Last month, I shared 31 best practices that have been demonstrated to promote high performance in organizations.  I labeled them the “silver bullet” for achieving and sustaining performance excellence – they represent best practices in customer focus, workforce engagement, process improvement, and organizational measurement (to see the column, visit here). 

This month, I’ll share another 12 best practices that can instantly help your organization improve its performance.  I’ll also offer a tool to help your organization improve its results – a complimentary gift to Council members.  So I hope you can invest 10 minutes to see how your organization can reach higher levels of excellence…

As I mentioned last month, there are six general things that leading organizations – organizations that are at the top in their industries or markets – do.  I think you’ll agree that:

5) High performing, world class organizations plan for the future.  They focus on their changing environment; systematically address strategic challenges; ensure adequate resources to accomplish key goals; and deploy, measure, and adjust plans as needed.

However, (effective) strategic planning is hard.  As I referenced in the January newsletter, about 70-90% of business strategies fail, which has a huge impact on organizational results (from a Digineer study cited in the January 2010 newsletter article):

• Decreased employee commitment, 67%
• Lost Market Opportunities, 53%
• Decreased Revenue, 53%
• Increased Costs, 39%
• Increased Cycle Times, 28%
• Decreased Customer Loyalty, 28%
• Lost Market Share, 28%.

Here are some best practices in strategic planning:

• Understand your environment – your strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats in terms of changing market and customers needs, shifts in technology, competition, regulations, and risks. 
• Identify your strategic challenges, strategic advantages (marketplace benefits that ensure future success), and core competencies (areas of expertise/strength that are difficult to imitate and create a sustainable competitive advantage).  And then determine strategic objectives that address your challenges or leverage your advantages/competencies.  Strategic objectives should be measurable, outcome-oriented results the organization must ACHIEVE to be successful in the future (they are NOT action plans). They should be challenging, but realistic.
• Develop action plans that align with strategic objectives.  Action plans should include the details of resource commitments and time horizons for accomplishment.  Deploy them throughout the organization, assigning ownership and accountability for completion.
• Involve all key stakeholders in the development of your plans.  It increases buy-in, develops stronger plans, and assists in ownership for implementation.
• Determine resources (human, financial/budget) AFTER you establish direction (most organizations do it the other way around). 
• Track the achievement and effectiveness of action plans, and adjust plans as environmental factors dictate.  Project your organization’s performance as well as your competitors (so as to see a path forward and to have milestones that facilitate adjustments when plans are not on track).

There are many effective planning processes (Hoshin Planning, large-scale change, catch-ball techniques, balance scorecard, and many others).  But the key is to understand your environment; set strategy to address challenges and leverage advantages; and deploy, measure, and adjust plans.  The role of organizational planning rests with its leaders…

6) High performing, world class organizations have visionary leaders.  Leaders’ actions should guide and sustain the organization – they should create an environment for performance improvement, accomplishment of mission and strategic objectives, innovation, high performance, organizational and workforce learning, and agility.

Why is leadership important?  Simply: effective leadership is the single biggest predictor of organizational excellence.  Period.  (If you want data, next month I’ll explore research that shows this direct link – the connection between leadership and employee passion, customer devotion, and organizational vitality.)

Here are some best practices in leadership:

• Be personally involved in setting vision and values and in deploying and reinforcing them throughout the organization.  Be personally involved in creating a focus on action, on balancing value for customers and the organization, on rewarding/recognizing performance that supports high performance.
• Be personally involved – and create systematic processes – to ensure ethical behavior on all stakeholder transactions.  Include ethics in training, communications, measurement, performance appraisals.
• Ensure effective, frank two-way communication with the workforce.  Use various media/vehicles for different messages and for different workforce groups.  Measure effectiveness of communication to see if messages are received (correctly).
• Ensure effective governance – accountability, transparency, and protection of stakeholder interests.  Evaluate leadership (senior leaders and governance board) effectiveness.
• Systematically address impact on society of your services and operations, and anticipate public concerns with current and future services and operations.
• Support and strengthen key communities, focusing on areas related to your core competencies and strategic objectives.  Consider societal well-being – environmental, social, and economic systems – as part of your strategy and daily operations.

