What this is all about
I have been teaching project management, process improvement, change management, and leadership courses for over 20 years. Here's what I've learned so far:
- These skills are not difficult - many training programs make them harder than they need to be.
- These skills can be used by anyone for professional or personal performance improvement.
- The tools in each of these disciplines work better when they are used together.
- These tools in each of these disciplines work better when you are using them correctly.
By applying the best practices, I have improved my own performance. I've learned what doesn't work and focused on the skills that make a difference. I have built a training program that shows you how to use these skills and tools to improve your outcomes and your life.
Frameworks for Higher Performance
The classes on this website offer three approaches to managing your life. What you learn here can be used in your personal life, your current work, or your career. You can use these skills and concepts to proactively discover the parts of your life that you want to improve. Develop a plan to set you on the road to success and build a way to ensure you reach your goal.
During my career, I have been a Project Manager and a Six Sigma Black Belt. I have found that each of these roles has great skills and approaches, however, when they are treated as separate departments, they lack the power for lasting change. I have discovered that simply identifying the issue doesn't fix it. Projects that lack a clear understanding of the problem miss the mark because the requirements do not match customer expectations. I think the biggest gap between project management and process improvement is sustainability. Once the initial excitement of a new process wears off, people drift back to the previous way of doing things.
This set of courses teaches the fundamentals of process improvement, project management, operational excellence, agile management, and design thinking which sets a framework for long-term success. These topics are based on processes and data. You will be able to identify and manage workflow while using data to measure success. The other essential feature that is covered is emotional intelligence. Emotional intelligence addresses interpersonal skills like communication, critical thinking, motivation, and change management. This will create the required mindset for ourselves and how we interact with others. Finally, we look at the cognitive processes for this journey and how we learn and apply system thinking or visual management.
Plan and Implement
This framework is Plan and Implement. To launch any new project or program, you need to plan and then do it. You may get it right without planning it, but you can reduce the number of mistakes and be intentional about the outcome if you plan it first. This section is based on the fundamentals of traditional project management. Project management are based on a set of best practices to manage time, cost, risk and quality of a project. This introduction start with what is included in project management and gives an overview of some of the history of project management. There is also a comparison to agile project management, which is better suited for measure and sustain. Another important topic here is change management. Identify and Improve are all about change too, but in the first section, the changes are on paper and in this section, the stakeholders are impacted by the change. Motivation is more important and resistance is more likely to sidetrack a project.
Course currently available
Identify and Improve
This framework is Identify and Improve. You can start with any of the learning pathways for some, a good starting place is Measure and Manage and for others, making this all happen requires Plan and Implement. Identify and Improve is grounded in process improvement. These include the popular lean approach to eliminating wastes like wasted time or unneeded movement. Six Sigma uses statistics to discover factors that negatively impact the customer. This starts off with an overview of what these approaches offer and a brief history of their development. This section also covers the training and use in organizations. The next section describes the types of process improvement and how they compare to each other.
Course available later
Measure and Manage
This framework is Manage and Manage. This is built on the vision of your future and planning out the steps to get there. Plan and Implement will fit here for some of the actions, but the starting place is higher level than in a project. This section focuses on big-picture thinking and breaks it down into manageable parts. This framework is developed from operational excellence and agile management as a way to create a vision and break it down. The introduction starts with the high-level process of driving from outcome to action plan and using purpose as fuel to get there. This also defines the ability to identify a vision for the future and use these tools to clarify and convert into tangible activities that can be scheduled. The tangible skills to quantify a vision into actionable tasks are accompanied by understanding your cognitive and emotional process. You have to be able to understand how you learn and what motivates you to get up out of the chair to start your amazing journey. In addition, you also need to understand how to work with others to build connections and community. The overview includes the different approaches to managing work, including classical and agile approaches.
