Expert Lean Programme

This five-day programme is designed to equip change agents, managers and leaders with the necessary knowledge and skills to lead successful transformations within service organisations. It will provide new insights to those who already have a good understanding of lean, and also to those who are experienced in the application of lean within a manufacturing context and wish to understand how to translate these skills to a service environment. Different, cutting edge perspectives about several service improvement methodologies will be introduced and their strengths and weaknesses critically evaluated. At the end of the programme, delegates will possess a deep understanding of the latest thinking within service improvement.

Programme

Design thinking for service

Brilliant companies understand that one of the key ingredients for success is organising operations around delivering excellent customer service. Service design as a methodology and way of thinking seeks maximum involvement from customers in order to orientate processes and interactions around excellence in service delivery. The aim is to create elegantly simple and serene service experiences. Professor Rob Morgan will provide a framework about how to orientate your service around service design principles and will provide examples of successful service design in action from leading companies.

Systems Thinking

Systems Thinking originated in the 1940s and 50s as a way of examining organisations as a series of interconnected processes and systems. Discussion will focus on how improvement needs to be considered within the context of a system, recognising that a change in one part of the system will lead to several impacts elsewhere. Sarah Lethbridge will explore several systems thinkers’ methodologies with the group, such as Checkland and Beer, but the main focus will be to review and critically evaluate the work of John Seddon, whose ‘Check’ methodology as part of his approach to Systems Thinking, has contributed greatly to current understanding of improvement within services.

Lean Six Sigma for service

Six Sigma is a highly useful methodology which provides both a structure for improvement and a mechanism to reduce defects and variation. Whilst services need to be developed so that they can ‘absorb variation’, when blended with a Lean approach, Lean Six Sigma can provide a great benefit to service improvement. This benefit is due to the suite of statistical process control tools that the methodology possesses. Dr Maneesh Kumar will provide a practical take on how to use these tools and take participants through a structured approach to problem solving and its many advantages.

Innovations within Sales and Marketing

Building on decades of industrial experience, Richard Harrison, will share some of his experiences of assisting sales and marketing teams to understand that their work follows a process - a process which can be improved. Customer value analysis tools will be shared as a mechanism to better understand how the organisation needs to mobilise in order to secure more market share and grow. Techniques such as Neuro Linguistic Programming (NLP) will also be discussed as a mechanism to mobilise change and secure stakeholder buy in.

Service Improvement Interconnections and IT

The final day of the programme will provide the group with the opportunity to reflect on everything that they have learned so far, comparing and contrasting approaches in order to enable a deep understanding of their respective strengths and weaknesses. Sarah Lethbridge will help the group to distill key improvement concepts and themes into a series of components which can then be adapted and blended to suit particular organisational needs. Finally, the future of improvement will be discussed from a technological perspective. Case studies of the latest advances in IT led service improvement led will be shared as will some of the new thinking in IT development improvement such as Lean Start Up and Scrum.