Monday, September 21, 2009

Galway 2009 Conference Sessions

Following are some Galway session descriptions keyed to presenters. 


Karen Carleton


Using the Six-P Framework to Holistically Determine ‘What Is’


Session Description + Objectives/Benefits


This participant-centered session introduces a holistic organizational performance assessment tool – the Six-P Framework. The Framework offers a unique eagle-eye view of an organization and will assist with the simulation activity. Suggested tools and methods for each “P” element, along with proposed stakeholder questions, will be presented. A case study and its findings will be discussed citing the framework’s application and its findings for an auto club’s community services.


PowerPoint slides, verbal discussion and job aids, will be used.


Session objectives:
  • Participants will be able to customize the Six-P Framework with its Tools/Methods Table and Stakeholder Question Guide to holistically assess organizational performance 
  • Participants will be able to immediately apply what they learn from the session to the simulation client case during the latter part of the session
Session Benefits:
  • Learners will gain a new tool - the Six-P framework – to assist with organizational performance assessment
  • Innovation or synthesis of ideas around data collection in people-centered research in organizations from idea exchange in group work
  • Opportunity to collaborate with diverse colleagues, and discover new ways of approaching problems in organizations
Participant Experience Level: Beginner to Intermediate


Session Type: Workshop (interactive 90 minute session)


Dr. Roger Chevalier

Sharpening Your Analysis Skills: Performance Consulting and the Questioning Process

Session Description + Objectives/Benefits


The session serves to identify performance gaps and their underlying causes. While we have many macro-level models for human performance technology, the question that remains is, "How do we identify performance gaps and causes with our clients?” This session will provide a performance consulting guide, a structure for asking questions, and a performance analysis worksheet (integrating gap analysis, cause analysis and force field analysis) to assist in interacting one-on-one with their clients. An interactive case study will reinforce what has been learned. Participants will be able to:

a.  systematically interact with their clients using a performance consulting job aid;

b.  develop questions to assess and diagnose the needs of their clients;

c.  identify performance gaps and causes using a performance aid that employs gap analysis, cause analysis and force field analysis.


Participant Experience Level: Intermediate

Session Type: 90 minute Workshop

Deborah Smith Cook and Pam Coffey


Building a Bigger Box

Session Description + Objectives/Benefits


This session focuses on cutting-edge ways to identify multiple, feasible alternatives to ensure that the business results of decreasing costs while maintaining services, identifying resource sharing opportunities with neighboring communities, and offsetting costs with specific fees, are met. Traditional brainstorming methods are limited by our experiences. Participants will practice methods that more fully leverage the people capabilities to yield more complete decision making and better results.

Participant Experience Level: Beginner

Session Type: Briefing


Paul Coombs

Organizations, People and Their Data: Factors in Performance Improvement Interventions


Session Description + Objectives/Benefits


Does the way in which an organization is structured affect how its members process information, or is it the ways in which humans process information that shape an organization’s structure? Chicken-and-egg question beside, this session explores the inextricable relationship of structure, information processing, and their effects on organizational performance.

This session explores the parallels between organizational structure and data handling, and it builds a typology for understanding the factors that enable managers and HPT practitioners to identify interventions and implement them so that the likelihood of an effective outcome is enhanced. To ignore the interaction between an organization’s structure and how its people handle information is to limit HPT effectiveness.

Participant Experience Level: Intermediate

Session Type: Briefing

Nikhil Desai

Stress Management Through Yoga

Session Description + Objectives/Benefits

Changing lifestyles, technological advances and a very intensely competitive business environment have created tremendous tension for all of us. With the fast pace of life in the modern world we are all feeling burnt out as stress is slowly but surely taking its toll.

No executive or company can afford to ignore the effects of stress.


Stress affects decision making, interpersonal relations, the quality of work and the level of productivity.