**********

So there you have it – the six things that organizations need to do in order to achieve and sustain performance excellence:

• You need to focus on customers – to listen and anticipate their needs, to build relationships and engage customers so that they are committed to your organization, are loyal, and are willing to advocate for and recommend your organization to others.
• You need to engage your workforce so that they are satisfied, capable, and fully motivated to reach high performance, to serve customers, and to achieve organization objectives.
• You need to focus on your processes so that you can optimize your resources and deliver products, services, and programs that satisfy – fully satisfy – customer needs and create value for the enterprise.
• You need to measure performance, both at the day-to-day operating level as well as the strategic level – ensuring that facts (rather than intuition) become the basis for organizational decision making and improvement.
• You need to set and deploy strategy – to set a course for the future, a grand vision for the organization.
• You need to have effective leadership that sets vision; aligns, guides, and manages the organization; focuses on workforce, customers, and partners; communicates effectively; and ensures accountability, transparency, ethical behavior, support of key communities. 

Incidentally, these six things are captured in the Baldrige Criteria for Performance Excellence, as set of best practices that change every two years by studying organizations with demonstrated high performance outcomes, and incorporating their best practices into future Criteria against which other organizations can gauge performance.  As such, these Criteria have become the “leading edge of validated management practices.”  Last month, we hosted our 19th Annual Minnesota Quality Award (attended by nearly 350 Minnesota leaders), at which 13 organizations presented their best practices for achieving organizational excellence.  For the slides and keynote videos, visit http://www.councilforquality.org/2009mqa.cfm.

So if those 43 best practices all work, and if all of them are important in driving organizational excellence, then what’s the most important to ensure your organization’s success?

(Pause, crickets chirp.)

I believe that’s where many organizations need some help.  You see, I believe that ALL of these things are important to an organization’s success.  But organizations are highly complex – they are a system of literally hundreds of processes that fit together to create something of value (presumably) for stakeholders.  Therefore, organizational leaders sometimes struggle to understand how the system is working: leaders sometimes fail to cut through the complexity in their system to understand where they have strengths on which they can build, and where they have opportunities or gaps on which they need to focus.

That’s where the Council’s core service – a comprehensive organizational assessment – can help leaders identify and prioritize opportunities for improvement, help leaders optimize their resources and maximize their performance outcomes, and help leaders help their organizations achieve the highest performance possible. 

There’s the silver bullet…the secret sauce: it’s about managing your organization as a system.  It’s not easy.  But it’s no longer an option.  After all, can you name any organization that doesn’t have to focus on its customers (patients, students, stakeholders), doesn’t have to engage its workforce, doesn’t have to set a direction for the future and align resources towards achieving that vision; doesn’t have to measure performance and make course corrections; doesn’t have to manage and improve its processes so that value is created for its stakeholders and the organization can sustain its vitality?  ALL organizations need to manage and improve ALL of these areas – it’s really only a matter of how WELL they manage the system. 

So I’m going to offer a “deal you cannot refuse.”  The Council is going to offer a FREE mini-organizational assessment to the first 10 organizations who respond.  It’s on-line and fully automated, and it will give you the voice of your people – not an employee opinion or employee satisfaction survey, but an employee perception survey of how your organization is performing.  It’s a couple of dozen questions, takes about 30-45 minutes per employee to complete (anonymously), can be given to a sampling of your people, and it will give you insights into how your enterprise is performing – on your strengths, on your opportunities for improvement on which you might focus your energy and resources.

This offer is completely, 100% free for member organizations of the Minnesota Council for Quality.  Since it is designed for organizations, we request only organizations of two or more employees respond rather than individuals or sole proprietors.  It can, however, be administered to parts of an organization (department, unit, team, division, site).  For more information, contact me at brian.lassiter@councilforquality.org.  The first 10 to respond are free.

Also, if you’re interested in learning best practices from any of the nine organizations that are on the journey to performance excellence or the four out-of-state organizations that have reached extremely high performance (and have received the Malcolm Baldrige National Quality Award), please visit http://www.councilforquality.org/2009mqa.cfm.

Achieving organizational excellence is difficult; sustaining it is even more challenging.  The journey to excellence never ends.

