How to Maximize Flow in
Knowledge Creation Value Streams

Eight Sessions: Thursdays, September 23 - November 11, 2010
Participation strictly limited to 12 per session.

Do you experience the wastes of reinvention, invention-on-schedule or revisited decisions, and does the waste slow down your product development process?

Do you need the ability to share your knowledge with internal and external development partners without spending hours of time to teach them what you know?

Is your company's most valuable knowledge locked in your product developers' minds?

This class will challenge how you think about knowledge flow in your product development process. It will help you learn to see and eliminate the barriers that slow down product development and help your teams maximize ROI from investments in customer and technical knowledge creation.

This is not a class for beginners. We will move fast and cover a lot of ground. I will personally interview each participant to ensure that we have a group that is ready to use this advanced material to take their lean product development work to a whole new level.

This web learning experience is designed to deepen your understanding of the knowledge creation value streams across your organization, especially in strategy development, market and customer research, advanced technical research and product development.

Sessions

Sessions meet via web conference. We will set the specific time based upon participants' schedule requirements.

Dates and topics are as follows:

• September 23: What is a Knowledge Creation Value Stream?
• September 30: The Nature of Knowledge Work
• October 7: A Culture of Knowledge Creation
• October 14: Towering Technical Competency
• October 21: Customer Intimacy
• October 28: Reusable Knowledge
• November 4: TRIZ to Bring Outside Knowledge In
• November 11: The Environment for Knowledge Creation

Format

Katherine will conduct each live session personally.

Participants will have access to Katherine via email during the course and for 90 days following the class to discuss how to implement course material.

Participants may ask questions and participate in class discussions by phone or through the web interface.

Each session will be recorded. The recorded presentation with slides will be distributed to the participants. Each participant will have the ability to download the recording approximately 24 hours after the session.

There will be homework assignments between each session, and Katherine is available by email to answer questions about the homework.

The "Waste Free" Guarantee:

Our refund policy is as lean as it gets: if any of our products or services don't meet your expectations, we will refund your money.

Registration Options

• Individual Registration: $795 per person.
• Team Registration:
  • $100 off per person per class for three or more.

Frequently Asked Questions:

• We'v e already been doing lean product development. Will I really learn anything new?
  
  Most books about lean product development and most consultants' workshops are designed to teach you the basics - the things that you need to know to get started. My class, Fundamentals of Lean Product Development is designed for people who are new to lean product development and it's focused on HOW to execute the practices.
  
  Once you have mastered the basic material and harvested all of the "low-hanging fruit" it's time to go deeper.
  
  No one has yet pulled together all of the experiences within the global Lean PD community alongside the theoretical underpinnings that help explain why all of this stuff works as well as it does to speed up product development.
  
  Once you understand WHY lean product development works to shorten time-to-market at the level of knowledge flow, you will be in a better position to truly make lean product development your own.
  
  
• How is this web class different from a face-to-face workshop?
  
  Most one day classes offer six hours of instruction.  This web class gives you eight hours for about the same price – even less if you sign up as a group.
  
  That’s not the only difference:  when you go away to take a workshop (or pay big bucks to bring a consultant to you), you listen to a lot of lecture, maybe go through a case study or two, and then go home. 
  
  This class extends over two months to give you time to digest the material, reflect upon its value to your organization and discuss it among your team, and then bring your questions back to the class.
  
  
• How interactive is the class?
  
  The class is as interactive as you make it.   You can participate in the class discussions, share your own work and give feedback on others’ ideas, ask me questions off-line and connect with others in your class.
  
  
• What if I don’t have time to make all of the meetings?
  
  We record each class session and make it available for later review on the class home page.  In fact, some people have taken the class entirely off-line through listening to the recordings after the sessions.
  
  
• What system requirements do I need to take the class?
  
  We use Adobe Connect to run our web classes. You just need an internet connection, and a Flash-compatible browser.  To test your system, click here.
  
  
• What if my entire team wants to take the class together?
  You have three alternatives:
  • Sign up for the class as a group.  You can either join the call from a conference room, or from your individual phone lines.  Each person participating in the call needs to have a paid registration.
    
    
  • Schedule a customized version of the course.  This makes sense if you wish to have more than five people on the call, and/or if you have specific areas that you wish to focus on during the class. This is a good option for a pilot program team.