Managing digital transformation presents some daunting challenges when faced with critical near-term deadlines, fast-moving market requirements and constrained resources. However, that is the condition of the typical technology-based company today. The challenges are caused by a combination of the constrained business conditions, business uncertainty due to societal issues, and the uncertainty and variability of the new technology. Fortunately there are several management approaches and techniques that can assist a company in the proactive management of digitally transforming critical business processes. PPI has several courses that are focused upon successful digital transformation, new product development based upon digital business principles and managing innovation in both products and business systems.

PPI will customize these programs if your company needs specialized training due to industry issues or corporate objectives. PPI will also work with its clients to develop customized case studies and exercises that are tailored to their business practices. Please contact us for prices and schedules.

Planning and Implementing a Digital Transformation

Businesses are quickly racing to transform their products, processes and business model from industrial age businesses to become digital age businesses. This is far more than an IT upgrade, it an impact every aspect of the enterprise. To do this effectively a business digital changeover strategy is needed. As part of this strategy, an organizational change and implementation plan must be developed. This course explains each of those elements and provides examples and exercises for creating them.

Managing New Product Development Projects

Product development projects are among the most challenging projects. They often have vague or shifting requirements, tight time schedules, immature high-risk technology, and a cross-functional team with differing functional goals. They are the embodiment of high risk. This course will discuss the unique characteristics of product development projects and methods and techniques the project leader and team members can use to account for these characteristics. This program is ideally suited for digitally transformed product development.

Design for Six Sigma

Six Sigma process management has become a standard practice in many companies. However, six sigma applies to established processes. When designing a new product, often there are few if any existing processes. Design for Six Sigma (DFSS) is a methodology to assist engineers so that the products they create are compatible with six sigma process management. This course presents the methodology of DFSS.

Design for Manufacturability

Products that are not manufacturable are not a competitive advantage for a company, they are a liability. The suite of tools and techniques that encompass Design for Manufacturability assist the design team to ensure the final design can transition smoothly into the production environment. This course will demonstrate the use of the DFM tools and allow the participants to practice with them.

Voice of the Customer

Everyone says that they want the voice of the customer to be reflected in their product requirements and product designs, yet often they have no methodology for capturing and analyzing this information. It is not enough to just repeat a few anecdotes, a systematic approach should be used to both understand what the customer wants and to translate that into design requirements. This course reviews several techniques for doing both of those.

Innovation with Lean and Six Sigma

Lean and Six Sigma are two proven methods for improving business performance. They focus on driving out waste and inefficiency and bring a level of process management that is needed to ensure sustained high levels of performance. But what they do not do is foster innovation. In fact, the principles of both Lean and Six Sigma will suppress and punish innovation efforts. This course shows how to use innovation tools in conjunction with Lean and Six Sigma processes to get both breakthrough innovation and low cost, high quality operational performance.

Product Line Strategy and Portfolio Management

A business strategy is often implemented through product line strategies. These strategies integrate the realities of the marketplace, the operational strengths and weaknesses of the business, the product lifecycle and product technology to find the point of competitive advantage. This course normally combines teaching and application consulting. It includes classroom teaching of product line strategy principles and coaches business teams in the application of those principles to their product lines.

Managing Design Transfer

Even though a product development team has designed a great product, that does not ensure business success. The company must still get that product into production; often in multiple sites around the world. The design transfer process can be a larger and more challenging project than the was the product development. This course will discuss the principles for effective design transfer and share best practices that have proven effective.

Program Overview:

Leading in the Digital Age is creating new challenges for operational managers and leaders. They can’t fine tune the organization and process then strive to maintain the status quo. The business environment is not that stable. Technology is rapidly changing, which means business operational processes are regularly being revised with new capabilities. Customer’s expectations are increasing with each new device or technology – they want faster, more personalized service. Employees expectations are also increasing as they expect more than just a paycheck; they want a safe, pleasant work environment where they can both grow and contribute. This adds up to a much more demanding job for leaders. They must be leading change into new processes and systems while simultaneously maintaining excellent performance from existing processes and systems.