Yours in Improvement,

Brian S. Lassiter

President, Minnesota Council for Quality

The Minnesota Council for Quality is pleased to welcome Beth Neu as our newest staff member.  Beth’s role is Director of Membership Development in the Twin Cities, and as such she will build and deepen relationships with our members to maximize the value of their membership and to help them improve and sustain their outcomes.  She will also coordinate the Council’s grant writing activities, furthering our work with non-profits, K-12 school districts, community improvement, and many other programs that advance excellence in Minnesota.

“We’re thrilled to have Beth join the Council,” says Brian Lassiter, president.  “She brings deep knowledge of non-profit membership development, as well as many other skills and talents.  She also has a passion for helping organizations improve, and will be a great asset for our team and our members.”

Beth has a background in health insurance administration, municipal government, and non-profit management, with a particular focus on membership development.  Her most recent experience was with the National Church Library Association as the Member Liaison.   Beth has additional experience in volunteer management, grant writing, and served as a reviewer of grant proposals for the state of Ohio’s Americorp granting agency.  Beth is a graduate of St. Mary’s University of Minnesota with a Master’s degree in Human Resource Management.

Are you interested in learning more about what makes organizations successful?  Are you interested in helping other organizations -- such as schools, hospitals, non-profits, and businesses -- around the state improve their performance?  Would you be interested in networking, learning, and sharing with others who feel the same way?

The Minnesota Council for Quality is seeking candidates for the 2010 Minnesota Quality Award Board of Evaluators.  The last of three training sessions in 2010 is October 5-7 in the Twin Cities.

There are many benefits to becoming an Evaluator, such as:

• strengthening your understanding of what drives organizational excellence (the Baldrige Criteria for Performance Excellence represent a validated set of best practices for organizational excellence, and can be useful for improving any organization’s performance) – and the 2010 Criteria represent significant changes, especially in terms of customer focus/engagement, core competencies, and sustainability/social responsibility;
• networking with influential leaders and professionals (this year’s Board of Evaluators will include about 150 leaders from around the state – executives, middle managers, surgeons and physicians, superintendents and school teachers, non-profit and public sector leaders, quality professionals, and consultants);
• seeing “best practices” deployed within another organization – knowledge that you could use back at your organization and/or in your career, helping organizations throughout the state – many of them schools, health care providers, non-profits, public sector agencies, and certainly businesses – improve their performance…simply get better at what they do; and
• developing a set of other professional skills that may help you advance your career – skills such as consensus- and team-building, written communication, verbal communication and interpersonal skills, interviewing, analysis, and systems thinking.

Most Evaluators consider the experience to be among the most valuable of their careers.  In fact, many have claimed that the experience and knowledge gained from this process rivals getting an MBA or advanced business degree.

Furthermore, Evaluators can earn college (undergrad and post-grad) credit for participating in training.  For interested Evaluators, the University of Minnesota and the University of Wisconsin-Stout both offer three (3) hours of credit in partnership with the Minnesota Council for Quality.

Applications for new Evaluators are due September 10.  Applications for returning Evaluators (which only require updates from your most recent application) are due September 24.

In addition to the full training October 5-7, new Evaluators are also required to attend a one-day orientation (either Sept 16, 21, or 22 – you choose, and all in the Twin Cities).

Workplace conflict is a commonly overlooked but costly phenomenon in business (perhaps more significantly today, as employees are asked to do more and more with less and less).  But indeed frustrated leaders and employees can avoid the behaviors that fuel destructive disagreements rather than wasting profits and time resolving them.

The Minnesota Council for Quality is pleased to announce a special, encore workshop: “Self-Defeating Habits of Otherwise Brilliant People: Pulling Together When Things Fall Apart.”  The workshop will be held July 27 in the Twin Cities (location TBD), and will be facilitated by Anna Maravelas, founder of Thera Rising (Thera is Greek, meaning “to heal”).

An expert in workplace conflict resolution and a devotee of Deming, Maravelas will share how to create emotionally resilient teams, avoid risk factors for heart disease and depression, eliminate five root causes of simmering hostilities, and maintain your integrity by sidestepping invitations to blame.  Rather than undermining relationships by “searching for stupidity,” Maravelas introduces techniques for avoiding blame and self-righteous indignation and focusing on the true causes of workplace inefficiency and waste.

Learn how to turn workgroups away from incivility toward collaboration, skilled communication and respect.  Discover how leaders can short-circuit blame and resentment—reactions that derail even the best people and projects.  These strategies last a lifetime.  CEOs, executives, and front-line employees rave about these techniques in their professional and personal lives.

