12-Week Operations Improvement Program

9 Workshops, 2 Hours Each, over 12 Weeks.

The “4 Core” Workshops

Success Story

Like our tagline says, we “start with a story” by exploring and capturing your Success Story in a storyboard format.

This helps you hone in on your company’s purpose, your expected outcomes, and the experiences of the people involved in your success.

Process Inventory

Starting at the highest level and working our way into more detail, the second workshop captures your existing process information.

This forms the baseline understanding of your operations and what might be improved.

Feedback Loop

We consider the Customer and Employee Feedback Loops the most important processes driving your success.

There are 2 parts to feedback loops: gathering feedback and implementing improvement. We focus on both, with emphasis on the latter.

Unique Offering

This workshop reflects on how you offer your products/services to customers and what makes them unique (or not).

Equal parts introspection and external research, this workshop is surprisingly difficult, but always rewarding.

At the outset of the 12-week program, you might describe your operations using language such as “back office activities”, “behind the scenes work”, or “everything that’s not customer-facing.” You might already recognize there’s always customer-facing operations. Either way, your operations narratives are likely heavy on technology, business metrics, and areas where your management sees gaps.

By the end of the Customer|Experience and Employee|Experience workshops, you will begin to describe operations from the perspective of your customers and employees. This human-centric shift is critical for focusing on what’s most important and making the Feedback Loop a constant force of process improvement.

An important (albeit trendy) tool for creative problem solving is Design Thinking. In the seventh workshop, we lead you in a “crash course” on Design Thinking curated to your existing understanding of the approach. The goal is to give you enough of a working understanding to apply Design Thinking to your business.

In the eighth workshop, we put Design Thinking straight into action and create a prototype of one of your operations improvement ideas. This helps the workshop participants flex their newly training Design Thinking muscles while also trying out part 2 of the Feedback Loop… actually implementing feedback and seeing what happens!

By the end of eight sessions, we will certainly have identified an aspect of your business operations where Epic Process simply isn’t qualified to give expert advice! These areas might be legal questions, complex marketing techniques, bookkeeping/accounting needs, intensive web/media production, or something else specific to your needs.

We track these areas throughout the program for you, prioritize your needs together, and then Epic Process brings in an outside expert to host a Q&A session just for you!