Universal Improvement Skills
Universal Improvement Skills teaches participants about improvement for individuals, teams and organisations.
It provides an integrated set of skills, tools and techniques that are universally applicable and transferable to a wide range of activities in the workplace. These skills can transform the way people work both on their own and in groups.
Participants learn both hard and soft skills. Methodologies, tools and techniques sit alongside how to involve people and how to run meetings in a participative and productive fashion. To explain ‘why’ as well as ‘how’, a brief introduction of the history and theory underpinning the ideas is provided at each stage.
Continually refined and developed based on real-life experience, Universal Improvement Skills has been running since 1994. Participants find that the application of these powerful but straightforward tools, techniques and methodologies has a dramatic effect on their projects, meetings, planning, day-to-day work and in the way they work with groups of people.
Duration and who should attend
This course is 3 days in duration and any of these people will benefit from it:
- Senior, middle and junior managers
- Project Leaders
- People who lead teams in the workplace
- People who need to improve their project management skills
- People who run meetings
- People who would like to be more structured in how they work
- Bright sparks who would benefit from a developmental opportunity
What participants will learn
Organisational Improvement
- A brief history of improvement in organisations and six Key Concepts that underpin the thinking and approach
- How to convert organisational strategy and good intentions into real change in the workplace
Projects
- The UIMPROVE framework for setting up and running projects
- Annual Project Planning
- How to set up a Project Steering Grid to monitor and steer the projects on an ongoing basis.
- How to set up individual projects properly with a clear remit
- Different roles in projects: Champion, Project Leader, Team Member, Key Player, Specialist, Facilitator
- Tools and techniques for involving people in projects
- How to run a Project Kick-Start
- A set of project methodologies that provide step-by-step guidance from the beginning to the end of any project:
- How to take an individual project and break it down into its component parts, identifying timescales, actions and milestones
Tools and techniques
- Tools for Planning and Organising
- Techniques for Productive Meetings – straightforward but highly effective structural techniques that will increase participation, variety, productivity and enjoyment of any meeting
Processes and how to improve them
- The principles of process improvement
- How to use Improvement Methodology to improve a process
- Analytical tools – Ishikawa Diagrams and Deployment Flowcharting
Participants learn both hard and soft skills. Project methodologies, tools and techniques sit alongside how to involve people and how to handle project team meetings in an integrated fashion.
Style and structure of the course
Universal Improvement Skills follows a tried-and-tested approach that is highly participative and practical.
Our training does not involve sitting around staring at a projector screen. Instead people get to think about and apply what they are learning to their own real-life scenarios including projects and meetings. There is ample opportunity to pick the brains of the people running the course. A ratio of two UIC Consultants to a maximum of 12 participants ensures that everyone gets a chance to have their say.
Support materials
Participants receive our comprehensive manual, The Complete Guide to Improvement. This contains 50 sections of easy-to-follow, step-by-step guidelines including everything covered on the course and a whole lot more.
Participants can also access support materials such as model agendas for Project Kick-Starts and project team meetings, and other templates such as Project Remits from our website.
