Project Portfolio Management Best Practice Webinars

To be an organization that uses data and facts to make decisions and drive change, you need a robust process for gathering and accessing timely, reliable, and relevant data and corporate lessons learned in a real-time environment. Please join Brenton D. Harder, Managing Director and Global Head of Operational Excellence for Credit Suisse, as he describes how Credit Suisse accesses a huge corporate knowledge repository coupled with real-time metrics to improve decision support for its global Operational Excellence and Centers of Excellence. Founded, in 1856, Credit Suisse Group is a world-leading financial services company, advising clients in all aspects of finance, around the world, around the clock. The company is active in over 50 countries and employs more than 48,000 people from approximately 100 different nations.

In this focused session, Brent will explore the following critical success factors for sustaining BPM performance improvements across a global platform:

• Fresh and relevant best practices and lessons learned in order to fuel a learning and growing organization
• Data accessibility and accountability to ensure that the right information is being applied by the right people (within the local operating unit) to run and improve the business
• Metric and performance indicator data as a true proxy for what’s going on in the real world
• On-demand project & portfolio management software technology to facilitate knowledge sharing and metrics tracking and reporting

Please join Jennifer Cavanaugh (Lean Master) and Jeff Martin (Black Belt) from WR Grace, as they lead an ISSSP-hosted Focused Session describing the keys to leveraging Lean/Six Sigma and common systems to optimize their New Product Development process. Grace is a global specialty chemicals and materials company noted for experienced people, technological leadership, global reach and strong customer relationships. Grace invested $70 million in research and development in 2009. In return, more than a third of sales came from products introduced over the previous five years.

Specific topics to be discussed include:

• The process design methodology
• The solutions identified to address specific process challenges
• The common systems implemented to solidify the gains

It is one thing to launch and complete a business process improvement effort that delivers the intended result; it is another thing to sustain gains that are made in process efficiency and organizational maturity over time. Please join Aart Broekhuizen, Business Excellence Manager at BHP Billiton EKATI Diamond Mine, as he describes the keys to achieving sustainable performance improvements through people. BHP Billiton is the world's largest diversified natural resources company with over 40,000 employees working in over 100 operations in 25 countries.

In this focused session, Aart will explore critical success factors for sustainable performance improvement including the roles of:

• Leadership support and commitment
• Project team member professional development and team building
• Efforts to ensure compliance and integrity
• Finance department benefits tracking and validation
• Technology infrastructure for sustainable performance management including knowledge management, metrics setting and results tracking

You want Lean Six Sigma thinking to become a permanent part of your corporate culture. But, how do you know if your program is succeeding right now? You may have a good feel for your programs maturity level relative to external industry benchmarks and norms – using the Instantis Six Sigma Maturity Model perhaps – but, how do you assess progress versus internal performance indicators? You need a scorecard that answers these questions and can help you assess your deployment performance on a consistent scale, detect areas needing improvement, and formulate plans for immediate action.

Please join Lean Six Sigma Program Manager, Tevfik Durmusoglu as he describes the Lean Six Sigma scorecard model used at Borusan Group to assess performance. Borusan is a $4 billion company with 4,500 employees, operating in a diversified range of sectors such as steel manufacturing, logistics, distributorship and energy. Since the program launch in 2002, over 1,200 projects have been completed. As a result, Borusan is considered to be a benchmark in Europe in terms of deployment infrastructure and maturity.

