Business Challenge
Transforming Solutions Inc. (TSI), was engaged by the University of North Texas Health Science Center (UNTHSC) to create an organizational culture of continuous improvement. As background, UNTHSC is one of the nation’s premier graduate academic medical centers, with five schools that specialize in patient-centered education, research and health care. They are part of the University of North Texas system.
Spearheaded by the Chief People Officer, the UNTHSC sought to explore new ways to address problems and continuously improve through guidance and training to transform the institution into one that embraces LEAN and Agile in an employee-centric and pragmatic way.
Starting with pockets of exposure to Agile and LEAN methodologies, UNTHSC wanted TSI to help the overall organization take this, along with other cultural attributes (such as their vision, mission and values) and transform the culture to improve quality and gain efficiencies.
TSI’s Approach and Role
Approach
To accomplish the identified goals, TSI engaged in the following:
- In the initial phase, UNTHSC sought to develop and prioritize processes for improvement and initial process improvement implementation for critical need areas to help build a business case with proven effectiveness and value for further buyin. This work intended to implement and share best practices and training with internal LEAN coaches and key stakeholders for process improvement, establish a usable, sustainable communication plan, evaluate improvements through metrics, and estimate return on investment for the improvement initiatives.
- In the second phase, TSI was asked to develop a Continuous Improvement methodology to be shared with UNTHSC staff through training with follow up coaching. This methodology was intended to be sustainable and usable for improvement initiatives across UNTHSC.
TSI collaborated with the UNTHSC Leadership Team to identify and prioritize business processes to implement a practice-based training and mentoring program to enhance LEAN and Agile understanding and development of implementation skills. TSI created a training program for continuous improvement and led a cohort of leaders through process improvement methodology using critical processes including Budgets, Contract Administration, HR Hiring, and UNTHSC Leadership as a pilot. Once the pilot was complete, phase two was implemented that provided full training and mentoring to the cohort for implementation of business process improvement and other continuous improvement strategies throughout UNTHSC and coaching for growth and development for future Continuous Improvement sustainability at UNTHSC.
Role
TSI served as a methodologist, project manager, continuous improvement leader, trainer, coach, and facilitator throughout this project. TSI provided and tailored its methodology as the basis for the methodology that is currently in place. After that, TSI evaluated trainees and quality of deliverables after they were trained and did a variety of “hands on” activities to get familiar with the tools.
Results
This project was viewed as a huge success. Based on TSI’s involvement the UNTHSC achieved the following:
- Developed and used a repeatable methodology to use on areas deemed “ripe for improvement”
- Took dozens of areas through the methodology which resulted in hundreds of improvement ideas implemented
- Trained over a dozen practitioners thus improving their skillsets
- Realized tangible savings, from the improvement ideas mentioned above, that resulted in hard dollar savings of over $1 million dollars annually.