Level 5 Improvement Specialist
Apprenticeship
(Black Belt)

Leading improvement strategies

The role of an Improvement Specialist

Improvement Specialists are responsible for leading the deployment of improvement strategy, for training others and for providing deep technical expertise in advanced Lean and Six Sigma, Project and Change Management principles and tools.

During and after their training, Improvement Specialists will typically report to Improvement Leaders who develop the improvement strategy and governance and provide technical guidance on advanced analysis. The Improvement Specialists manage Improvement Practitioners who lead smaller improvement projects. They will work closely with other Improvement Specialists to support the delivery of improvement strategy, working on multiple simultaneous projects linked to key business objectives.

Find out more about the role and responsibilities of an Improvement Leader in our brochure.

What Skills and Knowledge will be acheived?

Leading Improvement teams:

Personality types, team development stages, motivational techniques, situational leadership, learning styles, mentoring models.

Project planning, review & coaching:

Multi-element business case, financial plan, benefits realisation plan, risk management plan, project plan. Maslow’s hierarchy of needs.

Principles & methods for Improvement:

How to apply Improvement Methods across all functions, policy deployment principles, Lean culture.

Statistics & measures:

Probability distributions & how to test for fit of probability distributions to data. Confidence intervals, central limit theorem. Testing data for stability & normality & strategies for dealing with non-stable or non-normal data.

Experimentation:

Principles of full and fractional designed experiments including replicates, repeats, randomisation, blocking & centre points, resolution and confounding.

Failure mode avoidance:

System state flow, boundary diagram, interface analysis tables, fault tree analysis, robustness checklist, tolerance design and analysis. Principles & links between Failure Modes and Effects analysis for concepts, designs, processes.

Sustainability & control:

Control & reaction plans. Prevention controls.