Research & Development
The founding principle of this company is the use of empirical, data-driven methods in all of our activities. In terms of consultancy and training, this means:
- Setting our consultancy charges based on agreed objectives and service / performance levels. We charge our consultancy clients by outcome, not by activity.
- Developing our training courses using in-depth feedback from delegates and their sponsoring organizations. Each of our training courses is delivered at least twice, free of charge to invited delegates from target organizations, before we approach the market. In exchange for free training, we gain very detailed feedback from these initial sessions, which helps us to make our courses as relevant as possible to the needs of practising managers.
- Using the experience of our extended network, we have the unique ability to gather case study materials of the best quality, allowing delegates to work with real scenarios wherever possible.
The principals of Redland Research Ltd are seasoned consultants and trainers with (as at 2014) a combined total of 56 years’ experience in helping work organizations to implement and sustain continuous improvement. We recruit our consultants with a view to the breadth of their experience, their flexibility and their potential for contribution to our research agenda.
Our not-for-profit sister company, CITRA (Continuous Improvement Training and Research Associates (CIC) Ltd), has a mandate to undertake, promote and fund academic research into the use and development of continuous improvement in public sector and third sector service organizations.
Most consultancies tend to adopt or develop standard consulting and training methodologies which they then sell as standard ‘products’. We deprecate this approach as unimaginative and counter-productive. Instead, following a searching examination of the client requirements, we create bespoke solutions drawing on our experience. We also provide our clients with several tools to help evaluate the impact of our work - these and other methods for assessing the value added by consultants are addressed in our course Commissioning, Managing and Doing Without Consultants.
- Current development projects include:
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Private Sector
The Delphi App - a smartphone application which facilitates Delphi decision-making for managers in multinational companies.
Public Sector
SPC toolbox - a set of standardized tools for statistical process control using Excel, with online tutorials available in local government and healthcare versions.
- Current research projects include:
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CI manufacturing literature review - because continuous improvement methods are so practical, their transferability from manufacturing to service contexts has been assumed. However, little research work has been done to understand the conceptual basis of continuous improvement ideas in their original setting. Our project is a structured literature review of engineering literature to understand more about the conceptual background to continuous improvement techniques.
Internalization of Lean concepts by public sector workers - several previous researchers have acknowledged the challenges posed to successful Lean practice by the public sector environment. Earlier research has focussed on the needs and perspectives of organizations; our research focuses more on individuals and the ways they reject, or adopt and use, Lean ideas in their day-to-day work.