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The Why; Remembering that “Time is the Enemy”

Creating and maintaining an Operational Excellence (or Continuous Improvement) program is a seemingly daunting task full of complexities and nuances. That the objectives are also a moving target makes it even moreso.

But it doesn’t have to be that way…

What if there was a way to bring people together from across the organizational stratifications, get them all speaking the same language, and focused on the problem and not each other?

Encouraging cross-functional collaboration: Companies may face difficulties in fostering collaboration between different teams or departments. Design Thinking encourages cross-functional collaboration, as it requires input from various stakeholders to ensure diverse perspectives are considered throughout the design process.

Design Thinking offers a human-centric and iterative approach to problem-solving, making it invaluable for companies facing a wide range of challenges in today’s dynamic business landscape.  By adopting Design Thinking principles, companies can become better at driving the organization’s strategies, gaining alignment, fostering innovation, improving customer experiences, and drive overall success.

What is Design Thinking?

Design Thinking is a human-centered approach to problem-solving that places empathy and user needs at the forefront. It involves a creative and iterative process that seeks to identify and address users’ latent needs through innovation. Design Thinking focuses on creating tangible and practical solutions that enhance user experiences and meet specific requirements.

Design Thinking often starts with a loosely defined problem or challenge and employs techniques like user research and empathy to gain insights and reframe the problem in a way that aligns with user needs and aspirations.

Design Thinking emphasizes creating user-centered solutions that are practical, feasible, and desirable. It aims to generate innovative ideas and prototypes that address specific user needs and enhance their experiences.

Design Thinking for Operational Excellence™ (DT4OpEx®)

Design Thinking for Operational Excellence™ (DT4OpEx®) is an application of the Design Thinking methodology to improve operational processes and enhance overall organizational efficiency. The main benefit of this approach is improved communication and operational alignment between all stakeholders by carefully orchestrating and managing human conversations focusing in listening and empathizing with each and every stakeholder who will be instrumental in making the change happen or is affected by the change.

In this context, Design Thinking is used to focus on human emotions with anxiety and resistance on the one hand but also leveraging the excitement that co-exists; the eagerness to change and optimism many stakeholders experience when organizations need to change.

After all, change is not possible without people driving it and ensuring everybody not only intellectually but also emotionally understands why change is needed, what the opportunities and threats are and how their lives will change after the Operational Excellence program is implemented ensures everybody is on board and well informed before the change starts and during the journey to come.

It involves using the principles and tools of Design Thinking to identify, understand, and address operational challenges and opportunities in a systematic and user-centric manner.

Design Thinking for Operational Excellence™ recognizes that operational processes are not just technical or mechanical in nature but involve the experiences and interactions of employees, customers, and other stakeholders. It aims to foster a culture of innovation and continuous improvement by leveraging the human-centered approach of Design Thinking.

Our Design Thinking for Operational Excellence™ (DT4OpEx®) Offerings

Design Thinking for Operational Excellence™ Workshop Templates

Below you will find a sample of four standard Design Thinking for Operational Excellence™ (DT4OpEx®) workshop templates from our workshop template library. Each workshop template comes with a guide book and addresses a specific type of business challenge. In addition to the four workshop templates listed, we have others and are continuously adding workshop templates to the library.

Custom Design Thinking for Operational Excellence™ (DT4OpEx®) Templates

In addition to the standard workshop templates, we can create custom templates to support a Design Thinking approach to a nearly unlimited number of business challenges that you might have. We can also brand the workshop templates to your company or program.

Design Thinking for Operational Excellence™ (DT4OpEx®) Services

We also have a complete portfolio of service offerings in support of your Design Thinking for Operational Excellence™ (DT4OpEx®) efforts that include;

  • Education and Training in the concepts and methodologies of DT4OpEx®.
  • Certifications of facilitators in DT4OpEx® for the delivery of workshops.
  • Consulting services related to problem-solving using DT4OpEx®.
  • Consulting services related to creating custom posters and workshops to satisfy your bespoke challenges.

Design Thinking for Operational Excellence™ (DT4OpEx®) Partner Program.

Please inquire for details

Here are examples of the workshops we have created

PART 1 – chapter 1

What is Operational Excellence?

Define your Operational Excellence Lighthouse and Imagine how your organization will thrive after it has transformed into a high-performance organization which has reached the STATE of READINESS in a sustainable way?

Use

This workshop is used to determine what is important to an organization when standing up a program. It distills out from the narrative a clear and concise vision of the future and what needs to be done to get there.

Intended Audience

Those who should attend this workshop are all the stakeholders of the program and the senior leadership whose support and sponsorship is critical to the success of the program.

Expected Outcome

The expected outcomes of this workshop is to; snap into focus a vision of the future that is clear and concise so that all can align to it, define critical elements necessary to be successful, and establish the KPI’s for evaluating success.

PART 2 – chapter 9

Decisions, Decisions

How does accelerating the decision-making process increase the maturity level of your company’s OPEX and give you the ability to see further beyond the horizon, recognize opportunities and threats sooner, and device and deploy decisive response faster?

Use

We understand that time is the enemy and also that time is finite. This workshop teaches the participants to combat time by focusing on smaller, iterative progress towards a desired outcome more quickly and hastening the decision-making process; often from incomplete information.

Intended Audience

All the stakeholders who are directly involved in the outcomes that will be realized including; those who will own the results, those who will deliver the results, and those in the supply chain who will support those who deliver the results.

Expected Outcome

The participants will understand why time is the enemy. They will learn how to synthesis iterative decisions from incomplete information. And they will learn why trust and understanding of our individual and collective capabilities is so important.

PART 3 – chapter 14

Changing a want to a need

How can we separate wants from needs and select from the needs those which are actionable and have a compelling business case.

We will determine the major business functions involved and their respective strategies in order to make a go/no-go decision.

Use

This workshop is used to harvest the challenges an organization faces and, through a set of selection criteria, help determine which challenges get priority attention. Once a challenge is identified, we then go through a series of steps to determine who will be impacted and who will be involved contributors to complete the tasks and make a final go/no-go decision.

Intended Audience

The audience for this workshop will be senior leadership who need to sort through a basket of opportunities to determine what is wanted by the organization and what wants are elevated to being needs.

Expected Outcome

In this workshop, the participants will learn how to evaluate and prioritize a series of opportunities to determine which opportunity should get the attention and then subject the opportunity to a series of stress tests. The end result will be a recommendation to leadership that the opportunity should be pursued, evaluated further, or not pursued.

PART 4 – chapter 20

The Operational Excellence Enterprise Readiness Model

How to apply the Operational Excellence Enterprise Readiness model (OpEx-ERM) in order to devise and deploy an effective and efficient education and training program.

This will help your organisation

  • Build capacity and capability
  • Train your work force
  • Avoid build instead of buy
  • Create relevant content

Use

This workshop is used to construct an education and training program. Originally intended for an OpEx program, it is adaptable to any education and training needs an organization might have.

Intended Audience

The intended audience for this workshop include all the stakeholders involved in determining the construct of the training and education needs and those responsible for the the delivery of the training and education.

Expected Outcome

At the conclusion of this workshop, the participants will have a clear understanding of the desired outcomes of the education and training program and its construct, as well as any gaps that need to be resolved before its launch.