Manufacturing Slack

Many organizations arrange training classes, provide education budgets to their employees, hire well-known consultants to visit and give inspiring talks, but most of the time, nothing changes. Why isn’t your organization improving? What we can do about it?

In this course we examine how to improve this situation. Almost every organization has excess capacity waiting to be discovered and used to your advantage. We form a general understanding of what your business is doing today, discuss the learning curve and how it stops man improvement projects in their tracks, and you leave with a plan to find the hidden slack in your organization, start exploiting it, and decide how to reinvest that slack into the business.

Audience

Anyone working in an environment where they feel certain that change is needed, but look around and see that nobody has the time to change anything. You feel stuck and want someone to help you figure out a way to make progress.

Key Topics

• What is slack and why should you care about it?
• The problem with “we don’t have time” is that you have time, but you can’t see it.
• The other problem with “we don’t have time” is that you can’t create time, making it seem like an impossible problem to solve.
• If you could see the slack around you, what would you do with it?
• Finding sources of slack by mapping value streams.
• How to turn slack into improvement: alignment, planning, then execution.

Activities

• Lectures and group discussions.
• Individual and small-group working sessions, including mapping value streams to hunt for bottlenecks.
• Build a plan for finding and exploiting your first few likely sources of slack.

Preparation

Participants need the following to attend this course.

• Something to write with, and something to write on. I suggest index cards or sticky notes and a notebook.

Remote Training Preparation

Please do the following at least one day before the course is scheduled to start.

• Upgrade Zoom to the most recent version.
• Check audio, video, and screen sharing on Zoom.

Delivery Options

Live/Remote Private Course

The standard course runs as 2 sessions of 1/2 day each scheduled within a 1-week period. The course is suitable for groups up to 30 people. Larger groups should run the course multiple times.

It is also recommended to add follow-up working sessions to be scheduled 1 month, 3 months, and 6-12 months after the course ends, as a way to support the group as they apply what they’ve learned to their daily work.

Start the booking process for your live/remote course.