Asking tough questions about the current state of project management, The 12 Pillars of Project Excellence: A Lean Approach to Improving Project Results provides groundbreaking techniques to achieve excellence in project leadership that can result in six sigma type results or failure-free projects. It unveils novel solutions and breakthrough concepts—including project culture analysis, the five powers of project leadership, the power of visualization™, the science of simplicity™, dynamic risk leadership, and dynamic project failures analysis—to help you chart the most efficient path to the pinnacle of project leadership.

The author provides the cutting-edge methods based on decades of personal practical experience, valuable lessons learned, and authoritative insights gained from leading over 300 projects to successful conclusions. Complete with powerful tools for organizational- and self-assessment on the accompanying CD, this book will not only transform your approach to project management, but will also provide you with the tools to develop effective leaders and consistently achieve exceptional business results.

Every human being has an immense latent potential and is genetically engineered for success. However, for the potential to be realized, one needs a definite goal or purpose. Sadly, today a vast majority of the world population lacks a definite purpose in life. A “legacy” provides the definite purpose to individuals and acts as a “north star” and a “lighthouse”, keeping us on a steady path through the ups and downs of life. Leaving a legacy is not an afterthought or an accident. Leaving a legacy requires one to live a legacy driven life.

Today as we experience global economic and social upheaval on an unprecedented scale, there is an immediate need for all corporate and national leaders to learn how to lead a legacy driven life themselves and encourage their teams to design and live their own personal legacies to ensure accelerated growth of individuals, corporations and nations. This book is very unique as it provides a step-by-step formula of creating a “gold-standard” legacy by utilizing the V-Factor™ or the immense energy which comes from using the Power of Visualization™. Using this special formula and the inspiration from interviews with some amazing individuals, we all can learn to lead a legacy driven life of higher purpose, and leave a legacy of positive thoughts, positive words and positive actions for our future generations.

This handbook’s intention is to gather into a single reference the information related to the joint lean certification program of SME, AME, The Shingo Prize, and ASQ. This book will enhance your understanding of the certification’s Body of Knowledge (BOK) as a whole and give you a more holistic look at lean.

This comprehensive handbook covers all the topics included in the BOK: cultural enablers, continuous process improvement, consistent lean enterprise culture, and business results. Written by a team of lean experts with years of experience in the field, it will be indispensible to anyone interested in implementing and sustaining a lean initiative. The book is written, by design, at the Bronze Level for certification knowledge. This means that the weightings used in the Lean BOK for the Bronze Certification were considered for the depth and breadth of material considered for each rubric. By addressing the Lean BOK at the Bronze Level, this book provides a basic understanding of the lean principles, systems, and tools at a tactical level to drive improvements with measureable results.

Material from several lean practitioners with differing backgrounds and experience has been gathered to create this handbook, which serves as an ideal starting point for practitioners who want both a holistic view of lean in general and also specifically the BOK of this groundbreaking joint certification program.

Pinnacle Performance Zone™ (PPZ) is where new ideas flow, breakthroughs happen, and professional growth of team members and success on the job are celebrated. You clearly see the immediate result of changes to your state-of-mind: the impact of stress on your performance. You learn to change habits on your own terms, in a fun and engaging way. With Pinnacle Performance Zone as your partner, you can truly identify and reach your pinnacle performance.

The PPZ Main Menu is the “dashboard” from which you can choose to play games, explore environments, or take workshops to help you achieve smoother heart rate variation, learn how to breathe more evenly, and much more.

The PPZ Coach helps you train effectively using a wide variety of workshops such as: Advanced Breathing, Graph Training, Progressive Muscle Relaxation, Mindfulness, and more. The workshops use audio as well as visuals, and offer great flexibility of use. Shown above is the Paced Breathing Workshop, which allows the user to optimize their breathing rate with the help of an animated visual, a breath pacer, and a smoothness graph.

PPZ games are many and varied, to suit people of all ages and personalities. Challenge yourself to stay “in the zone” as you make “miracles” happen on your screen.

