A disconnect exists between an organisation’s strategy and its operational improvement activities. This lack of coherence clouds focus, drains energy and leads to disappointing results.

• Most managers have had the ‘reductionist’ approach to ‘fixing’ problems ingrained into them throughout their education and early careers, and this leads to the ‘interconnectedness’ of the system in which the problem exists being ignored. The ‘system’ will bite back, and the feedback loops will either dampen the impact of the initial improvements achieved (initial gains are lost over time), cause a new problem to emerge elsewhere (no overall end-to-end improvement), or result in performance oscillations (inconsistent productivity results which can fluctuate under the same operating conditions).

• The exclusion of individual/group behaviour and learning from the identified operational solution. SSOCM believes a systematic approach to change management is required. This is not the same as changing an organisation’s culture; it about identifying ‘how and why’ the players involved and connected to the operation need to learn and develop.

Of course there are other reasons which can come into play, such as, but not limited to: leadership; employee engagement; communication; erroneous data; poor assumptions; ignored anomalies; and role modelling. However taking a systemic and systematic approach to operations change management will automatically address these and many other potential pitfalls.