FAS Lean Practitioner Certification Program

What is Lean Practitioner Certification?

FAS Lean Practitioner Certification celebrates and recognizes participants who have demonstrated conceptual understanding of Lean and the thought process behind the A3 framework, including defining the problem, explaining the gaps between the current condition and target condition, and proposing countermeasures to address the root causes. Participants show effective application of A3 Thinking to address a problem in their functional area by leading at least one cycle of change with measureable results. All UCSF employees are eligible to apply. Application cycles for certification run year-round and at least two ceremonies are conducted annually to showcase candidates’ project through A3 presentation and reflection.

Why is Becoming Certified Important?

Individual Level

  • Enhance leadership, team engagement, and critical thinking skills
  • Build practical skills to create value for any job, improving personal work performance
  • Solve problems to create more capacity to do higher-level thinking, optimize the use of your talents to benefit you, your team, and your department

Organizational Level

  • Inspire others to join you to actively improve the way your department processes run, raise awareness of important issues
  • Contribute to organizational learning to help FAS achieve its goals in Continuous Improvement and Value Creation
  • Be recognized in your department and in FAS as having working knowledge/experience with applying Lean problem-solving methodology

Process to get Certified

Step 1: Training

UCSF employees are eligible for Lean Practitioner Certification by meeting any of the following training criteria:

  • Completing Lean courses offered by the PMO:
    • Former courses (until 2022): Lean Fundamentals, A3 Thinking for Supervisors and Managers.
    • New courses (Beginning in 2023): Intro to Lean + A3 Thinking 101 (optional: A3 Thinking 102 for additional coaching and support)
  • Leading a Value Improvement Project
  • