GREAT™ Productivity
Improve your productivity with GREAT™
The International Monetary Fund (IMF) has identified a drop in productivity growth as a serious problem for the global economy. This drop is more pronounced in the UK than any other member of the Group of Seven (G7) leading economies.
Four sectors in particular account for the stagnation in UK productivity, with professional services at the top of the list. Research by the Financial Times found that lawyers, accountants and management consultants lie at the heart of the UK’s productivity problem [source: Financial Times 2015].
Why is productivity falling?
There are a number of reasons. These include staff undertaking tasks that may be classed as non-billable, such as marketing or compliance work or even reading and answering email; inefficient systems and processes that no longer meet the needs of firm; and poor use of technology.
Some of the serious challenges facing firms:
- Finding and retaining qualified staff (known as the talent gap) - this means that existing staff have to be more efficient and productive
- Outdated and inefficient internal systems and processes, which often lead to overworked staff making mistakes - work has to be redone and rechecked
- Seasonality and workload compression - many businesses tend to be busier at certain times of the year, such as the end of the tax year, which puts a strain on staff and internal systems and processes
- SoMoClo (social, mobile, and cloud) technology is changing the way businesses work with their clients and outmoded systems often cannot cope
- Silo mentality - managers and staff not communicating effectively with each other.

How can GREAT™ help?
Productivity is all about using your resources effectively. Resources can include people, knowledge, business data, time and information technology.
Your staff can use the GREAT™ toolkit to analyse each process in turn and look for ways to improve them. This could include realigning existing systems and processes, or designing new ones to meet the needs of the firm.
With GREAT™ you can answer some basic questions:
- Is the system or process necessary - does it add value to the business?
- Can it be eliminated?
- Is it time-consuming - could it be automated?
- Is there any duplication of effort that could be eliminated?
- Does anyone use the output - is the effort worth it?
- Is the same data being entered more than once?
- How could this process be made better?
- Do we have the right data to manage the business?
You can also look at how the firm uses technology and decide, for example, to embrace emerging technology, such as Cloud-based solutions and apps to generate new opportunities.