To enable the participants to:
  • Resolve and Dissolve Stress
  • Learn The Benefits of Yoga
  • Improve Concentration
  • Develop Creativity
  • Improve Performance and Productivity
Participant Experience Level: All levels

Session Type: Briefing


Camille Ferond and Adolf Theron

Creating and Evaluating a Symbiotic Context for Opportunities by the Performance Creation Team

Session Description + Objectives/Benefits

The session is intended to:

1.  share what the presenters have done so far;
2.  to generate discussions, ideas and suggestions of what existing measures can be used to evaluate organizational impact (without having to reinvent the wheel); 3.  used the above to help participants create their own set of assessment MEGA level tools, based on their knowledge and experience;
4.  discuss how best to integrate them as part of organizations’ evaluation system where Mega assessment may not yet part of the organizational practice;
5.  share insights about the benefits of the proposed business approach (see Business Case below for additional benefits)

Participant Experience Level: All levels

Session Type: Workshop (interactive 90 minute session)

Dr. Judith Hale

Politics – Developing Your Professional Capital

Session Description + Objectives/Benefits

Politics is the art of exchanging favors. It is all about who you know and what you owe. When done well is the oil that makes good things happen. When done badly it compromises personal and professional ethics, destroys trust, and demeans our profession. Judy will bring clarity to why politics is important and the value of doing it well. P.S. she hails from Chicago, the home of the best and the worst in politics.

Attendees will leave with practical tips and a deeper understanding of:
  • The attributes of politics done well and done poorly
  • The importance of building political support
  • The necessity to engage in politics
  • Their current level of influence and how to increase itValue to the attendee - Attendees will gain rules and tips for 1) increasing their own level of influence in their organization and 2) for managing people whose influence potentially impedes the success of projects or initiatives.
Participant Experience Level: Expert

Session Type: 90 minute workshop

Dr. Anthony Marker

Using the Six-Ps to Link Systems Thinking, Strategic Planning, and Evaluation to Create Sustainable Performance Interventions

Session Description + Objectives/Benefits

This session presents an adaptation of Kirkpatrick’s familiar 4-levels Evaluation Model to include environmental and social measures. If one thing is becoming clear, it is that human activity is harming the planet. While the traditional industrial economic paradigm has provided many benefits associated with economic prosperity these same achievements also have resulted in dramatic climate changes, increasing ecological degradation, and a growing gap between rich and poor. In contrast, there is an increasing movement toward responsible organizational behavior. This emerging paradigm of responsible economic development will require that we find new models for evaluating organizational success and performance improvement that take the organization’s Social Footprint into account. This session will provide participants with an opportunity to:

1.  Explore and examine one such model
2.  Familiarize themselves with some of the sustainability field’s concepts, language and tools.
3.  Consider what concrete things they could do to foster a sustainability culture in their own organization based on case illustrations.


Participant Experience Level: Intermediate and Expert

Session type: 90 minute workshop

Christine Marsh

Outsourcing in Reverse – A Case Study from the Public Sector

Session Description + Objectives/Benefits

At a time when many public organizations were looking to save money by outsourcing their IT (Information Technology) services, Torfaen County Borough Council in Wales took a strategic decision to reverse that trend. Their ICT (Information Communication Technology) Operations needed to provide a comprehensive service through turbulent times involving ongoing restructuring of the organization as a whole.

The challenge was to bring together a complex and diverse mix of existing internal and external providers.

Our objective is to share how ICT Operations has accomplished establishing their culture, structure, team interdependency and roles/accountability of each department whilst keeping inbuilt flexibility to make appropriate adjustments along the way.

Participants will acquire some tools/techniques to apply on a practical basis within their own organizations.

Participant Experience Level: Intermediate

Session Type: 90 minute Workshop

Belia Nel

A South African case study on the national direction of a Performance Improvement Management System in Parliament SA

Session Description + Objectives/Benefits

This session will provide a case study experience of the implementation of the new direction Parliament South Africa took to re-align their HR function to the principles and practices of HPT. This sets a new performance culture in the HR function as it delivers on a value chain which is based on thorough process mapping of all the key result areas. This case study will also focus on the rigorous performance audit which was conducted to set the foundation for the value chain design and process mapping outcomes.

The objective of the session is to share with the audience the case study and the lessons learned during the project implementation and evaluation. The case study will cover the outcomes as follows:
  • The refinement of the Performance Management System where the organisational, team and individual performance is being aligned to provide overall results achievement
  • The outcome of the performance assessment and audit of the entire HR function identifying the misalignments and gaps in the performance outputs and deliverables
  • The objectives, competencies and performance measures for all the elements in the value chain as aligned with the HR Strategy and the contribution to a performance improvement culture
  • The interdependencies and measures of each value chain element bringing about the anticipated results as well as clarifying the input, process and outputs for each role.
Participant Experience Level: Intermediate

Session type: Briefing

Dr. Edward Schneider

Is your Client Ready to Improve?