Tevfik will describe the scorecard used in Borusan Group since 2006, focusing specifically on:

• Method and structure of assessment
• Components of deployment success and how they are measured
• Calculating the Program Maturity Level (PML) score of a company
• Interpreting the results of diagnostics and taking actions accordingly

Please join Dee Hope, Global Director, Program Management Office at Recall Corporation, as she describes a simplified approach to launching and maturing your resource scheduling and availability practice and, as a result, deliver significant value-add to the organization through more efficient resource utilization. Recall Corp. is an international information management services company with operations in 23 countries. The intent of Dee's recommended approach is to take the mystery out of this seemingly daunting practice and show the audience a simple way to get started without a significant technology investment and then leverage a more robust management tool once the process is adopted more broadly in the organization. Specifically, this presentation will describe how to:

• Take a tactical approach to building a standardized and sustainable resource management process that supports daily operations of projects and organizational stakeholders.
• Utilize familiar desktop tools initially and prepare the organization to leverage more sophisticated enterprise-class systems.
• Demonstrate quantifiable value to project stakeholders and executive management through the PMO's commitment to develop and maintain a process and a set of tools and templates that are easy to use.
• Generate reports that can assist any leadership team in making project priority decisions based on availability forecasts.
• Achieve buy-in and sustained management acceptance and support by being prepared to answer the questions: “what’s in it for me?” and “when can you deliver?”

Please join Lenovo’s Executive Director of Global Lean Six Sigma, David Olski, as he leads an ISSSP-hosted Focused Session describing the keys to starting up and coordinating a performance excellence deployment on a global basis in a cross-cultural environment. Lenovo, a Chinese-owned company, is the 4th largest PC manufacturer in the world and is in its fourth year of operation since acquiring IBM’s PC division. Lenovo currently has annual sales of $15B and employs over 23,000 people in over 60 countries.

With the challenges of a being a new company, compounded by merging two companies with distinct and strong cultures, driving performance excellence is an exercise in the integration of practices, alignment with corporate strategy and regional priorities, and adaptation to unique cultural approaches, expectations and norms. In this focused session, David will discuss lessons learned in bridging both corporate and national cultures, developing and managing shared visions and objectives, and supporting differentiated implementation approaches. Additionally, David will speak to the challenges of driving a global effort with a hybrid top-down and bottoms-up deployment approach.

Specific topics to be discussed include:

• Developing a program approach which transcends company and cultural differences
• Deploying Lean Six Sigma in a Chinese-owned company
• Aligning Lean Six Sigma with the corporate and geography strategy
• Managing and mentoring projects globally
• Rolling out multiple training strategies to meet global demand
• Balancing the building of capability with the demand for results
• Driving results beyond the financials

Please join Cordis Director Productivity Improvement, Angel Garcia, as he leads an ISSSP-hosted Focused Session describing the key aspects of the new "Worldwide Productivity Improvement Program". This program is one of the most important strategic initiatives for Cordis WW Product Supply in 2009 and is charged with delivering over $100 million in savings. Cordis is a medical device corporation with over 7,000 employees and the world's leading developer and manufacturer of breakthrough products for interventional vascular medicine and electrophysiology.

Specifically, in this Focused Session Angel will discuss best practices and lessons in several areas including how to:

• Architect a worldwide product supply -focused process for productivity improvements
• Focus project team activity on developing new ideas that are aligned with product supply strategy
• Ensure top-down executive support for and active involvement in product supply productivity initiatives
• Address critical success factors such as developing a productivity idea pipeline and efficiently executing and monitoring projects and results
• Evaluate the financial and productivity impact of the business excellence program
• Leverage project portfolio management technology to enhance cross-functional team communication across your organization

Please join United Airlines Six Sigma Black Belt, Milad Alhir, as she leads an ISSSP-hosted Focused Session describing how to use Lean Six Sigma to assess the business impact of Green initiatives. At United, it's about being green and in turn generating value for key stakeholders in a tough economy and hyper-competitive industry. United operates nearly 3,000 flights a day on United and United Express to more than 200 U.S. domestic and international destinations and its 52,000 employees reside in every U.S. state and in many countries around the world.

Specifically, in this Focused Session Milad will explore how to:

• Leverage the critical success factors that United has identified as necessary for generating green benefits
• Evaluate the overall impact of green initiatives on the business
• Calculate shareholder value and cost savings from Lean Six Sigma
• Improve shareholder value by reducing the company’s overall energy consumption and associated costs
• Leverage Project Portfolio Management technology to track the impact of green initiatives.

