Background

Business Excellence (BE) involves enhancing an organisation's management systems and processes to boost performance and stakeholder value. Business Excellence goes beyond a quality system, aiming for excellence in leadership, strategy, customer focus, information management, people and operations, to ultimately achieve superior business results.

Purpose

Enable participants to become Business Excellence Practitioners, to specifically apply the learning from the training programme within their own areas of responsibility and deliver process improvement.

Objectives

• Develop understanding of Business Excellence (BE) as a concept 
• Provide an understanding of BE models
• Enabling understanding and appreciation of the importance of Process centricity, Holistic thinking and Results maturity
• Demonstrate how BE can support process improvement activity to increase efficiency & effectiveness within areas, functions
• Assess the maturity of key processes, identifying Strengths and Opportunities for Improvements, and propose recommendations that drive improvement

Structure

The programme is split into three modules:

1. Teach (2 * 0.5 day) – introduction to Business Excellence, Process & Results maturity assessment
2. Groupwork (over ~6 weeks) – working in groups (typically 2-4), participants will assess a key process and identify recommendations, (supported by the facilitator)
3. Feedback (0.5 day) – groups present their findings to Process Owners / Managers

Administration

1. A minimum of 6 participants is required to make delivery of the programme viable. Maximum number of participants on each programme is 15.
2. It is mandatory for all course participants to attend all 3 modules.
3. Participants will typically have at least two years’ work experience and have an affinity for process improvement.
4. Ideally, this programme is delivered face-to-face, but if so desired, it can be delivered online via Microsoft Teams, (as was done during COVID-19).
5. During the Groupwork stage, participants have typically spent 2-3 hours each week on the group assignment.

Participant Feedback 

"Learnt a lot from the groupwork and feedback sessions especially about the process of analysing"

"More useful than doing a full assessor’s course, the tools identified could be used more commonly in the day-to-day business"

“Considering the new remote format of delivery the course was excellent.  Groupwork, discussions, etc. would be much easier F2F, and that would improve cross-fertilisation of ideas, but clearly that is not possible at the moment.”

“While we had good mix of group work and short assignments, it would help to understand little more on BE criteria”

“The sessions were well thought of and conducted well. Content was apt and given us the right start to the BE Journey. Idea of group participation with Jam board, regular check points during the group work and continued support by facilitators really helped get the right advice at the right time. Really appreciate their availability and support during the entire process”

Also feedback from Key Stakeholder who attended a feedback session:

"Many thanks for the invite to the session – it was fantastic! The opportunity to have the Business Excellence lens applied in such depth to the Customer Satisfaction process was really valuable and we are very energised by the feedback. I’ve already been in touch with the two teams to follow up, we’ll definitely be applying some of the ideas this year. Maybe we can be considered for future reviews so that we can get some feedback on how well we have progressed. Thanks again, it’s been a great experience to be involved, and I think every process owner should be knocking at your door to be included in future!"

Facilitation

The programme is delivered by Gareth Symons and Keith Steel, who are experienced BE professionals, trained within the multi-national Tata Group. Both have conducted BE assessments for many Tata companies, internationally and across multiple industry sectors. They were also responsible for training hundreds of BE assessors and practitioners for Tata in Europe from 2015 through to 2023.