Northwood Technical College Review

reviews Aug 31, 2021

Hello Everyone, today we would like to share with you a client experience from when St Andrews Lean Consulting had the privilege of introducing process improvement to Northwood Technical College (NTC). We asked Becka Cusick, the quality improvement co-ordinator at NTC to review her experience working with St Andrews Lean Consulting.

“Northwood Technical College’s process improvement journey started with a vision from our now retired Vice President of Institutional Effectiveness. Her vision led to a strategic initiative to find a systematic way to manage processes as a means for improving business performance outcomes and operational agility.

The college’s Institutional Effectiveness department pulled together an inspired eight-person focus group of faculty and staff to review several process improvement methodologies and tools. The team chose to utilize the LEAN methodology and tools, specifically LEAN in Higher Education. The buzz started, and the energy moved out amongst the 400+ staff.

After extensive research, we choose Mark Robinson from St Andrews Lean Consulting to facilitate our training. We emailed the application for Process Improvement Facilitator Training to all staff in the hopes of encouraging ~12 people to accept the opportunity, even though the responsibility would be in addition to their current job duties. We received 24 applications! It was at that time that our Executive Leadership Council agreed to fund two training sessions in order to accommodate all those that accepted the opportunity.

12 people attended each of the two trainings, coming together from five different campuses (some 3 ½ hours away)! We learned about Lean in Higher Education and its tools by scoping and redesigning two college processes. The energy continues as we prepare to kick-start our process improvement journey. These newly trained facilitators are already using the tools and methodology in their daily processes.

Our motto: The right people continuously searching for the simplest and most efficient process in order to meet the needs of and delight the customer”.

More information about Northwood Technical College:

NTC is a top-ranked college serving the northwest region of Wisconsin, USA with multiple convenient locations and offerings, including career-focused degree and certificate programs, customized training for businesses and a wide array of personal and career enrichment courses. For more information please visit: northwoodtech.edu.

If you would like to find out more about how our team at St Andrews Lean Consulting can help you on your Lean journey, you can contact us. 

Note: Northwood Technical College was previously known as Wisconsin Indianhead Technical College.