Education and Training
Courses 2010
To support Major Step Change including Business Process Re-engineering (BPR),
Change Management, Benchmarking, Programme and Project Management, and Culture Change.
Our
Training Philosophy and Approach
The following 10 training
courses are available. They can be readily tailored to
suit individual requirements for in-house
workshops.
To discuss your
consulting or training needs with one of our independent consultants
or trainers please
Contact Us.
More Best Practice and
Training Links below
Major Step Change Course Summaries
S01
Business Process Re-engineering (BPR) Executive Overview (1½ days) (Course Schedules), (Request course
details)
Designed principally for: Executives & senior managers, about to embark on
Business Process Reengineering Projects, or decide if BPR is appropriate
Course Objectives:
Making a big difference
quickly whilst minimising
risk requires a special kind of management
process.
This overview workshop describes a process to
manage this type of change from inception
to operational reality. It focuses on management &
implementation issues & does not discuss BPR analysis & design techniques in
detail.
Course Highlights & Examples of
course participant's feedback:
This overview workshop will show you how to:
- Articulate the need to consider organisational change, process
improvement, or IT development
- Define the need, scale of change required, the approach, and the
priorities
- Show how to scope, plan, execute and implement the result of a BPR
programme safely
- Manage a BPR project (The key staged objectives, milestones and
sign-offs)
- Overcome the barriers to change & reduce implementation risk
Note: Includes content from S02 (below)
S02 Business
Process Re-engineering (BPR) (Detail)
(4 days: modules 1 & 2 scheduled together as a 2 day course, then
2 days for module 3) (Course Schedules), (Request course
details)
Designed for: the BPR project team and
managers affected by a BPR project, or those who are seeking to make a
significant difference in operational performance in a short space of time
Course Objectives:
In a small business the owner does everything. As the
business grows the owner has to employ functional specialists to which he or she
delegates certain aspects of running the business. Over time these functions
expand to a point where they become departments, and often barriers are erected
(often physical) between departments. As documents, materials and information
flow between departments, delays start to occur as they pass from in-tray, to
out-tray, to in-tray again. Often defensive systems such as date-stamping and
countersigning start to emerge as one department blames another for a mistake or
delay. Office politics emerge. Complicated procedures emerge. As they expand,
departmental hierarchies are created and departments relocate creating
communications difficulties. The business products or services change. Paper
work, meetings, computer systems and conference calls, grow in an attempt to
counteract these difficulties to an extent where it is actually almost impossible
to co-ordinate activities
and get things done. It is at this point that the
objectives of the organisation can actually be in conflict with the current
organisation, procedures and bureaucracy, and costs go through the roof.
This is the time to sit back and think
there must be a better way!
If your business is exhibiting these symptoms, this detailed course,
which is split into 3 self contained modules,
aligned to the stages of a BPR project, will enable you
to undertake major organisational change to deliver a step change in
performance, quicker and more safely. Our typical results
suggests that things can be done about 5 times quicker with 20% less work by using
Business Process Reengineering to improve a process.
Course Highlights & Examples of
course participant's feedback:
This overview workshop will show you the objectives, components & tools &
techniques of Business Process Re-engineering (BPR) to:
- Module 1: (Day 1) Objectives: Covering stage 1 of a BPR project,
this module lets you discover how to:
- Articulate the need to consider organisational change, process
improvement, or IT development
- Understand the objectives of Business Process Re-engineering (BPR)
-
Identify, prioritise, scope, plan and execute development needs to
improve processes by the application of process development
-
Overcome barriers to change with minimal risk
-
Identify
opportunities presented by the application of IT
-
Module 2: (Day 2) Objectives: Covering stage 2 of a BPR
project, this module lets you discover how to:
-
Understand the current methods and record them
in such a way to facilitate analysis, and improve the process
-
Motivate staff to change their process
-
Apply simple general purpose analysis techniques to
improve processes as part of a BPR process
-
Module 3: (Day 3/4) Objectives: Covering stages 3, 4, & 5 of a BPR
project, this module lets you discover how to:
-
Align processes with business objectives and
identify new process needs
-
Analyse the current process against future
business needs
-
Remove waste from current processes and design the
new process
-
Organise processes to reduce lead-time, work and
mistakes
-
Design processes in detail
-
Minimise implementation risk
-
Institutionalise the change
and allow the process to improve in future
Note: This course is also available as an executive overview
S01 (above)
S03 Vision
of a World Class Organisation
(2 days) (Course Schedules), (Request course
details)
Designed for: The whole management team
Course Objectives:
"You have to have a dream", as the song once said.
