Pursuing Process Excellence - What's Holding You Back?

Session
Lean / Six Sigma

Authors
Kevin McManus
Performance Improvement Coach
Great Systems!

Description
Many organizations struggle to sustain their six sigma, lean tools, or other operational excellence focused initiatives. This presentation will help you learn how to take these approaches beyond the typical project team and training-based initiatives by changing your existing work systems to make process excellence part of every employeeýs job.

Abstract
Most organizations want to go faster - they want to reduce accidents and error, improve patient safety, 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?

With most implementation efforts, project teams and training courses are used to drive 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 way of 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 presentation will help you create a plan for making such changes yourself.