Operational Excellence: Journey to Creating Sustainable Value

CHAPTER 11CONDUCT INITIAL TRAINING WORKSHOPS

Facilitated training workshops are a very effective means for conveying the details of Operational Excellence, as well as specific processes, practices, and procedures. They provide participants an opportunity to work through an abbreviated version with all the elements of the full process. A workshop to identify organizational improvements was addressed in Chapter 10. Similarly, a workshop can be employed quite effectively at the commencement of the Operational Excellence program to acquaint the Steering Team with concepts, principles, and the program itself. A workshop is an effective means to begin the process of establishing program requirements and developing mission and strategy mentioned in Chapter 9. A workshop is particularly useful to acquaint members of the Leadership Team with the details of the Operational Excellence program and provide a forum for refining the program plan, preliminary identification, and value prioritization of potential improvements. The latter workshop is ideally conducted when the Leadership Team is initially formed during the Define phase. The knowledge must be in place before commencement of the following, Identify phase.

Regardless of whether a workshop is to be conducted by an outside facilitator or internal resources, it should be preceded by an abbreviated assessment to ascertain conditions, strengths to build on, and weaknesses to be improved in the area to be explored. Strengths include people, ...