Would You Like Me To Speak to Your Organization or Group?

In addition to facilitating TapRooT® root cause analysis workshops and my own performance improvement workshops to groups both in the United States and around the world, I also seek out opportunities to make keynote presentations at conferences, organizational improvement events, and local chapter meetings. If you would like to have me be a part of one of your upcoming events like this, please send me an e-mail. Please keep in mind that my schedule tends to fill up around 4-6 weeks in advance.

I have had the privilege of making the following presentations to a variety of groups over the past year:

	Pursuing Process Excellence - How to Sustain Your Improvement Efforts
	25 Years of Quality - Have We Really Improved That Much?
	Stop Meeting Madness! - Using LSS (Lean Six Sigma) to Improve Meeting Effectiveness
	Does Your Organization's Culture Support High Performance?
	Do You Work in a High Performance Workplace?
	Are You Ready for 21st Century Leadership?
	Workshop facilitator biography

Pursuing Process Excellence - How to Sustain Your Improvement Efforts Back to Top

In the majority of implementation efforts, project teams are used to drive a given performance improvement initiative.  Most commonly, kaizen teams are used to put lean methodologies in place and six sigma teams are employed to take advantage of those quality focused tools, just as quality circles were once relied on as the drivers of a company’s total quality management effort.  While a project team approach, where a select percentage of employees get to participate in improvement efforts, can deliver significant short term gains, it is not enough to either build the use of these techniques into an organization’s work culture or create a way of doing work that is sustainable over the long term.

The small percentage of truly high performance organizations that exists has figured this out.  They realize that sustained success over time cannot be realized by relying on project teams alone - high levels of both employee engagement and consistent process improvement are needed.  They make it mandatory that each employee, and in particular, each process owner, both learn process improvement skills and use them on a daily basis.  Team meetings become more than something one attends for an hour or two a week.  Projects become more than something a select group of supervisors work on a time permits.  Performance measurement is not seen as optional or as something that project teams do, but most process leaders don’t. Most importantly, they find time for their improvement efforts by working to minimize the high levels of management system waste that often exist in most organizations.

To achieve process excellence, all work must be seen as a process that is customer-focused.  In order to integrate this theory into each employee’s job, leaders must be measured differently, process measurement efforts must be balanced and aligned, learning must be seen as something that people must do in order to advance, and an effective root cause analysis approach must be used to find the systemic causes of human performance and equipment problems for all key processes.  In this workshop, a variety of proven approaches for achieving these, and other systemic changes, in your organization will be shared.  You will leave this workshop with a tangible road map for taking your performance improvement efforts to the next level, and you will hopefully gain additional insight into why most performance improvement initiative fail to live up to their long term process excellence and culture change expectations.

25 Years of Quality - Have We Really Improved That Much? Back to Top

If you simply look at the raw productivity trends, you would easily say organizations in this country, and in others, have significantly improved in the twenty-five years since “If Japan Can, Why Can’t We?” initiated the Total Quality Management craze.  If you look beyond these broad indicators however, and are really honest with yourself, you might arrive at a much different answer.  In the past twenty five years, have we really improved that much?  Are our workplaces better places to work at, and are our people more effective, or does technology deserve much more of the credit than we as human beings do?

In this presentation, Kevin McManus will share his personal quality journey over the last twenty-five years with you.  As he does so, he will explore the different trends and fads that have been part of the shift towards continuous process improvement in this country.  He will also make a case however to support his beliefs that we really have not changed that much – that absent of technology, our workplaces are not much better places to work at now than they were in 1980.  Finally, he will offer best practices and a course of action that we can follow if we choose to really make our workplaces more effective and capable of sustaining significant improvements over time.

What would Deming, Juran, Scholtes, and Imaii say about the degree of change that has, and has not, occurred in the workplace?  Would they feel good about the way their philosophies and ideals have been embraced by today’s organizations, or would they shake their heads in disgust? Take the time to spend this hour with Kevin, and form your own opinion.  Have we really improved, or do we have a lot of work to do?

