Schedule

Welcome from Harrisburg University

Opening Remarks from the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania

This session will introduce participants to Lean Six Sigma and how it can positively impact workplace culture. Participants will hear about Lean methodology and tools that can assist them in making processes simpler, faster, better and less costly for employees and external customers.

Diversity, equity, and inclusion has become a crucial and transformative element within society, and most importantly in the workplace. As the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania continues to lay the foundation for a healthy government, it is essential for us to lean into 21st century leadership and embrace inclusive excellence. This presentation will focus on utilizing a trauma informed approach to DEI in workplace to ensure sustainability and create a pathway for restorative justice, while challenging oppressive structures and systemic issues in state government.

Tackling challenges effectively and sustainably requires a high-performing team. But how do you create one? Is there a repeatable process we can use that is proven to work with literally thousands of teams? In fact, there is. The research for this particular method, called Scrum, began in 1983 when a former West Point graduate became frustrated with the poor results he saw from most teams he worked with. Scrum was heavily influenced by lean, so they work effectively together. And Scrum has been applied to all kinds of teams, including those in Government, customer service, education, health care, marketing, and all kinds of physical and software products. We have applied Scrum to Government programs over the last 17 years. Learn about the challenges and how to apply those lessons learned to build your own high-performing team.

What does it take to create a commonwealth government where customers are satisfied, and employees can truly thrive? It takes a commitment to the keystone of the Healthy Government Framework: a human-centered mindset and culture. In this keynote talk, learn from Renée Smith, the co-creator of Healthy Government Framework, why it is essential to put people at the heart of the organization and how to do that each day. Learn the origins and application of the framework, and how creating a more human workplace can help teams deliver greater value to Pennsylvanians. As a behavioral scientist and leader, Renée’s primary research opens a bold new pathway to lean continuous improvement and effective workplaces with happy, loyal employees. Learn the five things to avoid and the three things to uphold to create a human workplace. Understand the role of accountability in a human-centered culture. Come away inspired and holding the “key” to supporting all the other elements of a healthy, effective government.

In today’s era of fast-paced, ever-changing workplaces, having a vision and common goals is even more important than ever. Just an important, though, is achieving those goals. Do you know where you are going? Is your team on track to reach that vision? This presentation will look at the foundational components of a vision, strategy, and strategic goals and the importance of each. We’ll then present an approach for linking individual projects to those goals, so the organization is on track for achieving its strategy.

The Office of Vocational Rehabilitation of Pennsylvania (OVR) conducted an organizational-wide evaluation to understand a number of their processes and systems more clearly. The main Lean tools used during this evaluation were Process Mapping and SWOT Analysis.

Traditional workforce recognition and promotion programs focus solely on individual members’ contributions and accomplishments. It certainly makes sense that employees who perform well at their jobs are probably going to do well at the next higher level. Organizations use a performance measures or other type of accessible data points to evaluate employee performance to identify top performers ready for increased responsibility and recognition.

Connecting employees to an organization’s purpose is critical to sustainable success for any improvement or change effort. Naturally, as leaders in our organizations, our intuition is to communicate—or over-communicate—the vision and mission to everyone to ensure they know what the words say, what the organization is trying to do, and what their role is in that outcome. However, our intuitions fail us by not understanding the perspectives of our workforce and how they perceive their role and contributions against the patterns and structures they see every day. In truth, most will never be in a position to connect daily tasks to the overarching mission, but that’s okay; they don’t have to for the organization and all employees to flourish. This session will discuss one of the natural divisions of perspective in the workforce. By the end, we will learn how to articulate the most impactful connections to each employee’s perspective, obtaining buy-in and even active cooperation with organizational improvement and lean transformations. This isn’t a lecture. If you bring your questions, you’ll leave with a path toward connecting yourself and your employees to your organization’s purpose. Value to Attendees: Attendees will leave this session with strategies to gain organizational buy-in for organizational transformation initiatives from the different perspective groups found throughout the workforce.

Covid-19 changed the game, making remote work and distributed team members the norm. I think we all sense that something fundamental has changed in the nature of work, and many of these changes will persist even after the pandemic. Like it or not, whiteboards and sticky notes can no longer cut it. We have to use Agile tools. So… which one? In this talk Craeg will do an in-depth walkthrough of two leading Agile tools: Atlassian Jira and Kanbanize. He will review the philosophy of each tool, and then walk through a fully featured simulation, complete with sample projects, plugins, and project configurations, that show off the best that each tool has to offer. Atlassian Jira is a “developer’s tool,” and this heritage shows through clearly in the way it is set up, how the pieces fit together, and the problems it tries to solve. But this is really only a small part of the Jira story. The Jira plugin marketplace has exploded in popularity, with hundreds of high-quality plugins that extend Jira in all sorts of interesting ways. Kanbanize is the market leader among a set of up-and-coming Kanban tools including Kaiten, Swift Kanban, Kanban Zone, and LeanKit. Craeg will explore how Jira supports both Kanban and Scrum at the team level, as well as scaling beyond the team level. In contrast to Jira, Kanbanize offers a “batteries included” approach that tightly integrates features in a unique and highly usable interface. Craeg will explore the areas of overlap and the unique strengths of each tool. In the end, both are highly capable, flexible, and powerful enough to support even the largest of organizations. But…in the end there can be only one. Come to see the results of this legendary battle!

Governor Wolf tasked all commonwealth employees under his jurisdiction with being leaders in diversity, equity, and inclusion. Our panelists took the charge to heart by connecting their passions for DEI through the creation of brave spaces in which to have uncomfortable and difficult conversations. From hosting biweekly EACH is Important Conversations (Exploring All Complexities of Humanity), to bringing leaders together to discuss growth in the DEI space, to hosting podcasts helping those along their DEI journey, to creating a commonwealth-wide antiracism book club, these strong women have pushed the conversations of DEI forward. They will discuss their roadblocks, keys to success, and their vision for a more inclusive commonwealth staff.

Implementing Lean principles is the latest public sector movement and involves new lean concepts, new lean planning, and new lean tools. But even the best implementation of these three lean components will fail without a fourth component; one that sets the proper foundation: a lean culture. During this presentation we’ll: •Discuss why the office culture is imperative to successful lean implementations •Encourage participants to share failure and success stories and share our own •Provide and solicit tips and techniques on establishing, supporting, and growing the foundational culture needed for successful Lean implementation •Challenge participants to identify the role and importance of cultural leaders and cultural enablers and their impact on continuous improvement, enterprise alignment, and results. •Identify methods to address threats to a burgeoning Lean culture and ways to establish practices to ensure culture continuity

Leadership has been recognized as an integral part of a successful Lean transformation. Leaders are people others follow, and while there is a general understanding of Lean leadership behaviors in private sector organizations, do these same leadership behaviors translate to public sector organizations. The frontline supervisor in a Lean transformation is critical to its success. The role of the frontline supervisor is complex requiring a balance between the interests of higher levels of management and the work units they lead. The front-line supervisor is also a key communicator in interpreting and implementing the goals and objectives of the Lean effort. This interactive session will explore the key traits necessary for front line supervisors to build successful lean efforts. This program will share the results of in-depth interviews with front-line supervisors from seven commonwealth agencies. The participants will discover the several leadership behaviors that front line supervisors exhibit to engage their direct reports in a successful Lean transformation, and will takeaway practices, that can be implemented the next day.