Thera Rising has an international reputation, in workplace conflict resolution, team building and leadership development.  The founder, Anna Maravelas is the author of, “How to Reduce Workplace Conflict and Stress” (Career Press) which readers rate a five-star “must read” on Amazon.com.  Anna’s work has been published in the NY Times, Oprah Magazine, and MSNBC.  More information on Thera Rising can be found at http://www.therarising.com/. 

Speaker: Anna Maravelas, founder of Thera Rising
Dates: Tuesday, July 27

Location: Twin Cities (TBD)

Time: 7:30 Registration, networking, breakfast; 8:00-4:00 Program
Cost: $200 members; $300 members of partner organizations; $400 non-members

Workshops in Minneapolis, St. Paul, and Rochester all sold out last year and had nearly 100% attendee satisfaction – don’t miss this valuable program!!  Space is limited.

For more information, visit http://www.councilforquality.org/specialevent3.cfm.

How would it change your life if you could find a greater sense of purpose at work?  What would it mean if you could increase your level of job satisfaction today?  What if the answers to these questions were already inside you?

Most people search their whole lives trying to find a job that they can fall in love with – a job that makes the most of their skills, experience, and character qualities.  The reality is, however, that less than 16% (1 in 6) of us will ever find such a position.  So, what does it take to become one of the few people who love what they do?   In a word, the answer is passion.  Passion is the driving force behind thriving at work (and in our personal lives).  It bridges the gap between mearly existing to being fully engaged at work. 

The Minnesota Council for Quality is pleased to offer two half-day workshops Aug 18 and 19 (you choose) in the Twin Cities that will help you come alive at work: "How to Become More Engaged at Work" Workshop.  Both sessions will be facilitated by Jack Mateffy of Mateffy & Company (who sold out two Performance Improvement Network sessions and one Rochester Area Quality Council session this spring!).

These dynamic half-day learning experiences will show you how to build the work life you’ve always wanted.  It will change the way you look at your job and give you time to refocus and plan for a more fulfilling future.  Using fun and powerful accelerated adult learning tools, such as mind mapping, attention density, moments of insight, and brain pattern redevelopment, participants find this workshop extremely interactive, compelling, and in many cases, life changing.  So whether you are interested in identifying and tapping your own passion at work or at home, and/or you are a leader who could benefit from helping your staff find and tap theirs, take the first step toward a more engaged work life by attending one of these two workshops!

Workshops are mornings Wed, August 18 OR Thurs, Aug 19 (you choose) at a location in the Twin Cities.  Cost is $150 for Council members ($250 for non-members), plus $40 for workshop materials. 

Through this interactive workshop, you’ll:

• Appreciate how the need for employee engagement has grown and is changing the workplace.
• The link between your engagement level and feeling challenged, living healthfully, being creative, improving productivity, and being less tempted to leave.
• Learn what it takes to build a fully engaged, truly motivating work life.
• Discover exactly what  gets you excited about getting to work by playing the Passionwerx™ What Are You Passionate About At Work?© Card Game.
• Become more engaged immediately by designing and using a personal engagement plan.
• Consider how your physical and emotional energy levels impact your ability to be engaged at work.

For more information, visit http://www.councilforquality.org/specialevent4.cfm. 

To register, email brian.lassiter@councilforquality.org with your name, organizational affiliation, and member status.

As a stakeholder of the Minnesota Council for Quality, most of you have experienced the benefits of our programs and services that promote organizational improvement and performance excellence in our State.  The Council’s mission is to advance performance excellence in organizations, individuals, and communities across the State, and we are proud to be working with over 300 organizations in and beyond Minnesota.  However, there are over 100,000 businesses in this State, so we have our work cut out for us to increase our impact.  In short, we want more organizations throughout Minnesota to know about the Council, hear your success stories, and improve their own performance.

So we’re seeking volunteers with marketing and communications experience to join a new Council Board marketing committee, which will be chaired by Kathy Burnham, a senior vice president at Padilla Speer Beardsley and a Council board member.  The committee will meet for an hour or so each month (in person or via conference call) to get started and set priorities.  We’re especially interested in people with experience in or access to graphic designers, writers, and various other communications expertise (marketing, advertising, social media, etc.).

The Minnesota Council for Quality, in cooperation with the Minnesota Healthcare Quality Professionals, is pleased to announce a special two-day conference this fall: “Best Practices in Customer Engagement, Loyalty, and Satisfaction.”  The main conference will be October 13, with pre-conferences on October 12.

There will be no knowledge forums in July.  These free monthly sessions – intended for leaders and professionals to share best practices and knowledge on organizational improvement and for networking – are free for Council members.

Sessions resume as follows:

• Rochester Area Quality Council (RAQC) resumes Tuesday, August 3

• Minneapolis Performance Improvement Network (PIN) resumes Thursday, August 5

• St. Paul Performance Excellence Network (PIN) resumes Wednesday, August 11

• Twin Ports Performance Excellence Network (TPPEN in Duluth) resumes Tuesday, September 21.

Mark your calendars.  We’ll see you later this summer or fall!

The Alliance for Performance Excellence (the national consortium of state quality award programs) is pleased to announce the Baldrige Resource Library (BRL), an online repository of over 1000 articles and videos on organizational improvement, quality, and all aspects of performance excellence.  The BRL is made possible in cooperation with the Baldrige National Quality Award Program, the Baldrige Foundation, and the American Society for Quality.

The BRL is THE place to answer questions such as "How do I find out more about Baldrige?", "How do I get started on the journey to excellence?", "Should I do Baldrige, ISO, Lean, or Six Sigma?", and many others.  The BRL includes all aspects of organizational improvement, Baldrige Criteria, and other quality methods/tools.

The Minnesota Council for Quality also administers an online repository of articles and whitepapers in our Improvement Clearinghouse (http://www.councilforquality.org/improve.cfm).  In addition, the Clearinghouse includes over 300 links to other sites that specialize in organizational excellence, along with an event directory for training, education, programs on organizational improvement in Minnesota.  It is free to use.

Enterprise Minnesota, a partner of the MN Council for Quality, is pleased to announce their next upcoming event: “Lean Office: Beyond the Manufacturing Floor.”  The session is July 28 in Minnetonka.

In addition, Enterprise Minnesota will host the following other programs:

July 28: Lean Office: Beyond the Manufacturing Floor, Minnetonka

Aug 18: TWI: Leadership to Improve Productivity, Quality, and Morale, Twin Cities

Sept 15: Supply Chain: Six Steps to Becoming a Better Supplier, Twin Cities

Oct 20: The Vale of Your Business: What Expert Buyers are Looking For, Roseville

The Minnesota Chapter of Project Management Institute (PMI), an alliance partner of the Council, is pleased to announce its next breakfast session: “New Features of Microsoft Project 2010.”  The session will be held July 13, and will be facilitated by Daniel Renier, VP of Educational Services at Milestone Consulting.   

Microsoft Project 2010 became generally available May 12th to businesses and in June for consumers.
There are significant improvements with the last version (Project 2007) and much more is in store for Project 2010!

Here is an opportunity to get an overview of the new features in Microsoft Project 2010. Additionally, as Project 2010 is demonstrated, a few Microsoft Project scheduling fundamentals and best practices will be presented and can be leveraged for use with prior versions of Microsoft Project.

Dan will cover key Project 2010 investment areas and features including User Interface Enhancements, User-Controlled Scheduling, Incremental Leveling, Task Inactivation and the new Team Planner and Timeline Views. For certain new features Dan will compare how Project 2007 and 2010 function differently.

The MN Healthcare Quality Professionals, an alliance partner of the MN Council for Quality, is pleased to host a (free) monthly webinar seminar series.  The series, hosted by MHQP and HealthForce Minnesota, is a monthly "quality in the trenches" brownbag education series.  The objective of these sessions is to provide a healthcare quality "survey course" using selected materials from the National Association of Healthcare Quality (NAHQ)'s Certified Professional in Healthcare Quality (CPHQ) preparation materials. 

Upcoming webinars include (over the lunch hour):

6/24        Panel: Hardwiring Core Measures in EHR’s

7/22        Panel: Patient Safety in the Clinics

The intended audience includes healthcare quality professionals who want a re-grounding in the breadth of their profession, and clinicians who want to learn more to become champions of change.  MHQP especially wants to reach out to healthcare professionals in rural/outstate Minnesota who don't get many quality education opportunities.

