Workshop on Continuous Innovation & Process Improvement

Program overview:

Business Managers and leaders must constantly be on the lookout for new ways of doing business, improving processes, innovating products and services, and creating novel organizational solutions. The constant drive of process improvement is the key to a successful organization. Many organizations fail to succeed because they place this accountability on leaders instead of people actually doing the work. A company needs to build the culture of continuous improvement bottom up, from the most valuable areas of the organization – where the valuable processes are occurring. Empowering all team members within the organization to continuously seek opportunities for improvement is what will lead to strength within the company. This is required in an increasingly competitive business environment like ours today.

For whom:

This program is designed for Line and functional managers, supervisors, senior and middle level managers responsible for strategy, marketing, business development, operations, HR, product development, and other functional areas of the organization that need to constantly improve their processes to deliver better services to customers.  

Learning objectives:

At the end of this program, participants will be able to:

• explain the need for continuous improvement and innovation;
• acquire skills, knowledge and attitudes to plan, organize, conduct, control, and evaluate planned, deliberate change based on continuous process and product improvements;
• acquire skills to search for changes in the external and internal business environments with a view to finding opportunities for performance improvement or innovation;
• apply the full process of continuous improvement and innovation; and
• create the need for leadership, focus, and constant learning, experimentation, trial and error, and adjustment in creating a culture of continuous improvement.

Course outline:

Day One: Introduction to Continuous Innovation and Process Improvement

• How change and learning occur
• The competitive and strategic advantages of continuous improvement and innovation
• Problem-solving vs. performance-improvement vs. innovation
• Innovation and creativity
• Sources of change in the external and internal environments
• Continuous improvement cycle: Plan, Do, Check, Act

Day Two: The Planning stage: Problem analysis and targeted improvement and innovation

• Problem identification and analysis: root-cause analysis, problem tree analysis
• Incremental vs. radical change,
• Value chain analysis and process mapping
• Opportunity search and idea generation for innovation
• Brainstorming and idea mapping,
• Lateral thinking and creativity

Day Three: The Implementation stage: Developing and implementing changes and improvements

• Goal setting and prioritization,
• Deliberate vs. experimental approaches
• Formalizing trial and error methods for continuous improvement and innovation
• Planning for implementation,
• Organizing for implementation
• Test phases and pilot projects

Day Four: The Check stage: Evaluating initiatives and deciding

on project continuation

• Progress review structures and processes,
• Description and reporting of results
• After-action review and lessons learned processes
• Performance metrics and measurement,
• Evaluating and comparing results
• Maintaining focus on objectives and outcomes

Day Five: The Act stage: Reacting, adjusting, and standardization

• Go/no go and resource decisions,
• Dealing with the unexpected and obstacles
• Dealing with extreme failure or success
• Standardization and full-scale rollout of improvements and

innovations

• Setting the example and leading the charge
• Motivation and morale building for Staff for Continuous Improvement  

Training Methodology

Lectures, discussions, exercises, case studies, audio-visual aids will be used to reinforce these teaching/learning methods.