Implementing LEAN Process Improvement

This training has been cancelled. Please check back for updates about future LEAN training opportunities.

Training Details

LEAN Rapid Process Improvement has a lot to offer to nonprofits and local government but remains a largely unexplored area in these sectors. Join us for a two-day non-credit professional development training designed to help nonprofit and local government professionals learn how LEAN practices can streamline processes at their organizations. This training will teach you how to understand the problems that LEAN addresses through the knowledge and use of:

1. SIPOC and process mapping
2. Collecting data about "time"
3. Removing waste or unnecessary steps
4. Root cause analysis

This training is intended for beginning to intermediate LEAN practitioners and will offer participants the opportunity to apply some LEAN tools to their own work. Participants will come away from the training with new tools they can use to improve processes at their own organizations. 

Instructor

Sheilah “Paddy” O’Brien, MPA, LSSGB, OPMA and has had a career at all levels of government and numerous non-profit organizations. Her last 17 plus years have been focused on working with organizations to improve the way they do their work.  Improvements have led to decreased costs, and enhanced positive reputations. Her work has covered a range of organizations in the corporate, educational, governmental and non-profit sectors.  She has conducted over 30 improvement workshops and developed over 15 classroom trainings.

She started her work with nonprofits early in her career.  As a VISTA volunteer (now part of Americorps)  in inner city Cleveland, Ohio, she provided public relations and communications skills to a non-profit housing organization.  Her recent work was with the health and human services agency of the state of Oregon.  Some results of her work: reducing delay in processing food stamps and redesigned work for same day service; reducing backlog in processing health plan cards, and speeding up the processing of small purchases from 19 days to a few hours.

She has been the recipient of numerous awards such as the ACTION Employee Special Achievement Award, the Housing and Urban Development Fellowship for Graduate Education, and recognition in the Congressional Record for outstanding VISTA work.   She has been an invited speaker to the Southern Leadership Conference on Children and Families, the Oregon State Fiscal Association, the Institute of Internal Auditors, the Oregon Association of Personnel Directors, and the 60 member staff of the Oregon Secretary of State’s Office of Auditing.

Uniquely, she enhances Lean improvement work with her knowledge and skills gained from auditing, program evaluation, project management, and facilitation. She is the author of Lean for the Nonprofit, What you don’t know can cost you and most recently, Facilitating Rapid Process Improvement Workshops, a Self-Study Guide for the Lean Leader.

Paddy is a Lake Oswego High graduate, has an BA from Pitzer College, and MPA from Cornell University.

Take home handout

If you attended our LEAN webinar on April 13, 2021 and would like to practice and apply your learnings, check out this handout.