The strategic problem this addresses
Established processes accumulate workarounds, rework and delay. Fixes are applied to symptoms, and improvements do not stick because nobody owns their sustainment.
Intended audience
- Improvement and delivery leads
- Operations and service managers
- Quality and assurance teams
- Team leads with a process to fix
Prerequisites
- Innovation Processes
Duration and delivery format
2 days. In person or live online, cohort of 12 to 24.
Capability outcomes
By the end of the programme and its workplace application, participants can:
- 01Map a current-state process with its measures, hand-offs and failure points
- 02Run a structured root-cause analysis instead of guessing
- 03Design a future-state process and the experiment that proves it works
- 04Build a sustainment plan with owners, measures and review points
Course experience
Day one maps the process as it really runs, not as the documentation says. Teams gather data, identify waste and delay, and use root-cause techniques to get beneath the obvious explanation.
Day two designs the future state and an improvement experiment small enough to run within weeks. Teams close by building a sustainment plan that names who owns the process and what they will measure.
Methods
- Process mapping
- Value and waste analysis
- Root-cause analysis
- Future-state design
- Improvement experiments
- Sustainment planning
Tools
- Miro or Visio
- Excel or Power BI for measures
- Copilot or Claude for process analysis and documentation
Where AI supports this programme
Process analysis, Output capture, Benefits tracking. Human ownership of decisions, source checking and your organisation’s information-handling rules apply throughout. How we govern AI use.
Practical outputs
Work products recorded in the Capability Portfolio.
- Current-state process map
- Root-cause analysis
- Future-state process
- Improvement experiment
- Sustainment plan
Workplace application
Participants run the improvement experiment on the real process, measure the result against the baseline and record the sustainment plan in operation.
Assessment and recognition
A before-and-after measure of the process, the experiment record and the sustainment plan. Recorded in the Capability Portfolio.
Capability Portfolio record
Completion and workplace evidence are recorded in the participant’s Capability Portfolio and count toward facilitator and leadership stages.
Position within the wider pathway
A Deliver stage specialist module. Continuous Improvement optimises an established process; Innovation Delivery, Change and Adoption moves a validated solution into implementation and sustained use.
- 1Aware
- 2Align
- 3Apply
- 4Deliver
- 5Sustain
Part of the recommended pathway for: Innovation Practitioners and Unit Teams; Core Teams and Capability Specialists. See the role-based pathways.
Related programmes
Place in the Innovation Capability System
The Continuous Improvement loop for a process that already runs.
See the whole systemEnterprise deployment options
Standalone programme
One programme, one cohort, one live challenge each
Best for: A team or unit that needs a specific capability now, or an organisation testing the approach before committing further.
Facilitated cohort
A role-based pathway for a cohort, with sponsored challenges and coaching
Best for: Developing practitioners, facilitators or leaders for a defined part of the organisation with visible results.
Enterprise capability academy
The full pathway run at organisational scale, with internal facilitators
Best for: Organisations building innovation and AI capability as a permanent asset rather than a programme.
Relevant case study
Enterprise, consumer goods
Faster from concept to shelf
A global consumer goods company
A multi-stage programme in agile and lean methods that reset how product teams at one of the world’s largest snack companies moved from concept to launch.
Read the case study