Weatherhead Executive Education

Program Dates	Continuing Education
April 23, 2008, 9:00 a.m. - 4:30 p.m. Cleveland, OH Add to Cart Nick Berente	This program provides continuing education credit for the following professions: PMI Project Managers 6 PDU SPHR Professionals 6 CEU PHR Professionals 6 CEU OHIO CPA 8 CPE

Process improvement practices – from Six Sigma and enterprise-resource planning (ERP) systems to supply chain integration – have greatly transformed the way organizations operate. But even as businesses seek competitive advantage through streamlining and standardization, these same efforts can impede other forms of innovation that are no less critical. This program will help managers to understand the fundamental tradeoffs between process improvement and innovation, preparing them with tools to critically analyze the advantages and implications of each type of process improvement. Through a series of discussions and interactive, team-based exercises, participants will actively explore specific ways that process improvements can foster and hinder innovation. In a final exercise, participants will engage in simulation software to experience how process improvement decisions impact an organization’s ability to innovate and compete over time. At the end of the day, participants will have specific strategies and tools to assess and nurture certain types of innovation from process improvement efforts

Topics

• Process improvement principles and associated initiatives
• Forms of innovation
• Managing complex systems
• Tradeoffs between process improvement strategies and innovation strategies
  

Learning Outcomes
As a result of attending this class, participants will:

• Develop a critical eye toward process improvement efforts, helping them appreciate the complexity of these activities and the impact these can have on an organization’s flexibility, and hence its ability to innovate.
• Receive a toolkit to identify the tradeoffs between innovation and process improvement
• Apply a set of generic strategies to pursue specific innovative practices in an organizational context within simulated learning environment

Who Should Attend  
Managers, process owners and information systems professionals. The program is particularly applicable to sales and engineering managers, as well as consultants.

Level of Prior Knowledge in This Subject Area: None

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