Would a Great Systems workshop help you save time and money?

Organizations waste a lot of time and money on workshops - in other words, training - day in and day out around the world. A lot of this waste is due to the organization's failure to effectively use the concepts that are taught in the training. Another key reason for workshop waste however is the fact that all too often, workshop time is primarily dedicated to lecturing about concepts. As a front line manager, I was consistently frustrated when I was asked to attend lecture-based training, because it was in essence wasting my time. As a trainer however, I learned over time the folly of this type of teaching approach, and chose to drastically modify how I trained others in an attempt to maximize the dollars and minutes my students were investing in the classroom. Great Systems! workshops are designed to be different - minimal lecture, lots of practice and dialogue, and a high focus on true skill application that will lead to fundamental personal, team, and organizational systems change.

Most organizations want to go faster – they want to reduce errors and costs, improve customer service, and reach higher levels of performance in general.  Unfortunately, many struggle to attain, let alone sustain, process excellence, in spite of their efforts to install improvement approaches such as six sigma and lean practices.  What’s holding them back? If they are making some progress, why do they struggle to sustain their improvement efforts over time?

With most implementation efforts, project teams and training courses are used as the main vehicles for driving the performance improvement initiative.  While a project team approach, where a select percentage of employees regularly participate in improvement activities, can deliver significant short term gains, it is not enough to either build the use of these techniques into an organization’s work culture or create a new approach to doing work that is sustainable over the long term.

The small percentage of truly high performance organizations that exists has figured this out.  They realize that sustained success over time cannot be realized by relying on project teams and training alone.  Instead, they design their work systems to make it mandatory that each employee, and in particular, each process owner, both learn these skills and use them on a daily basis.

This workshop will help you (1) clearly identify those systems that are holding you back or making it difficult to sustain your improvement efforts, (2) explore system improvement options that exist, and (3) create a plan for making the changes which are need to sustain and accelerate your improvement efforts.

Many organizations are attempting to use lean and six sigma approaches to improve their front line processes, but they appear to be reluctant to apply these approaches to certain key management processes.  From a high performance workplace perspective, meetings and e-mail processing represent a key management process that we invest a lot of time and money in daily, and yet many organizations don’t use their lean, six sigma, or process excellence techniques to improve the effectiveness of these two key management processes.  How much money does your plant, job site, or company spend on meetings and e-mail processing in a typical week?  Which meeting defects are affecting your team the most?  How much of your meeting and e-mail time is wasted, and how could it be better invested to help the organization improve?

In this workshop, you will learn techniques for measuring meeting and e-mail communication effectiveness and costs in the same manner that we analyze the performance of front line work processes.  You will also learn how to define typical meeting defects and rework, and how to make process improvements that will reduce that waste.  Examples of systems that can be used to increase meeting process owner accountability, meeting alignment, and skills for leading effective meetings will be also be shared. Finally, you will learn how to significantly reduce e-mail waste and improve the overall effectiveness of your organization's communication processes.

Most companies waste lots time and money in meetings because they don’t make the best use of their meeting time and money. Few of today’s team leaders even know about, let alone consistently use, key team facilitation skills. In turn, they fail to effectively manage their group dynamics, get the most out of their team’s diversity, or reach synergistic, high impact decisions. How effective are your team meetings?  How skilled are your team leaders at leading meetings and facilitating group decision making? Do you effectively use your meeting time, or do you often find your group going off on tangents, arguing about opinions instead of facts, or spending time listening to just one or two team members talk more than they should?

The “Facilitating and Leading Team Events” workshop is designed to help team leaders improve their personal team facilitation and leadership skills in a high impact way. By participating in this workshop, each person will repeatedly practice and evaluate their personal use of high impact team skills, in addition to learning more effective ways to get the most out of team events. By learning to become more effective team leaders and facilitators, each participant will return to work with the skills necessary to reduce significant meeting waste, improve group dynamics, and increase the output of their improvement team and team communication efforts.

