The Operational Excellence Programme
Course Overview
The Operational Excellence programme is a two-day specialist course designed to differentiate director level delegates from their peer group and enhance their career.
This highly interactive programme introduces theoretical and practical research to explore operational excellence through academic, leadership practice and organisational change lenses. Drawing extensively on real-life case studies and structured discussions, delegates will build on strategic visioning to design and implement operational excellence through the process, information, transformation and people dimensions of change.
At a glance
The two-day programme will cover the following areas:
- Strategic context for change to realise operational excellence.
- Business operations - frameworks, components and concepts common in the different sectors (e.g. Six Sigma, Lean and OKAPI).
- The fourth Industrial Revolution: cross-sector opportunities challenges and aspirations.
- Setting the context and environment for business change.
- Business processes and value streams - concepts, capture and optimisation.
- Digital transformation - operational excellence through smart use of technology.
- The five faces of agile: adapting to changing internal and external forces.
- Leveraging data, information and analytics for sustained competitive advantage.
- The complex relationship between organisational culture, employee behaviour, leadership and change.
- Objectives, structure and work method.
- Strategic context for change to realise operational excellence.
- Business operations - frameworks, components and concepts common in the different sectors.
- The fourth Industrial Revolution: cross-sector opportunities challenges and aspirations.
- Setting the context and environment for business change and continuous improvement.
- Case Studies 1 to 4: realising value through the use of digital technologies.
- Business processes and value streams - concepts, capture and optimisation.
- Leveraging data, information and analytics for sustained competitive advantage.
- Digital transformation - operational excellence through smart use of technology.
- The five faces of agile: adapting to forces.
- The complex relationship between organisational culture, employee behaviour, leadership and change.
- Case Study 5: Driving competitive advantage through leveraging culture.
- Understanding the language, core concepts and theoretical frameworks associated with business operations in different sectors.
- The ability to build on a clear organisational strategy to drive customer value through operational improvement.
- Practised the use of the Fourth Industrial Revolution core concepts as an aspirational model for operational excellence.
- An awareness of how modern digital technology can be used to drive organisational change to sustain client value.
- An understanding of, and the opportunity to use business process mapping and information optimisation to drive change.
- An appreciation of the complex interaction between culture, leadership, employee behaviour and organisational change.
- A toolkit for engendering organisational change towards sustained operational excellence for use in their current and future roles.
John Palfreyman
John combines part-time Non-executive director positions with supervisory and guest lecturing activities with the University of Leeds Business School.
John’s full-time career with IBM - which concluded mid-2017 – was a mixture of leveraging digital technologies into government and public sector organisations around the world with the commercial exploitation of emerging technologies for business benefit, across all industries and geographies.
Before IBM, John enjoyed a number of business leadership roles in professional information technology services in the UK and Germany. John’s current interests include the application of blockchain technologies for business benefit, strategic agility, digital transformation and the cultural enablers of organisational transformation.
John is passionate about the appropriate application of technology to drive long term competitive advantage in the context of a long-term strategic plan.