The reasons for dreaming are twofold:
-
What you would like to achieve or sometimes what
someone else has achieved
-
Dissatisfaction with the status quo or what you
cannot currently do
This course, designed in workshop style in conjunction with
S05 World Class Change Management (below), will enable you to define the
gap between your present position and our definition and examples
of "World Class" and approaches to becoming "World Class" to
provide the motivation for change.
Course Highlights & Examples of
course participant's feedback:
This course will help
you to:
- Identify the characteristics of leading companies / benchmarks
- Identify examples of the 21 wastes in your business
- Define "World Class" Products & Services
- Judge competitive performance (“SQAIRPAD” paired comparison)
to define development needs
- Focus on which of the 6 drivers of performance currently
has a wheel off (“SCOPER analysis”)
- Focus on which of the 5 characteristics of resources are driving or inhibiting
performance (“CARAP analysis”)
- World Class Processes
- World Class Change Mechanisms / Implementation
- Prioritise the issues (Process Quality Management)
Note: Includes a copy of our unique 118 point Agility self-diagnosis
checklist
S04
Strategic Capacity Management (1 day) (Course Schedules), (Request course
details)
Designed for: The whole management team,
but particularly senior operations and supplier development personnel
Course Objectives:
Your strategic capacity management process is probably
the most valuable asset you do not have.
This course, designed in workshop style, provides approaches to developing a
strategic capacity management process to aid business planning which:
- Simplifies capacity management
- Delivers a framework for meeting future demand with:
- Capability
- Resilience
- Effective & efficient use of resources
Course Highlights & Examples of course participant's
feedback:
This
course discusses the strategic considerations relating to capacity management,
to help you to:
- Define more effective, appropriate, low cost
capacity management processes (the four levels of capacity management)
- Define strategies to improve output or responsiveness
- Increase core competence:
- Define competitive performance & Critical Success Factors (CSF's)
- Define Resource Viability; Core Competence & Critical
Mass
- Focus on which of the 5 characteristics of resources are driving or inhibiting
performance (“CARAP analysis”)
- Make balanced Make vs. Buy decisions using our unique 17 point
decision table
- Balance capacity across a process using TAKT time & Capacity (line) balancing
- Define the four steps to create workflow (The Capacity 4S's)
- Capacity strategy & segmentation
- Simplify the process & create value streams
- Reduce the need for scheduling (and its accompanying complex
software)
- Segment your processes to provide superior customer service and
reduce the cost of control simultaneously (Resource Domination Analysis)
- Make effective repair or replace decisions (Replacement theory)
- Create Lean & Agile capacity
- Create resilience & consistency of service & Manage volume & variety changes:
- Manage seasonal demand effectively by the practical application
of the "capacity battery" principle
- Reduce risk and provide business continuity in the event
of disasters
- Flex capacity constraints: (ceilings; floors; walls) to cope with
massive shifts in load or mix of work using techniques to:
- Quickly up-shift or downshift capacity (exchange curves)
- Reduce fixed costs in periods of low demand
- Increase your ability to cope with mix increases (Redundancy & Bandwidth
Analysis)
- Reduce the impact of forecast error in strategic capacity
decision making
- Turn the business plan into a capacity plan
- Create simple capacity simulation models
- & finally get more output for free!
