Center for Executive & Professional Development

Process Mapping and Process Improvement
How to document, analyze, redesign, and manage processes for dramatic improvement!

Process mapping can be an extremely powerful diagnostic tool for your organization. And you may well find more than process issues—including structural problems, poor controls, and people issues. Learn to tap into employee frustration to fix processes and get to the root cause of quality and timeliness issues.

Learn to use the sixteen symptoms of a broken process and the five lenses of process analysis to pinpoint those processes in need of immediate attention. Also learn key criteria to prioritize process improvement efforts.

Once you have diagnosed your process problem, you will be able to pick the right improvement technique, which may include continuous process improvement, process redesign, six sigma, lean techniques, and reengineering. Practice these techniques on your own real-world processes during the course, and leave with real improvement ideas.

By using fundamental design principles, you can create processes that are exceptionally fast, dramatically cheaper, and that produce high quality products or services. Learn to capture process costs, quality costs, cycle, process, wait time, and employee frustrations as part of the diagnosis of processes. By costing out process and quality costs, you will be able to demonstrate to senior management cost savings and return on investment opportunities.

Moving to a process focused organization requires both a skill set and mind set. The course will give you the skills you need to enact real process improvement within your organization. You will also be coached in leading and facilitating the mind set that will drive your organization to the next level of performance. Learn how to select, organize, and facilitate process improvement efforts as well as the eight major barriers to process improvement and effective strategies for overcoming these barriers.

Finally, information technology is enabling process management in a variety of ways. Complete process documentation can be easily accomplished with modern software programs. More importantly, processes can be simulated to do “what if” analysis and to validate changes in process design.

We encourage you to bring your process problems to the seminar and practice the powerful techniques and tools on these processes. Leave with an action plan to fix these processes and then establish an environment of on-going process improvement in your company or organization.

This workshop is designed for professionals that want “hands-on” experience in process mapping, improvement, and management such as:

	Process improvement teams or task forces
	IT professionals
	Department heads
	Quality professionals
	Operations professionals
	Managers and supervisors

Participants receive a copy of Dan Madison’s: Process Mapping, Process Improvement, and Process Management book

Instructor:
Shelley Sweet is founder and principal of Intercept Management Consulting in Palo Alto, CA. As a management consultant, she has worked with a variety of public, non-profits, as well as corporate clients on strategic planning, assessment, organizational efficiency and business process design. Her clients range from the mega-corporations of Cisco Systems, Chevron, Bank of America and Microsoft to the California Council on Economic and Environmental Balance, Community Legal Services of San Jose, the Los Angeles Unified School District and the USC, Los Angeles.

Prior to founding her company in 1991, Shelley was Director of Management and Employee Development for Saba, Marketing Director and Senior Consultant for Omega Performance Corporation and VP of Corporate and Retail Training at Bank of America, San Francisco.

Shelley received a Bachelor of Economics degree from Wellesley College in Massachusetts and a Masters in Management from John F. Kennedy University in California.

“Our organization is trying to increase capacity, throughput, and utilization of people. This means big changes in the shop area. We’ve been implementing Lean for several years. I know how to use value stream mapping, but it does not give the detail I need. I really like the mapping with swim lanes that Shelley taught us for process mapping, It makes it obvious which people need to be involved in improving the process across functional boundaries.

“I brought the charts of our tapping process that we made in class back and hung them up in my office. I explained them to all the lead people in my group, checked with them to make sure they were accurate, and then we all started looking at them to figure out improvements. We changed the sequence of the steps to minimize hand offs. We also reduced wasted time in the paint queue. We developed point of use inventory in the sub assemblies and eliminated going back and forth to the warehouse. I anticipate we will reduce total process time from 5 days to 3 days, a 40 % savings.”

Roger Chuculate, Manufacturing Manager
TD Williamson

“I came to the class because I had a programming background and needed to see the bigger picture in the health care organization where I was working. Shelley’s teaching was very good, she was approachable, and had a wealth of stories that I could benefit from.

“I got really pumped up from the class. “I realized that I needed to get more information up front to build improved processes. I had a new way of identifying roadblocks in processes and had methods to redesign processes to make them more effective. I saw that I had to take responsibility for influencing improvements vs. depending on others. Within just three days after I got back to the office, I identified why an installation project had been floundering for several months, took action, and moved the project along!"

Debby Bearden, Information Manager
St. John Health Care System