Session Description + Objectives/Benefits


Just because a client is anxious to improve its performance doesn’t mean it is ready to do so. Before we can plunge into improving performance, there are some basic assumptions we have to check, sine qua non “improvement” is at best a random process. In this session, we’ll explore what must be checked, and how to be tactful as you go about it. You’ll learn how to recognize the true starting point for your project, and whether your project should start at all.

Participant Experience Level: Beginner

Session type: Briefing

Analysis as an Intrinsic Part of Any Solution

Session Description + Objectives/Benefits

Time and again, clients balk at paying for extensive analysis of their performance problems. In their minds, they already know they have a performance problem, and don't see the value of gathering more data to prove it. This is a misperception of the analysis phase, brought about by the consultants listing a report of the analysis of the end product.

When the analysis is done collaboratively, the real result of the analysis phase is a change in the workers' perception of their jobs, and a convergence toward a common language to talk about the goals and processes of the enterprise. This session will describe a case study of the analysis process, emphasizing the transition from initial to final conditions, and de-emphasizing the reporting aspect.


Participant Experience Level: Intermediate/Advanced


Session type: Briefing

Arnoud Vermei and Han van der Zanden

In the End it’s all about People!

How an integrated improvement effort based on Process management and Lean/Six Sigma led to a winning combination for a large Chemicals Manufacturing site

Session Description + Objectives/Benefits

In 2004 a large Chemicals Manufacturing site in the Netherlands faced serious performance problems. An analysis of several existing incident surveys led to a large organizational change journey around three strategic spearheads:
  • Building a shared Vision and Strategy
  • Develop and implement a Process oriented site governance model
  • Develop and implement a Common Improvement Methodology
Many improvement efforts impacted the existing systems and structures. Taking a holistic systems view helped to see the connections and interrelationships between the issues at hand. By continually exploring the link with business results, value creation was ensured during the length of the journey. The change of systems and structures however proved to be the easier part in this exciting journey. Aligning jobs, behaviours and culture to the new ways of working in the end was the biggest challenge. In this session two of the members of the change team present an overview of the case and invite you to actively engage in defining initiatives to address the human dimensions of this challenge.

Objectives:
Attending this session you will experience how common concepts of system thinking and value creation can be applied in a manufacturing environment. Consequently, this will enable you to recognise the challenges of the cultural and behavioural changes needed to make new ways of working effective.

Participant Experience Level: Intermediate

Session Type: Briefing

Sunday, September 20, 2009

Prepare for the simulation

Joining us in Galway?

Soon we will be in Galway ready to work together, share, learn, and have lots of fun while at it.  Why not start warming up for our unique simulation? 



If you have not registered for the Galway Conference yet, don't wait more.  Please scroll down for instructions or click here.

Thursday, September 17, 2009

Galway Conference - Register Now

Galway Conference Registration

 To register now, proceed as follows:

ISPI members / Holders of non-member account

Option 1:
First log on at http://www.ispi.org/ and proceed to online registration. Select ISPI Europe 2009 from the displayed. A new page will be displayed. Click on the “Register” button to enter the online registration form.
You may also go directly to http://my.ispi.org/myISPI/Core/Events/events.aspx , select the Europe Conference, then click on the ”Register” button and then log in to your member or non-member account.

Option 2:
Download the conference registration form at: http://pl.ispi.org/conf/euro2009-regform.doc
Fill out the form and fax to ISPI (1-301-587-8573). You may also call ISPI to provide your payment details by telephone or to get further assistance.

Non-ISPI members / No active non-member account

Option 1:
Open a non-member account (free of charge). Go to our Join Online page at: http://www.ispi.org/join/    Once you have created your account you may login and proceed to online registration to the ISPI Europe/EMEA Conference in Galway.

Option 2:
Download the conference registration form at: http://pl.ispi.org/conf/euro2009-regform.doc
Fill out the form and fax to ISPI (1-301-587-8573). You may also call ISPI to provide your payment details by telephone or to get further assistance.

Let us know if you have any questions or if you need help to process your registration.