You are cordially invited to participate in the 2010 North American Coordinate Metrology Association (NACMA) annual workshop on August 4, 5, & 6 in Minneapolis, Minnesota. We are very pleased to announce that Medtronic Inc. will be our host for the event.

This internationally recognized annual workshop, in its 16th year, will offer presentations given by renowned metrology experts from around the world. Lectures will cover basic subjects in coordinate metrology including probing, GD&T, CMM–CAD integration and laser scanning, and address recent developments in instrumentation, standards and procedures. The workshop is designed for scientists, technicians on the shop floor, engineers, equipment manufacturers, and operational managers concerned with accurate and precise measurement whether in research, development, or manufacturing applications. These issues are of increasing importance in a global marketplace for improving competitiveness and the interoperability and compatibility of manufactured goods.

For more information or to register, visit http://www.iigdt.com/NACMA/. 

South Central College is pleased to announce their fall quality and performance improvement curriculum.  Council members are entitled to a 10% discount.

The following courses will be held at the Faribault campus (prices before member discount):

8/23-9/27, Certified Quality Inspector (CQI) Review, 6-9PM, $250

8/31-9/28, Certified Manager of Quality/Organizational Excellence Review, 6-9PM, $450

9/21-9/22, Introduction to Quality, 8AM-4:30PM, $445

10/4-11/29, Certified Quality Engineer (CQE) Review – Webinar, 6-9PM, $450

10/5, Problem Solving Tools & Methods, 8AM-4:30PM, $235

10/25-11/29, Certified Quality Technician (CQT) Review, 5:30-8:30PM, $250

10/28, Project Management, 8AM-4:30PM, $235

11/3-12/1, Certified Quality Auditor (CQA) Review – Webinar, 5:30-8:30PM, $250

11/9, Understanding & Implementing ISO 9001, 8AM-4:30PM, $235

11/10, Internal Auditor Skills, 8AM-4:30PM, $235

For more information, please contact Laura Hardy at 507-332-5802 or at laura.hardy@southcentral.edu or contact Brian Knutson at 507-332-5874 (brian.knutson@southcentral.edu). 

The Universty of Minnesota’s College of Continuing Education, an alliance partner of the Council, is pleased to announce their winter/spring improvement and business courses.  Council members receive a 10% discount on all CCE courses.

7/12-7/16, FastTrack Business Analysis Certificate (3 courses), $1,850

7/14, Negotiating for Agreement, $395

7/23, Introduction to Business Analysis, $395

7/26-8/6, FastTrack Project Management Certificate (9 courses), $3,500

7/30, Project Management Foundations, $395

7/30, Working Assertively, $395

7/30, Managing Business Requirements, $750

8/6, Project Initiation, $395

8/10, Principles of Supervision, $995

8/12, Project Planning, $750

8/13, Business Process Modeling and Analysis, $750

8/17, Introduction to HR Practices, $395

8/19, Financial Intelligence, $395

8/20, Project Risk Management, $395

8/24, The Human Resources Audit, $395

8/25, Delegating to Enhance Job Performance, $395

8/27, Problem Solving and Decision Making, $395

8/27, Project Execution, $395

9/10, Presentation Skills for Professionals, $495

9/10, Use Case Fundamentals, $395

9/14, Process Mapping and Analysis,  $995

9/14, Staffing Recruitment and Selection, $395

9/15, Business Grammar Update, $395

9/15, Interviewing and Selection Processes, $395

9/15, Successfully Dealing with Conflict at Work, $395

9/17, Facilitating User Acceptance Testing, $395

9/17, Project Control and Closure, $395

9/17, Ethical Business Decision Making, $395

9/21, Investigations and Documentation, $395

9/22, Introduction to Business Analysis, $395

9/24, Emotional Intelligence for Professional Success, $395

9/24, Project Leadership, $395

9/24, Business Process Planning, $395

9/28, Designing On-Boarding Programs, $395

9/28, Implementing Process Change, $995

9/29, Foundations in Business Writing and Design, $395

9/29, Creative Training Techniques, $1,485

9/29, Managing Business Requirements, $750

10/1, Using Influence to Drive Results, $395

10/1, Project Negotiation and Conflict Resolution, $395

10/5, Legal Issues in HR and Management, $395

10/5, Successful Manager's Leadership Program, $2,995

10/7, Virtual Management (Previous Title: Managing Virtual and Remote Teams), $395