While it may be frustrating to do, you can make change happen within your own sphere of influence even when those you report to don’t support your desire to improve, or when the executive team won’t support an organization wide process excellence initiative.  By using the basic tools that high performance companies regularly use on those processes you can directly influence, you can both improve your own understanding of how these tools can work and help demonstrate to others that effective tool use does make a difference.

The personal pursuit of process excellence is really not that complicated.  All you really need to do is define those processes you own, the customers of those processes, the counts and measures that are needed to gauge process improvement, and the waste streams that are preventing you from attaining higher levels of performance.  Once you have done this, you can find the root causes of that waste, implement corrective actions to address those root causes, and continue to measure process performance to see if your changes are having the desired effects.

In this workshop, you will learn how a set of simple process improvement tools can be used to allow you to achieve process excellence from the inside out. After learning how these tools work together, you will set up the basic process definition and measurement tools that are needed to drive process excellence from the inside out. Time will also be spent helping you identify current non-value added work time investments that can be eliminated to make time for your new process analysis and improvement efforts. You can't use the tools if you don't have the time!

This exercise intensive workshop is designed to help you both assess the strengths and opportunities for improvement that exist in your current health care work systems.  These exercises will also help you develop an action plan for making these approaches more effective, and in turn obtain better, and more sustainable, results.  As the day progresses, you will work in teams through a variety of exercises that are designed to help you identify what is truly important to your organization, the key processes and metrics that you can use to achieve your performance goals, and those improvement actions that would benefit your own process excellence pursuit efforts the most.  You will also get the opportunity to complete a self-assessment based on the Baldrige award criteria.

Videos from Malcolm Baldrige Quality Award recipients will be used along with these exercises to help illustrate the types of workplace practices these organizations use to improve leadership, strategic planning, patient-focused care, workforce engagement, and process management throughout their organizations.  These videos, along with the course material, will also help you better understand how the Baldrige criteria and scoring guidelines are designed to promote and encourage process excellence in all aspects of health care delivery.

In a service setting, process excellence should be easier to pursue and attain.  After all, you get immediate customer feedback and the transactions which need improvement are obvious.  Unfortunately, many service organizations often struggle to adopt those practices that have made some manufacturers successful.  Think about it – how many quick serve restaurants, hotels, retailers, and airlines do you as a customer see as excellent providers of their service?  While one might think that process excellence is tough to sustain in the service sector, there are practices in use that you could learn about and benefit from.

It’s true – high employee turnover, problems that seem to keep coming back, and never ending customer complaints are not just part of doing business in the service sector. This exercise intensive workshop is designed to help you both assess the strengths and opportunities for improvement that exist in your current service systems.  These exercises will also help you develop an action plan for making these approaches more effective, and in turn obtain better, and more sustainable, results.  As the day progresses, you will work in teams through a variety of exercises that are designed to help you identify what is truly important to your organization, the key processes and metrics that you can use to achieve your performance goals, and those improvement actions that would benefit your own process excellence pursuit efforts the most.  You will also get the opportunity to complete a self-assessment based on the Baldrige award criteria.

Videos from Malcolm Baldrige Quality Award recipients will be used along with these exercises to help illustrate the types of workplace practices these organizations use to improve leadership, strategic planning, patient-focused care, workforce engagement, and process management throughout their organizations.  These videos, along with the course material, will also help you better understand how the Baldrige criteria and scoring guidelines are designed to promote and encourage process excellence in all aspects of service delivery

This workshop covers the basic skills and approaches needed to create value stream maps and spaghetti diagrams, perform quick changeover analysis, put in place a visual workplace, and install 5S work practices. Perhaps more importantly, this workshop also focuses on the types of changes you need to make in order to get all of your people to use these lean improvement tools on a consistent basis. If you want to make lean thinking a daily habit across your organization, or simply within your own team, consider spending the time to bring this highly interactive workshop to your organization.