The Six Sigma Maturity Model is a standard tool used to benchmark and guide private-sector enterprises in their process improvement journeys. Now it is being adopted by public-sector organizations at all levels of government to help advance their continuous improvement programs from the launch and early success phases to institutionalization and culture transformation.

Please join Instantis CEO and creator of the Six Sigma Maturity Model™, Dr. Prasad Raje, for the "Six Sigma Maturity Model in Government" Focused Session. Dr. Raje will define the commonly experienced stages of Six Sigma program maturity and elucidate the tremendous practical value the model can bring to government organizations that want to:

Specifically, Dave and Alec will discuss best practices and lessons learned in the areas of:

• benchmark their progress against industry norms
• assess implementation strengths and performance gaps
• anticipate common adoption pitfalls
• effectively communicate progress and garner additional support for the Six Sigma initiative across the public sector enterprise

This workshop will walk participants through highly acclaimed model and explains how it can be used as a compass for government organizations that want to take their operational performance to the next level.

Please join Dave Gronewold, Global Director, Operational Excellence, and Alec Symington, Corporate Operational Excellence Manager, as they discuss Covidien’s Operational Excellence program, which has achieved great success in reducing costs and improving quality since its inception in 2000. Covidien, a leading global provider of healthcare products, has embraced Operational Excellence as a strategic initiative. Covidien’s integrated deployment of Six Sigma, Lean, and Design for Six Sigma has been bolstered by a strong internal training and certification program and the EnterpriseTrack Project tracking system and Training Manager module. Training Manager is an integrated training administration system.

Specifically, Dave and Alec will discuss best practices and lessons learned in the areas of:

• Establishing and communicating training and certification objectives
• Designing program structure and curriculum
• Managing and delivering training programs
• Tracking training and certification status
• Customizing the Instantis Training module to Covidien's needs
• Achieving full integration of training-related databases
• Achieving data integrity and automated upload of training records
• Reporting on training activity and business impact results

Please join Sue Moore, Vice President, Business Alignment & Results in Xerox Lean Six Sigma as she outlines the keys to fostering growth using Lean Six Sigma. Sue will describe the leadership role that the Finance organization played by both embracing Lean Six Sigma to improve its internal processes and collaborating with operations and even customers as a strategic partner to support their top-line initiatives. The presentation will provide an overview of the Xerox Lean Six Sigma journey, current deployment status, an internal Finance department case study, and future directions. Most importantly, Sue will discuss the critical success factors for achieving top-line growth objectives using Lean Six Sigma including:

• Leadership development
• Linking the growth strategy and project execution
• Building a value creation culture
• Focusing on the customer experience
• Deploying the right tools and technologies

How do you know when your Operational Excellence program has become a permanent institution on your corporate culture landscape? The answer for Baxter came when their program focus changed from selling and pushing continuous improvement methods and tools to the local lines of business, to responding to business demand for their services such as coaching, training, methods and tools.

Join Baxter Master Black Belt for EMEA Business Process Improvement (BPI), Xavier Dejaer, as he describes the keys to achieving program escape velocity within Baxter EMEA operations. Baxter is an $11 billion global, diversified healthcare company with 46,000 employees in 60 countries, manufacturing facilities in 26 countries, and products sold in over 100 countries.

Specifically, Xavier will describe best practices in achieving escape velocity in a multi-country deployment context. He will identify and discuss specific OpEx program "thrusters" such as:

• Executive Leadership
• Business Alignment
• Methodologies & Tools
• Coaching and Training
• Program Governance & Decision-Making
• Project Tracking Systems

Join DuPont MBB, Stephan Schwarz, as he reviews best practices and lessons learned from one of the most iconic and successful operational excellence deployments in the world. The majority of the session will be dedicated to an interactive Q&A in which Stephan will draw from the unique perspective of DuPont’s massive global deployment across all five of the company’s major business platforms involving over 23,000 Black/Green Belts, over 300 MBBs and 140 Champions. This is your chance to quiz an expert with your burning questions in topic areas such as:

