Ideas, Innovation, Implementation

“They always say time changes things, but you actually have to change them yourself.” — Andy Warhol

Every year at Signature we spend time around the end of the year focusing on new strategies to improve the company, and 2012 was no different.  We just finished up on what we call our SI3 initiative.  (Signature - Ideas, Innovation and Implementation).  During the past 3 months team members from all across the company worked in virtual teams to study what we do and how we can do it better.  Lots of time was spent talking to people in all areas of the organization with two rules in mind: (1) we have no sacred cows and (2) any change is fair game as long as we have buy-in from the people in the field who have to make the new idea actually happen.

This year resulted in some really impressive results with the teams presenting their ideas to the full company last week. Some of the ideas are pretty simple yet valuable, such as buying a paint sprayer for each property or developing a tracking method for HVAC filter changes.  

“We cannot solve a problem by using the same kind of thinking we used when we created them.” — Albert Einstein

Others were pretty major for our team.  The Team Member Time Team researched and evaluated every scheduled meeting in the organization and then asked “WHY?”.  In one case we had a weekly meeting scheduled due to an implementation plan that was rolled out over 7 years ago.  The Team Member Time Team concluded that this meeting could easily be eliminated or restructured to better utilize Team Members’ time.  

“Ideas are useless unless used.” — Theodore Levitt

The Signature Team once again did a bang-up job of developing effective changes that we can make all over the company, focused on solving the problems in an innovative way, and then made the implementation happen on a company-wide basis. 

Thanks to the whole Signature Team for keeping Signature ahead of the curve.