Note 1:: Includes a copy of our unique 118 point Agility checklist
& our 17 point Make vs. Buy decision table
Note 2: Written in
conjunction with
M23 Capacity Management which contains complementary material.
S05
World Class Change Management (1 day) (Course Schedules), (Request course
details)
Designed for: The whole management team
Course Objectives:
"You have to have a dream", as the song once said, but you
also have to have
a way of delivering the dream.
This course, designed, in workshop style, in conjunction with S03
Vision of a World Class Organisation and S08 Programme
Management helps you to convert the vision
you created in S03 (above), not into a business plan for the benefit of the bank
manager, but into a Competitive Achievement Management process by adding
World
Class Change Mechanisms (see
illustration).
Course Highlights & Examples of
course participant's feedback:
This course will help you to:
- Construct a competitive achievement plan (not just a business plan)
that is a real action plan using competitive positioning analysis
tools such as:
- "SWOT"
- "FAB"
- "Z charts"
- "USP" / "key buying criteria"
- Product life cycle analysis / Pig analysis / Life cycle costing
- Resource viability, Core competence & Critical Mass: (Strategic
Capability Analysis) (Overview from S04
Strategic Capacity Management)
- Turn it into an actively managed development programme to:
- Drive step change (overview from S08
Programme Management, and S09 Project Management)
- Drive strategies for:
- Product development
- Market development
- Process development
- People
- Procurement
- Capital investment
- Drive continuous improvement
- In the same way as you have an "operations management" process
establish a "Development Management Process" to:
- Coordinate development
- Resolve priorities and conflicts
- Overcome the barriers to change
- To make your vision a reality in the shortest possible time
S06
Introduction to Benchmarking (overview) (½ day) (Course Schedules), (Request course
details)
Designed for: The Management team
Course Objectives:
Benchmarking is not about the metrics
of superior performance. It is about the methods of
achieving it.
This course, designed in workshop style, as an executive overview of
S07
(below) will enable you to:
- Create a culture where change is possible
- Take benchmarking beyond the metrics
- Acquire totally new ideas of how to do things better
S07
A Guide to Benchmarking (detail) (1 day) (Course Schedules), (Request course
details)
Designed for: The management team and benchmarking
team members
Course Objectives:
"Someone out there must have done this before. They may be
doing something similar to us but better. Why don't
we have a look?"
Benchmarking is much more than a site visit!
This course will enable you to establish and run a
Benchmarking programme and understand why Benchmarking is a very powerful
change agent.
Course Highlights & Examples of
course participant's feedback:
This course will help you to:
- Plan your first Benchmarking project
- Identify who can help
- Learn from the best
- Understand the methods, tools and techniques of Benchmarking
- Overcome the barriers to change
- Achieve the bottom line benefits you are seeking with least
effort in the shortest time
Note: This course is also available as an executive overview
S06 (above)
S08
Programme Management (1 day) (Course Schedules), (Request course
details)
Designed for: The Management team, development managers, change programme or project managers and
operational mangers
Course Objectives:
To make beneficial change happen!
This course designed in conjunction with S05 World Class
Change Management (above) and S09 Project Management
(below) will show you how to manage a continuous stream of market led,
technically and commercially viable,
product and process
developments to support the business plan, with minimum risk,
which are both safe and environmentally friendly. (There may be a
risk associated with not doing it.)
Course Highlights & Examples of course participant's
feedback:
This course focuses on the management process
and human change management aspects of
ensuring safe and successful major product or process development.
It will help you to:
- Provide an executive oversight of the four types of
development process, when and how to deploy them
effectively to achieve both step change and
continuous improvement
- Continually position and manage individual projects within
a change programme through a programme management process
- Engage the whole team and overcome resistance to change
- Correctly initiate, prioritise and manage individual projects within a
change programme to deliver the full deliverables / benefits on time and
to budget
- Take timely actions on delinquent projects
- Implement a development management process
- Provide appropriate management focus on development and a vehicle to
stimulate enthusiasm for change and to
- Make beneficial change happen
S09 Project
Management (1 Day) (Course Schedules), (Request course
details)
Designed for: Beginners to project
management and team members of project teams.