With the full suite of Workshops, Events, and Virtual Environments, you are trained to: Understand the stressors impacting your state of mind, Measure your stress level, Train yourself at your own level and pace, Restore balance, resilience, and vitality, Improve physical and mental well-being, Improve focus, concentration, and memory, Improve productivity, performance, and teamwork

All successful organizations have one factor in common – a strong culture. In fact, astute leaders know that the only guaranteed strategy for long-term success is a strong culture. Culture remains an esoteric and misunderstood topic. There is a false belief that merely implementing lean or six-sigma will automatically change the culture for the better. However, culture transformation remains a distant dream for a majority of organizations. iCulture™ is a state-of-the art simulation approach to help organizations accurately visualize their existing culture, understand the impact it has on the employees and customers and develop a practical plan for a dynamic culture transformation.

Mark Baker, the Executive Director of the Shingo Institute says, “The Shingo model is based on a new ways of thinking and it is exciting to have past Shingo Award winners like Adil Dalal and others continue to partner with Shingo to offer innovative products and workshops that can help organizations consistently deliver new levels of success to all their stakeholders.” According to Geoffrey Mika, a veteran in global lean transformations says, “The culture transformation gap in the current lean, Toyota Production System and Six-sigma based platforms is beautifully addressed by Adil Dalal in his iCulture™ simulation. The simulation walks you through the steps of culture assessments and transformations with sophisticated simplicity and in amazing detail. In my 24 years as a Kaizen sensei for many Fortune 100 and other organizations, I have never seen a product address culture as iCulture™ does – Adil has truly revolutionized the approach to culture assessment and transformations for organizations.”

The iCulture™ workshop is a hands-on workshop developed for executive leaders and individuals interested in sustainable transformation of cultures. It provides an award-winning practical formula for building a customized, sustainable culture of excellence. The formula is based on the principles of operational excellence provided in The 12 Pillars of Project Excellence: A Lean Approach to improving Project Results by Adil Dalal. This book is the winner of three prestigious awards: 2013 Axiom Best Business Book medal, 2014 Shingo Research and Publication medal, and 2015 ASQ Philip Crosby medal. The book has also been adopted as a Leadership Body of Knowledge by the Human Development & Leadership division of ASQ.

Adil Dalal says, “It is about time corporations have a practical approach to culture transformation. iCulture™ has been designed to help organizations of every type and size rapidly undertake a journey to building a strong culture, which will translate to loyal employees, delighted customers and long term success and profitability”. Adil adds, “What I am most proud of about this product is that it is made in the USA using latest 3D and green technologies and is completely customizable to any corporation so that they can be in complete control of their culture transformation.”

The Lean Board Game © was developed with the purpose of providing advanced technical knowledge about Manufacturing Engineering and Lean Manufacturing to the participants, through a highly interactive and motivating board game. To do that, the training teams are divided into two sub-teams in order to create a competition environment, and then receive a couple of information about the market demand, suppliers and internal processes. Based on that information, the sub-teams are challenged to create a complete Productive System starting from zero.

The basic learning activities provided by this game are: Shifts and journeys definition, Machines and equipment selection and acquisition, Labor hiring, Auxiliary resources and devices acquisition, In-process Bins/Racks definition and acquisition, Factory layout design including aisles, areas for materials handling, people circulation, support functions and in-process materials stock and supermarket, Productive areas synchronization, Processes and activities distribution

Several concepts and tools are applied during the rounds of the game, such as: Value Stream Mapping, Standardized Work, Continuous Flow, Pull System & Kanban, Setup Reduction, TPM, Error Proofing & Poka Yoke, and more…

After defining and establishing the initial production picture, during one entire week, the players will receive short theoretical information about the concepts and tools in a daily basis before starting to practically apply them along the week using the game boards and pieces, thus creating future scenarios and calculating the results they would get with regards to productivity, efficiency, lead time, labor costs, depreciation and profitability. Those results must be consolidated at the end of each one of the rounds. The sub-team presenting the best business performance after the five rounds will win the game!

To finish the layout design, during the third round, the sub-teams will be challenged to idealize and build each workstation of the final assembly line, following a practical preestablished guide.

To do that, they will have to measure the time of each assembly step, size the resources needed to assemble the entire product and determine the best balance of activities between the assembly workstations.