In today’s competitive business environment, training professionals are under constant pressure to deliver more training, in greater quantities, and in less time. Challenges include global competition, reductions in corporate resources, and the ongoing need to retain talented and skilled people.

Traditionally, training departments were often separate from their organization’s day-to-day business. Multi-day live classroom training was the primary approach. This was expensive from a dollars and resource perspective, and difficult to schedule because of travel arrangements and other work commitments. Management frequently viewed training as necessary, but costly.

Distance education was a step in the right direction. It reduced travel costs, and eliminated some, but not all, scheduling issues. Other initiatives such as web-based training, mentoring, blended learning, and just-in-time learning were also beneficial. However, this was like picking the low-hanging fruit on a tree. Additional savings and improvements would require more innovative approaches.

Besides efficiently delivering training, today’s training departments must be tightly aligned and integrated with their organization’s business goals and needs. The common goal is to drive higher performance and create strong business results by improving employee performance.

Lean Six Sigma is an improvement process designed to help organizations meet their goals and their customers’ needs.

An early innovator was Dr. W. Edwards Deming, a quality improvement pioneer in both Japan and America. His 85/15 rule stated that 85% of problems were built into the way work was done, and only 15% was the fault of individual employees.

One central theme of Lean Six Sigma is that unnecessary complexity adds cost, time, and waste. Another is that only customers can define quality. Anything that does not meet a customer need can be considered a defect. In addition, low quality and slow processes make their corresponding services and products, expensive. By focusing on improvements to the process flow, we can improve training development speed, quality, and integration with organizational business goals.

This presentation examines the challenges of training in today’s competitive business environment. It focuses on a systematic approach to training program development using the principles of Lean Six Sigma.

Examples will include self-paced web learning portals that provide structured training paths as well as access to additional resources such as recordings of knowledge transfers, departmental sites, documentation, and wikis.