The Digital Leadership Program acknowledges that challenge and equips your organization to lead in the Digital Age. It is an action learning program that combines seminars and exercises with a real-world leadership challenge. The program can be customized for your industry and business model. The learning seminar portion of the program consists of seven day-long seminars that address different aspects of leading a digital organization. This is combined with the participants creating and implementing a real-world project based upon a business leadership initiative. The participants will attend the seven sessions and between sessions work with others in the program on to create, plan and implement a project that is an element of the business digital strategy. Participants will be assigned to work in teams of three on these projects. At the end of the program, each team will present the status and results of their project to senior leaders.

Learning Seminars:

Session 1 – Kickoff and Framework for Performance Excellence

This initial session will be used to kickoff the program. The challenges of a leading and organization in 21st century will be explored. The Balanced Scorecard will be used to address how to measure business success. The balanced scorecard combines financial measures, operational performance measures, customer satisfaction measures, and employee engagement/learning measures to create a comprehensive view of organizational performance. The forces of demographic changes, technology changes, and macro-economic changes will be used to assess the imperative need for leadership. The role of a leader versus a manager will be explored. Finally, in this session, the project teams for the action learning projects will be assigned and the goal or focus of each team will be determined.

The seminar will be a combination of lecture/presentation with facilitated discussions and exercises. One exercise will be to create the framework for a Balanced Scorecard. Another exercise will be the initial team meeting and planning session for the Action Learning Project. A Guest Presenter from the organization will often present and focus on how the organization has changed over the past few years and explain the strategic initiatives with which the projects will be aligned.

Session 2 – Developing a Digital Mindset – Technology as an Enabler of the Future

This session will consider how technology has changed the nature of financial services and the emerging trends with new technology. The elements of a digital strategy, which is much more than just an IT strategy, will be discussed. The impact of technology on customer interactions, internal processes, and the regulatory environment will be explored. All of these will be used to create the elements of a business digital strategy. Then the impact on the role of the manager and team leader in a digital age will be discussed. The need for deep trust and how to build that will be explained. And the need for continuous learning and the impact that has on employees will be explored.

The seminar will be a combination of lectures/presentations with facilitated discussions and exercises. One exercise will be to conduct a force field analysis of digital trends on both customer interactions and internal processes. Another exercise will be to do a self-assessment of the ability to create deep trust among team members and direct reports. Each team will meet to determine how a digital mindset will affect the planning and implantation of their Action Learning project. A business guest presenter will focus on digital technology strategy for the organization and some of the successes and failures that have occurred when deploying technology.

Session 3 – Operational Excellence – System thinking and Continuous Improvement

This session focuses on understanding operational processes and applying continuous improvement approaches to them. It will include an introduction to process mapping and identifying waste streams that exist within a business process. Continuous improvement techniques focused on problem solving will also be introduced. Applying digital solutions can transform a slow, wasteful and inefficient process.

This seminar will be a combination of lectures/presentations with facilitated discussions and exercises. One exercise will be to create an “As-Is” process map for the process associated with their project. There will be a series of quick exercises associated with problem solving using a case study, or a team can apply the problem-solving tools to their project if their project has a known problem. Each team will also have time to discuss the attributes of the “To-Be” process they are creating as part of their project. The business guest speaker could either be someone discussing operational efficiency and performance, or someone who led a team that found and fixed a difficult and complex process problem.

Session 4 – Financial Acumen – Making Informed Business Decisions

This session focuses on financial risks and rewards of business decisions. A high-level overview of how the organization makes money will be discussed. Then operational measures of profit, margin, and cash flow will be reviewed, and the inter-relationships identified. The emphasis is on operational measures and how managers can influence those, not on asset valuation or stock market analysis. Several ROI techniques will be introduced that can be used for making decisions to fund projects. In addition, capitalization and depreciation of IT assets will be reviewed and how those impact ROI calculations. Digitalization projects should deliver financial benefits, through increased sales, lower costs or both.