The "Fundamentals of Lean Tools and Concepts" workshop is designed to help anyone who wants to begin using lean tools and concepts to reduce waste and increase customer value for those key processes they are responsible for. The tools you will learn to use and the exercises you will experience will also give you better lean implementation results in less time and at a lower cost. The “Lean Tools” workshop can be customized to meet the needs of any workplace.

This workshop will help you understand the challenges of culture change and learn more about the types of systems high performance organizations are already using to make this type of change happen. It will show you why simply sending people to training or repeatedly asking them to change won't work - if you want different daily behaviors on the job, you have to change the systems that created and reinforced those behaviors to-date.

Perhaps more importantly, this workshop also focuses diagnosing your existing system design problems and creating a plan for the types of system changes you need to make in order to begin shifting your existing work cultures. If you want to create a consistent, process excellence focused work culture across your organization, or simply within your own team, consider spending the time to bring this highly interactive workshop to your organization.

What is so special about a Great Systems! workshop? Back to Top

In short, a Great Systems! workshop is special (and different than most) because it is designed to encourage (1) plenty of skill practice and (2) a high level of interaction. Significant effort is also made to focus on how to really use only a few key concepts, instead of spending a lot of training time lecturing about book theories. Perhaps most importantly, Great Systems! workshops are (1) relatively low in cost and (2) taught by a person who has both worked for years as a line manager and dedicated more than 25 years of his work career to personal, team, and organizational performance improvement.

In his workshops, Kevin's goal is to help you identify HOW to begin using the tools and concepts that are taught immediately upon your return to work. By sharing his personal successes and failures in regard to tool and concept use, he will help you minimize the amount of time and money you might waste as you try to apply what you have learned in a given workshop. He will also work with you to help identify how key work systems, such as job descriptions, training requirements, and performance expectations need to be modified to help ensure consistent and effective tool application.

Where do Great Systems! workshops take place? Back to Top

On-site workshops can be scheduled to meet your needs and personal schedule. The onsite course approach also helps you increase the degree of consistency in skill application that is needed to get the concepts and tools that are taught into use across the site or company. Participation fees are reasonable, and each course carries a 100% satisfaction guarantee - if the course does not meet your expectations, your participation fee will be refunded. All you have to do is return the training materials.

How much do Great Systems! workshops cost? Back to Top

On-site workshop costs vary with company and team size. In general, the cost of a one day onsite workshop for up to 15 people will range between $1,500 and $2,000 for eight hours of class time, depending on organizational size. For a 15 person class, your daily cost per person falls between $100 and $135!

These costs include (1) training materials, (2) a follow-up action plan from the facilitator, and (3) three months of free online consultation. Meals, refreshments, and travel expenses are not included in these costs (but I really try to keep my travel costs low - no first class air travel, limos, or suites).

Again, if a course does not meet your expectations, your participation fee will be refunded.

How can I find out more about bringing a Great Systems! workshop to my organization? Back to Top

You can initiate the on-site workshop process by sending me a e-mail at kevin@greatsystems.com indicating which workshop you would like to bring into your facility. I will then work with a contact person from your location to arrange the workshop logistics, and more importantly, to customize the workshop to meet the specific needs that you have. We will also prepare a firm delivery cost at that time. You will be invoiced for the workshop costs following the event.

What types of workshops does Great Systems offer? Back to Top

Great Systems! workshops are designed to help you become more effective in three possible areas - personal effectiveness, team effectiveness, and / or organizational effectiveness. The 12 most popular workshops that I facilitate are listed above - click on the link to explore a given workshop in more detail. I can also develop custom workshops to meet your specific process or systems improvement needs, so if you are looking for something that is not listed above, feel free to send me an e-mail at kevin@greatsystems.com and ask me if I offer that type of course.

Great Systems!
70460 Walker Road Rainier, OR 97048

206.226.8913