Tuesday, September 15, 2009

Galway Preliminary Conference Program

Galway Conference Program

Here is an updated but still preliminary overview of the Galway Conference program.  Let us know if you have any questions. Click on image to enlarge.



Monday, September 14, 2009

2009 Galway Preconference Workshops - Short Descriptions

2009 Galway Preconference Workshops

Not to be missed!

Below is a short and updated description of our three preconference one-day workshops to be held on November 5th. Get in touch if you have questions or if you need additional information.

 Workshop 1 - HPT: The Essentials (Dr. Judith Hale)
Description: This workshop focuses on the how to apply the principles of HPT (Human Performance Technology), in ways that are relevant to clients, efficient in the use of time and other resources, and effective in producing meaningful results. This session is designed for people wanting to help clients focus on what matters, better understand what performance requires, and build sustainable solutions. It is ideal for professionals who want to distinguish their services from the purveyors of silver bullets and current fads.

Attendees will learn how to:
1. Quickly get to measures that matter.
2. Distinguish between means and ends so you are focused on the right goals.
3. Recommend a suite of solutions with lasting power instead of a silver bullet that will fizzle in time.
4. Communicate what you do and have done in ways that build stakeholder commitment.

Level: Beginner

Value to the attendee: Attendees will gain rules, tips, and tools they can apply on the job. All of the resources are designed to engage clients in the mutual discovery and design of performance solutions and their eventual evaluation.


Workshop 2 - BPTA 101, Principles of Business Process Management (Dee Carri)

Description: This course is the foundation for all courses in the Business Process Management curriculum and is required for BPM certification. It provides an overview and discussion of the principles, concepts and techniques required to transform your business from a traditional, functional organization to a process-centric organization. The course introduces a systematic approach and methodology for planning, monitoring, measuring and managing your company’s business process performance and for redesigning and improving specific processes.

Who should attend: This introduction to BPM is a must for everyone interested in business process improvement. It’s designed for business managers, business analysts, and practitioners involved in process-based change and the automation of process solutions. This course is the foundation for all other courses in the BPM curriculum. It establishes a methodology, a common language, and a baseline for all other courses in the curriculum.

What you will achieve:
• Understand the value and benefits of business process management
• Understand the principles of business process management and how to apply them
• Understand BPM best practices and methodologies
• Understand the respective roles of relationship management, process architecture, process analysis, process redesign, process improvement, process automation, and organization design – and how to make them work together.
• Understand basic BPM management and measurement techniques.

What you will learn:
• How to align your corporate strategy with a well designed business architecture
• How to integrate your business process architecture with human performance and IT implementation plans.
• The key considerations of a process-based approach to business process change management
• The strategic, tactical and operational considerations in a comprehensive BPM framework
• How to plan for cross-organization acceptance and implementation


 Workshop 3 - Optimizing Accountability in Teams and Client Partnerships (Lee Johnsen and Thomas Westbrook)

Description: In every organization, projects begin, tasks are assigned, efforts are made, and deadlines are met - or missed. Directions are given and results are promised but not delivered. Agreements are misunderstood or never made. It is not really anyone's fault - it's just how leaders and team members often fail to communicate. This highly-interactive pre-conference workshop offers a systematic way for individuals and teams to plan and complete tasks at expected performance levels. Workshop participants will immediately benefit from learning a process they can readily apply to the conference simulation by increasing the effectiveness of their consulting teams and enhancing their client interactions. Participants will take part in a variety of learning experiences from lecture, group discussions, video vignettes, and case studies.

Who should attend: Beginner or Intermediate experience levels.

What you will gain: The session is designed to enhance participants’ effectiveness as members and leaders of teams that are charged with accomplishing specific, measureable organizational results. Participants will use a job aid and application tools to learn the process and concepts taught in the workshop. They will also discuss how these tools may be applied in the conference simulation.

You will learn how to:
1. Apply the concepts of Responsibility, Empowerment, and Accountability and the role of each in achieving project success.
2. Create clear agreements that maintain focus and overcome obstacles to successful project completion.
3. Create guidelines for managing agreements, including updating and/or renegotiating.
4. Hold individuals, teams, and themselves accountable for agreed upon results.
5. Use recognition and reward to advance empowerment and accountability.