Lean Process Improvement: Waste, Root Cause and Flow

This course contains the use of artificial intelligence.

Most improvement projects end at the map. The process gets documented, the bottlenecks get circled, the deck gets presented, and six months later everything runs exactly as before.

A description of a process changes nothing. What changes something is what happens the first time somebody departs from it.

The second reason these projects fail

The cause gets looked for wherever it is comfortable to look. Late deliveries are explained by discipline, defects by carelessness, the missed deadline by not having enough people. None of those are causes. They are the first plausible sentence available, and they have the useful property of requiring nothing from anyone senior. Five whys exists for exactly one reason: to stop you from accepting the first convenient answer. Most people run it twice and call it three times.

What the work looks like when it is done properly

You map where the work waits rather than where it moves, and you find that the delay is almost never in the step everyone complains about. You classify waste specifically enough to price it. You separate a symptom from a cause using something more reliable than the opinion of whoever is loudest. Then you change the behaviour around the process — what gets described as expected, what ritual repeats it, what happens when someone deviates — because a standard that lives only in a document is not a standard, it is a suggestion.

Where this comes from

I have run process and organisational improvement inside companies scaling fast and companies cutting hard, including Preply, Wargaming, iDeals and Alfa-Bank. Over 1.6 million people have enrolled in my courses and more than 150,000 professionals have been trained through them. I hold PHRi and SHRM-CP certifications and represent HRCI in more than ten countries. A note on scope: this course teaches Lean tools and root cause work. It does not teach statistical process control or belt certification, and it does not pretend to.

How the course is built

You start with the toolkit: waste, standardisation, maturity, the five phases, and every map type including the value stream. Then the tools themselves — 5S, five whys, the eight disciplines method, cause and effect, benchmarking, affinity diagrams, SIPOC, prioritisation matrix, DRIVE and ICOR. Then the operational reality they run in: bottlenecks, queues, downtime, context switching, operating rhythms and dashboards. Then the thinking that separates cause from symptom: argument structure, cognitive bias, source verification and decision models. Then the organisational intervention: diagnosis, action planning, interventions at individual, team and process level, and calculating the return so the project survives budgeting. Then the knowledge system that makes a standard reproducible without you in the room. And finally culture, because that is the only thing that decides whether the improvement is still there next year.

What is included

• Lifetime access to all 42 lessons and every future update

• Active instructor support in the question and answer section

• Udemy Certificate of Completion

• Practical assignments run against a process you actually own

• A section with additional courses, tools and resources

Why start now

Waste does not announce itself. It shows up as everyone being busy, as a schedule that has always been like that, and as a cost line nobody questions because it has never moved. The first value stream map takes an afternoon and usually surprises the person who drew it. Enrol now and draw yours this week.