This seminar will be a combination of lectures/presentations with facilitated discussions and exercises. If available, the organization’s financial reports will be used throughout the day for doing calculations of measures and ratios. Monthly, quarterly, and operational metrics will be calculated with discussions about the differences and how to influence changes. ROI exercises will be used to demonstrate how to decide the priority among projects. Project teams will be given time to determine what financial information is needed for them to forecast the financial impact of their project and justify the expenditures. The business guest speaker will discuss critical financial drivers for the departments and branches represented.

Session 5 – Agile Project Management

The Agile project management methodology has been widely adopted by digitally transformed organizations. This approach leads to quick implementation of technology and allows for flexibility to react to changing markets and changing technology. The methodology also fosters communication among cross-functional team members.

This seminar will be conducted with a combination of lectures/presentations, facilitated discussions and exercises. The project teams within the class will create story cards for their project and plan a project sprint for execution to of project tasks. The concept of Kanban scheduling, minimum viable product (MVP) and scrum meetings will be practiced in class exercises. The business guest speaker will discuss the balance between project predictability and project flexibility within the organization.

Session 6 – Creating Organizational Alignment – Influencing, Negotiation, and Conflict Resolution

This session focuses on the interactions between people and how to align team members and stakeholders. It starts with an understanding of the communication process and what creates barriers or inhibits communication with an emphasis on digital age communication technologies. The class also addresses motivation and influencing skills across cultures. When working to implement new initiatives or technology, there is inevitably conflict as process and workflows change. Therefore, the class also presents several models and techniques for negotiation and conflict resolution within business teams.

This seminar will be a combination of lectures/presentations with facilitated discussions and exercises. The class will include exercises involving role playing of stakeholder communication to address influencing skills. Also, negotiation and conflict resolution case studies will be used to provide opportunities for participants to practice the application of the skills presented. The project teams will be given time to identify key stakeholders whose support is required for their project implementation. They will then develop an influencing and negotiation strategy for each stakeholder. The business guest speaker will discuss the demographics and issues from employee surveys.

Session 7 – Implementing Organizational Change – Cultural Change Management

This session focuses on strategies for addressing cultural change within an organization. A systems perspective of the organization will be presented that includes both technology and facility perspectives and customer and employee perspectives on the status quo and organizational change. The transformation readiness framework developed by the Institute for Digital Transformation is a core element of the program. Typical barriers to change will be identified and strategies for overcoming them presented.

This seminar will be a combination of lectures/presentations with facilitated discussions and exercises. The exercises will be conducted by each team using their team’s project as the setting and context. Exercises will include mapping the drivers and barriers to change within an organization and creating a change communication plan for their project. The business guest speaker will be a senior leader who has implemented large change projects sharing some of the challenges they faced and how they were overcome.

Session 8 – Capstone (Optional) – Project Summaries and Celebration of Success

This session is on one-half day session where each team presents their project results to senior leaders. This is followed by a celebration for the participants and presentation of their course completion certificates.

Action Learning Project:

A key to the success of this program will be the action learning projects. These present opportunities for the participants to apply the skills and theories taught in the seminars. Through this practical application, they gain experience. At the beginning of each seminar, a time will be set aside to discuss the progress from the previous month on each project and to highlight successes and failures that occurred while implementing (or failing to implement) the best practices. The final result of these projects, or at least the launch of the project result, will be presented to senior leadership at the final capstone seminar.

Recommended project criteria:

• Cross functional project involving multiple departments or multiple locations
• Project is aligned with a strategic corporate objective for the upcoming year or addresses a major problem recognized throughout the organization as a significant issue
• Project involves some element of digital strategy or technology
• Project does not require large capital expenditures
• Each project has a senior leader who agrees to be executive sponsor for the project