10/8, Applied Project Management, $395

10/8, Achieving Results Through Personal Power and Leadership, $395

10/12, Measuring and Improving Work Processes, $750 

10/12, Principles of Employee Compensation, $395

10/13, Data and Process Modeling, $750

10/13, Documenting Employee Performance, $395

10/13, How to Deal with Difficult People, $395

10/6, Legal Issues for Supervisors, $395

10/14, Eight Steps of Instructional Design, $990

10/14, Strategic Planning and Measurement, $750

10/15, Project Management Foundations, $395

10/19, Project Management for HR Professionals, $395

10/21, Fundamentals of Leading Organizational Change, $795

10/22, Project Initiation, $395

10/26, Performance Management Processes, $395

10/27, Improving Work Processes, $395

10/27, Technical Writing, $395

10/28, Introduction to E-Learning and Webinars,  $ 990

10/28, Project Planning, $750

10/28, Developing Leadership Skills, $750

10/29, Increasing Power and Influence through Listening, $395

11/2, Organizational Training and Development, $395

11/2, Process Innovation,  $995

11/3, Handling People with Tact and Diplomacy, $395

11/4, Creativity and Innovation, $395

11/4, Organizational Assessment, $795

11/5, Project Risk Management, $395

11/9, Employee Benefit Practices and Trends, $395

11/10, Advanced Editing and Proofreading Strategies, $395

11/10, Business Process Modeling and Analysis, $750

11/10, Managing Performance and Developing Talent, $395

11/12, Project Execution, $395

11/16, Business Process Management and the Balanced Scorecard, $995

11/16, Employee and Labor Relations, $395

11/18, Customer Focused Marketing, $395

11/18, In-Depth Coaching: Leading Individual Change Interventions, $795

11/19, Project Control and Closure, $395

11/30, Strategic HR Planning, $395

12/1, Facilitating User Acceptance Testing, $395

12/1, Writing Business Reports, $395

12/2, Leading Successful Team Intervention Strategies, $795

12/2, Leading Through Change, $395

12/3, Exercising Organizational Influence, $395

12/3, Project Leadership, $395

12/7, Technology for HR Management, $395

12/8, Coaching for Excellence, $395

12/8, Use Case Fundamentals, $395

12/9, Developing Direct Reports and Employees, $395

12/10, Project Negotiation and Conflict Resolution, $395

12/14, Business Acumen for HR Professionals, $395

12/15, Verbal and Nonverbal Communication Skills, $395

12/15, Writing for the Web, $395

12/16, Successfully Leading Enterprise-Wide Change, $795

12/16, Capstone in Supervision, $750

12/17, Project Management for IT Professionals, $395

In addition, the following evening courses will be offered:

9/13, HR Certification Test Prep, $1,095

9/14, Project Management Foundations, $395

9/15, Project Risk Management, $395

9/21, Project Initiation, $395

9/22, HR Certification Test Prep, $1,095

9/28, Project Planning, $750

9/29, Project Control and Closure, $395

10/5, Introduction to Business Analysis, $395

10/12, Project Risk Management, $395

10/13, Project Leadership, $395

10/19, Project Execution, $395

10/19, Managing Business Requirements, $750

10/26, Project Control and Closure, $395

10/27, Project Negotiation and Conflict Resolution, $395

11/2, Project Leadership, $395

11/9, Project Negotiation and Conflict Resolution, $395

11/10, Applied Project Management, $395

11/16, Applied Project Management, $395

11/16, Data and Process Modeling, $750

Finally, the following online courses will be offered:

9/13, Online Principles of Systems Engineering, $2,295

10/1, Online HR Certification Test Prep, $1,095

10/4, Online Business Analysis Certificate, $1,850

The University of St. Thomas’ Executive Education and Professional Development, a partner of the MN Council for Quality, is pleased to announce the following upcoming programs:

7/12 – 8/5/2010 Lean Six Sigma Black Belt, $8200

Also, coming in the fall of 2010: Mini MBA for Technical Professionals and Mini Master of Supply Chain Management.

.