Operations & Continuous Improvement learning path | 3by3Grid
Driving operational excellence through process optimisation, standardisation, and efficiency improvement. Covers lean thinking, workflow design, automation, capacity planning, quality assurance, and performance optimisation.
Concepts
- 5S Methodology: Organise Your Workspace and Improve Results The 5S Methodology gives managers a structured approach to organising physical and digital workspaces in ways that reduce friction, eliminate waste, and build the process stability that continuous im…
- 5W1H: Clarify Plans and Responsibilities to Enable Implementation Success The 5W1H framework helps managers eliminate ambiguity at the point of planning by structuring every task or initiative around six essential questions, ensuring that responsibilities are clear, timeli…
- 8D Problem Solving: Use Eight Disciplines for Root Cause Analysis When a defect or process failure recurs despite previous fixes, 8D (Eight Disciplines) provides a structured, team-based method for identifying the root cause, containing the damage, and implementing…
- After-Action Reviews: Turn Experience Into Better Performance After-action reviews give teams a structured way to extract clear lessons from completed work, so the same mistakes stop compounding across projects and future performance steadily improves.
- Capacity Planning: Optimize Resources to Meet Business Demand Capacity planning gives managers a clear, structured way to align team availability with business demand, reducing overcommitment, missed deadlines, and reactive firefighting.
- Card Sorting: Organise Content the Way Users Think Card sorting helps managers and product teams design navigation, content structures, and category systems that reflect how users actually think, reducing rework, misalignment, and costly redesigns la…
- Control Plans: Catch Failure Modes Before They Escalate A control plan helps managers systematically monitor the critical outputs and in-process variables of a repeatable workflow, so that known failure modes are detected and contained before they compoun…
- Customer Journey Mapping: Improve Team Decisions and Service Quality Customer journey mapping helps managers identify the gaps between what customers expect and what their teams actually deliver, enabling better decisions about where to focus improvement effort and in…
- Demand Forecasting: Make Smarter Operational and Financial Decisions Demand forecasting gives managers a structured, evidence-based method for estimating future customer demand, reducing the operational and financial cost of misalignment between planned resources and…
- Design of Experiments: How To Implement Multi-Variable Testing When changing one variable at a time produces inconclusive results or takes too long, Design of Experiments gives teams a structured way to test multiple factors simultaneously and identify which com…
- DMAIC: Solve Recurring Process Problems DMAIC (Define, Measure, Analyse, Improve and Control) gives managers a disciplined, data-led route from a persistent performance problem to a verified root cause and a fix that stays fixed.
- Failure Mode and Effects Analysis: Strengthen Processes Before They Break Failure Mode and Effects Analysis gives managers a structured method for identifying where a process is most likely to break, scoring the severity and likelihood of each failure, and directing preven…
- Flowcharts: Turn Complex Processes into Clear, Actionable Steps Flowcharts help managers make complex, inconsistently executed workflows visible and shared, so teams can identify gaps, clarify accountability, and improve processes with confidence.
- Gemba Walk: Lead Better Through Direct Observation A Gemba Walk helps managers replace secondhand status updates with direct, in-person observation, surfacing frontline problems early enough to act on them before they compound.
- Kaizen Reflection: A Practical Approach to Continuous Improvement Kaizen Reflection helps managers and teams identify small changes that improve processes, reduce waste, and strengthen accountability without requiring large, disruptive projects.
- Kanban Boards: Visualize Workflows To Enable Faster Delivery Kanban boards help teams visualize work, identify bottlenecks, and maintain continuous flow, enabling faster delivery and better prioritization of tasks.
- Lean Cost Management: Reduce Waste and Improve Process Performance Lean Cost Management helps managers identify and eliminate operational waste that inflates costs and slows performance, enabling teams to do more with existing resources without sacrificing quality o…
- Lean Experimentation: Test Ideas Quickly, Reduce Risk, Accelerate Learning Lean Experimentation helps managers validate assumptions and test ideas quickly with minimal investment, reducing the risk of committing significant resources to unproven assumptions and improving de…
- Offshoring and Outsourcing: Make Smart Resource Decisions Offshoring and outsourcing help organizations reduce costs, access specialized skills, and scale operations more flexibly without overloading internal teams.
- Process Mapping: Visualize Workflows to Drive Efficiency Process mapping gives managers and teams a practical method for making invisible workflows visible, revealing where handoffs break down, effort is duplicated, or steps have quietly become obsolete.
- Service Blueprinting: Design Reliable, End-to-End Service Experiences Service blueprinting helps managers diagnose and improve service performance by revealing how customer interactions, internal processes, and supporting systems connect and where breakdowns actually o…
- SIPOC Diagrams: Understand and Improve Any Process A SIPOC diagram helps teams clarify how a process works end to end so they can remove confusion, align stakeholders, and identify where improvement efforts will have the most impact.
- SMED Methodology: Cut Changeover Times with Lean Thinking SMED helps operations managers systematically eliminate wasted time during equipment changeovers, increasing production flexibility and reducing the hidden cost of downtime.
- Standard Operating Procedures: Strengthen Consistency, Quality and Trust in Growing Teams Standard operating procedures give growing teams a reliable foundation for consistent, high-quality work, reducing errors and enabling managers to delegate with confidence.
- Swimlane Diagrams: Clarify Who Does What Across Complex Processes Swimlane diagrams help teams make ownership, handoffs, and dependencies visible so work moves faster, with fewer misunderstandings and less rework.
- Value Stream Mapping: Visualise End to End Processes and Reduce Waste Value Stream Mapping gives managers a structured method for visualising every step in a workflow, identifying where time and effort are being lost, and building a credible case for lasting process im…
- WIP Limits: Improve Team Focus and Throughput WIP limits help managers cap the number of active tasks in a workflow, reducing overcommitment and improving the speed and reliability with which teams complete their work.
Courses
- Decide Whether to Hire, Outsource, or Say No to the Next Contract Provide a repeatable way to decide whether to hire, outsource, or decline a new contract when demand would push the team past its current capacity. This course pairs demand forecasting and capacity p…
- Document a Process Before the Person Who Knows It Walks Out the Door Losing the one person who actually understands a critical process is one of the most common and least prepared-for operations failures, and it rarely surfaces until the exit interview is already book…
- Turn a Recurring Quality Failure Into a Fixed Process, Not Another Apology When the same defect keeps coming back despite quick fixes, this course walks a manager through the shift from patching symptoms to permanently fixing the process. You'll use a fishbone diagram to ma…
Simulations
- Mapping the Waste Everyone Learned to Live With Order-to-ship time has crept up 40% with no single culprit, and leadership wants answers in three weeks. This value stream mapping simulation puts you on the floor, separating the real bottleneck fro…
- The Contract's Signed and the Team's Already Over Capacity Three weeks after signing your firm's biggest contract, the team is 30% over capacity and the penalty clock is already running. This simulation puts you through a live capacity planning call: cut pro…
- The Process No One Wrote Down, Failing in Real Time An operations manager has 48 hours to document an undocumented process while a client audit is already underway and three team members describe the same workflow three different ways. This simulation…