Stop Meeting Madness - Using LSS (Lean Six Sigma) to Improve Meeting Effectiveness Back to Top

Meetings are a necessary process in any high performance workplace.  Unfortunately, meetings also result in a lot of organizational waste.  This presentation will explore meeting waste and defect types, along with examples of process improvement tools which can be used to reduce your own organizational meeting waste.

Many organizations are attempting to use lean and six sigma approaches to improve their front line processes, but they appear to be reluctant to apply these approaches to certain key management processes.  From a high performance workplace perspective, meetings represent a key management process that we invest a lot of time and money in daily, and yet many organizations don’t use their lean, six sigma, or process excellence techniques to improve the effectiveness of their meetings.  How much money does your plant, job site, or company spend on meetings in a typical week?  Which meeting defects are affecting your team the most?  How much of your meeting time is wasted, and how could it be better invested to help the organization improve?

In this presentation, you will learn techniques for measuring meeting effectiveness and cost in the same manner that we analyze the performance of front line work processes.  You will also learn how to define typical meeting defects and rework, and how to make process improvements that will reduce that waste.  Examples of systems that can be used to increase meeting process owner accountability, meeting alignment, and skills for leading effective meetings will be also be shared.

Does Your Organization's Culture Support High Performance? Back to Top

Have you experienced the downside of a failed effort to install high performance work practices such as six sigma, lean manufacturing, or total quality management? Would you like to prevent wasting time and money as you try to put similar improvement efforts in place? If so, you would benefit from this workshop. Most improvement efforts fail because the work culture does not support a high performance way of thinking. If you want to shift a work culture, you have to start by changing the work systems that drive, support, and encourage high performance work behaviors and beliefs. This workshop will help you learn more about these simple, but effective, work systems and it will give you the chance to assess the degree to which your existing work systems support high performance work practices.

Do You Work in a High Performance Workplace? Back to Top

Many organizations would like to think that they are high performers, but many also struggle to actually achieve and sustain the results that justify such a title. This presentation will use examples of high performance work systems and cultures to help illustrate what a high performance company looks, sounds, and feels like. Participants will also receive a high performance workplace assessment to help them gauge their progress towards becoming a high performance organization.

Are You Ready for 21st Century Leadership? Back to Top

At the end of the 20th century, a lot of books had been published and read on the topic of leadership. Many people had invested considerable money attending training workshops in an attempt to learn how to become a better leader. Now, five years into this new century, many of us are still left wondering what it takes to really be an effective leader, especially in a workplace that is often quite different than those that the books were written about and the training sessions were built around only ten years ago.

This one day workshop, like those that have preceded it, is intended to help make its participants better leaders. To be successful in today's workplace however, supervisors and managers must be able to proactively lead what seems to be an ever changing workforce, quickly respond to rapidly shifting customer demands, and effectively learn to utilize change. This workshop will provide key tools that are needed to become a better leader in the climate of today's business, and each participant will get a chance to begin using these tools to help improve their own leadership abilities.

Session Presenter Biography - Kevin McManus Back to Top

Kevin McManus is a performance improvement coach for Great Systems! and an international trainer for the TapRooT® root cause analysis process. During his twenty seven years in the business world, he has served as an Industrial Engineer, Training Manager, Production Manager, Plant Manager, and Director of Quality.   He holds an undergraduate degree in Industrial Engineering and a MBA. Kevin has been a member of IIE for more than twenty-six years, and has served as Senior VP of Continuing Education on the IIE Board of Trustees.  He has served as an Examiner and Senior Examiner for the Malcolm Baldrige National Quality Award for eight years.  Kevin also writes the monthly performance improvement column for Industrial Engineer magazine, and he has published a book entitled “You Can’t Win Indy in an Edsel – How to Develop a High Performance Work Culture.”'

Other Recent Presentations by Kevin McManus Back to Top

	Stop Meeting Madness Presentation (SWF)
	Conducting Effective Investigations Presentation (SWF)
	What is High Performance Leadership? Presentation (SWF)