Executive Leadership: Don Linsenmann’s 5 Critical X’s

• Leadership and resource commitment
• Driving and sustaining employee adoption of company processes and systems
• The role of data and technical rigor
• Tracking the results to the bottom line
• Financial validation rigor & reporting

Strategic Focus & Change Management During Transitions

• How Six Sigma becomes the way you work?
• Evolving from improvement to design for growth
• Driving Six Sigma towards the customer win-win situation
• Integrating Lean & Six Sigma
• Training
• Software evolution

Join Bernard Martin, Senior Director, Business Process, as he addresses the new direction that McKesson has charted for its Six Sigma training program. Ranked 18th on the Fortune 500 with over $93 billion in annual revenue, McKesson’s success over the past 175 years has been based on its ability to adapt, change and innovate. Bernard will describe the benefits of the new training approach and the results they are accruing in areas such as:

• Business needs alignment
• Effective project management, team mobilization and change management
• Project cycle time for new hires and new team leaders
• Belt competency levels and advancement opportunities

Join Ingram Micro Senior Manager Liz Taylor as she leads an ISSSP Focused Session describing how Ingram Micro is re-energizing their Lean Six Sigma program and accelerating their project ROI. The presentation will draw from the unique perspective of the world’s largest technology distributor and a leading technology sales, marketing and logistics company connecting over 1,400 suppliers with over 170,000 resellers in 150 countries. Specifically, Liz will describe how Ingram-Micro leverages its Balanced Scorecard and the EnterpriseTrack™ project portfolio management system from INSTANTIS to:

• Align projects to the Ingram Micro global strategy
• Accelerate results by effective best practice sharing
• Increase management buy in and involvement
• Enhance the perceived role of the Lean Six Sigma program in achieving strategic objectives

Join DuPont MBB, Stephan Schwarz, as he leads a Focused Session describing best practices and lessons learned from one of the most iconic and successful operational excellence deployments in the world. The presentation will draw from the unique perspective of a massive global deployment across all five of DuPont's major business platforms containing > 23,000 Black/Green Belts, > 300 MBBs & 140 Champions. Specifically, Stephan will share best practices and lessons learned in the following areas:

Executive Leadership: 5 Critical X's (Don Linsenmann)

• Leadership commitment
• Resource commitment
• Driving and sustaining employee adoption of company processes and systems
• Data and technical rigor
• Enabling with IT, but driving with people
• Tracking the results of 9,000 active projects, 17,000 closed & completed projects to the bottom line
• Financial validation rigor & reporting
• Celebrating your successes

Strategic Focus & Change Management During Transitions

• How Six Sigma becomes the way you work?
• From improvement to design for growth
• Driving Six Sigma towards the customer win-win situation
• Integrating Lean & Six Sigma
• Training
• Software evolution

At France Telecom/Orange, Six Sigma and Lean project portfolios are managed side by side with New Product Development, IT PPM, CapEx and other strategic initiatives and project portfolios. All project portfolios are driven by a single corporate-level strategy called NExT (New Experience of Telecom). Join Pierre Dunoyer de Segonzac (Head of Group Project Management, Certified MBB) as he describes the France Telecom top-down model of multi-initiative project portfolio management and governance. Glean insights into the role of Six Sigma project portfolios in a world driven by a corporate-level Project Management Office (PMO). France Telecom is a world leading telecom services provider that operates in 220 countries with over 158 million customers, 200,000 employees and $58 billion in revenue.

