Focusing on Excellence - June 2011

Thu, 05/12/2011 - 13:46 — l-childs

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Here's the latest news from the team at Ceptara (www.ceptara.com), a company dedicated to helping organizations and individuals focus and achieve their goals.

Upcoming Events

July 12 - Personal Excellence Workshop Learn how to manage the daily chaos and still maintain focus on what's important. Curious? Learn more about the workshop here. If you're interested let us know and take part in this deeply discounted workshop (Price: $200 | Regularly $350)
September 6 - Lean Practices Overview This class provides participants with a basic understanding of Lean principles, and how they are applied to the workplace. Jim Griffin will be teaching this one night only class.
September 13 - Lean Six Sigma Green Belt Foundations Course Learn best practice approaches that can be applied immediately in your work and build a foundation for further understanding and development in the area of work process improvement.

Personal Excellence Workshop Header

Join us July 12th for our Personal Excellence Workshop to be held in Seattle WA. Come prepared to look at what is important in your life and learn how you can organize personal and business tasks to help you achieve excellence.

The workshop with help you to:

Identify your life's goals in context of your pressure points.
Understand why your goals are important to you.
Identify daily organizational techniques to help you focus on your goals and manage the firestorm of activities and daily expectations.

The class presents in two parts, a) learn the basics of personal excellence and b) how to leverage Microsoft Outlook using Ceptara's Organizer for Outlook Add-in to implement your new personal excellence system.

Find more information on the Personal Excellence Workshop here.

Register for the event by June 30th to take advantage of our early bird pricing, only $200 for 6 hours of focused instruction on what matters most to you.

Creating an Effective Meeting Agenda

Meetings are supposed to be held with a specific purpose. Whether it's to brainstorm for ideas, assign tasks, or inform the group, there's a goal to achieve. For the most part, an agenda can be used to help you do just that. Use these RACI guidelines to help create an effective agenda.

Using Corrective Action to Make Matters Worse by not Considering Variation

Often management will want to take corrective action to solve problems but before they implement the change they fail to consider variation making the outcome ineffective or counterproductive. Commitment by management is key. Find the entire article located at the bottom of this link.

Standardizing Personal Processes

At the heart of any continuos improvement project is standardization. Daily proceses that leaders often overlook can vary each time it is preformed therefore quality may suffer, lead times are erratic and productivity may be constrained. Use the tips found here to develop a standard work process at your organization.

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Get up to date info from Ceptara on Twitter - @ceptara. Daily posts keep you informed of the latest from us and news within the industry.

The Ceptara team hopes you enjoyed this issue. Please feel free to contact any of us if you would like to discuss any of the articles or our services further. We hope you'll pass this along to anyone you think would benefit, and, of course, anyone can subscribe to our newsletter by clicking here.

Chris Lindstrom
Managing Partner

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