Course Objectives:
The objective of Project Management is to deliver at
least the expected outcomes, no later than planned, and within budget!
Myth or reality? Discuss?
Designed in conjunction with S08 Programme Management (above), this course
is
not a conventional project management-by-rote course. It will not teach you how to use Microsoft Project, nor will it
talk about "Prince". What it does do, is show you, and give you a chance
to practice, the key practical things you have to do. It covers the four key
stages of a project life cycle, 18 detailed planning steps and 10 tools &
techniques to ensure project success.
Course Highlights & Examples of
course participant's feedback:
It will help you to:
- Manage all of the four key stages of a project life cycle:
- Project Initiation
- Classify your project to ensure proper and appropriate management focus
- Scope / de-scope your project and clarify objectives
before you start
- Identify the true project objectives
- Write "SMART objectives" and "terms of reference"
for a project
- Predict major risks & minimise them
- Project Planning
- Select and organise the project team and define the
3 key project roles
- Identify the tasks to be done
- Estimate tasks you have never done before
- Put the tasks into a logical and priority sequence
- Minimise project lead-time using
"chunking", "critical path networks"
- Create the most
favourable cash flows during the project and set the project budget
- Select an appropriate implementation strategy to get
the job done
- Project Execution
- Keep projects firmly and uncompromisingly in control and manage timely control actions
- Overcome resistance to change and "Not Invented Here"
- Communicate the project plan effectively
- Identify and create project documentation to record significant facts,
deliverables, constraints, risks and likelihood of success
- Expose hidden problems and escalate them in a
proportionate and timely way
- Ensure that the promised resources actually materialise
- Avoid "mission creep"
- Project Close
- Ensure project closure
and proper handover to operations
- Ensure that change is institutionalised & the lessons
are learned
- Manage "QCDR" to deliver the bottom line
benefit:
- Deliver all of the deliverables to the required
Quality
- Stay within budget by managing the Costs
- Deliver on time in full
- Minimise the Risks
Note: As part of this course we will give you feedback on the "terms
of reference" you write for you first project following the course.
S13 Culture Development Methods (1 day) (Course Schedules), (Request course
details)
Designed for: The management team and
individual managers who wish to change the culture of their organisation.
Course Objectives:
Manager: "They just want paying for doing nothing!"
Staff member: "They want blood and don't want to
pay for it!" "I've heard that........."
Getting the best from your people sometimes does not come
easily. But you can readily recognise when it is not working well!
-
Key symptoms
include:
-
Following this
course you will also recognise when culture is working superbly to create
a lively, dynamic, positive, force for business improvement by
providing:
Course Highlights & Examples of
course participant's feedback:
This course will help you to:
- Analyse your business's culture and the barriers to change that exist
- Analyse your own management style
- Understand the difference between goal setting and task setting
- Directing vs. Delegating
- Your use of communication mechanisms
- Understand the symptoms and drivers of your business's current culture
- What aspects of culture need developing
- Change the drivers
- Recalibrate your communications methods
- Kill the rumours grapevine
- Diagnose your change management process
- Organise your processes (Overview from S02
Business Process Reengineering (above) to get things done more easily
and quickly and improve process ownership
- Establish team-working
(Overview from OM01 Organising & Engaging The Team)
- Recognise quality behaviour
- Drive continuous improvement (Overview from
C01 Focused Improvement
Systems)
- Use "benchmarking" as a change vehicle for culture change
- Make corresponding systems and procedure changes.
In order to establish a culture development programme to:
- Create a new culture where talent and effort is recognised and
can
thrive and where negativity is challenged
- Create a successful, engaged, motivated, self-managed team
_____________________________________________________________________
To discuss your
consulting or training needs with one of our independent consultants
or trainers please
Contact Us.
Home Page
© SM Thacker & Associates
(Consultancy and Training Specialists) Original
January 2000. Version 19 March 2010