In this presentation you will learn best practices and lessons learned in areas like:

• Prioritizing operational excellence projects in a multi-initiative context.
• Using strategy alignment to drive project selection and to share and drive a common vision
• Balancing "local" priorities in a top-down multi-organization and multi-country deployment
• Leveraging a software platform to centralize multi-portfolio management
• Identifying critical success factors like establishing a strong governance model and single common model for financials and KPIs

Presenter: John Cocuzza, Business Excellence Leader
Company: Abbott
Join Business Excellence leader, John Cocuzza, at Abbott Nutritional, as he shares best practices and lessons learned regarding project selection and benefits reporting for Lean Six Sigma and other operational excellence processes at Abbott. Come prepared to ask your burning questions and get answers and advice in areas like:

• Selecting projects for optimal business value and impact
• Project scoring and prioritization processes
• Establishing and communicating project-level financial goals
• Required software system for successful project benefits and executive-level reporting

Join Cameron Master Black Belt, Cheryl Smith, as she leads a Focused Session describing the journey to Lean Six Sigma at Cameron. She will explore the opportunities to use Lean tools and principles and the Six Sigma methodology to get the biggest bang for your Lean Six Sigma investment dollar. Cameron is based in Houston, Texas and has long been a leader in equipment and services used worldwide in oil and gas operations along with a strong presence in global energy markets and process industries. Cameron operates in over 100 countries and employ over 12,000 employees. In this presentation you will learn best practices and lessons learned during the Cameron journey in areas like:

• Defining and developing a Lean Six Sigma Culture
• Redefining your system and processes using the Lean and Six Sigma Roadmaps
• Tracking and reporting Lean Six Sigma financial benefits
• Integrating Lean tools and principles

Join Quality and LeanSixSigma executive, Julie Brignac, as she leads a Focused Session describing best practices and lessons learned regarding project benefits’ reporting for Six Sigma, Lean and other operational excellence processes at Brambles. Brambles is based in Sydney, Australia, and is the parent company of CHEP, a global provider of pallet and container pooling services, and Recall, a global provider of document and information management services. Brambles and its affiliates operate in over 45 countries across six continents, and employ over 12,000 people. Julie will discuss the required infrastructure for successful project benefits reporting, as well as Brambles’ approach to projecting and tracking benefits and financial and reporting workflow considerations. In this presentation, you will learn best practices and lessons learned in areas, such as:

• Establishing and communicating clear financial and project benefit goals
• Aligning reporting goals to your financial reporting approach
• Mapping out a financial and reporting workflow that is consistent with your reporting goals and approach
• Defining technology requirements by stakeholder

Join Ceridian Black Belt, Nancy Anastas as she leads a Focused Session on making the transition from a largely manual in-house project tracking and management process to a centralized, enterprise-wide, web-based solution. The first part of the presentation will set the stage with a detailed Ceridian situation and gap analysis. Next, Nancy will describe Ceridian’s “Maintain vs. Buy” and vendor analysis processes. Roll-out and deployment considerations will also be addressed. In this presentation you will learn best practices and lessons learned in areas like:

• Defining system requirements
• Assessing benefits and financial impact
• Establishing vendor selection criteria
• Evaluating deployment options: on-premise vs. hosted
• Rolling out a new system and ensuring user adoption

The Six Sigma Maturity Model™ defines the commonly experienced stages of Six Sigma maturity. Roxanne O’Brasky, President and Founder of ISSSP called the new model “the first rigorous attempt to describe the Six Sigma journey from launch and early success to culture transformation.” This model has tremendous practical value for organizations that want to:

• Benchmark their progress against industry norms
• Assess implementation strengths and performance gaps
• Anticipate common adoption pitfalls
• Effectively communicate progress and garner additional support for the Six Sigma initiative across the enterprise.

Find out why all of the Six Sigma community luminaries are talking about the Six Sigma Maturity Model. This workshop will walk participants through this highly acclaimed model and explains how it can be used as a compass for companies that want to take their operational performance to the next level.

The Strategy Capability Ladder defines the key levels of strategic maturity that most organizations experience. Understand where your organization stands in terms of its relative sophistication in articulating, communicating and executing corporate strategies and priorities. This model has tremendous practical value for organizations that want to benchmark their strategic maturity against industry norms, assess requirements to improve the strategy-project linkage \using a common language and framework, and chart a strategic maturity growth path. This workshop will steps participants up through the rungs of the strategy capability ladder and explain how it can be used as a framework for companies that want to take their strategy execution and operational performance to the next level.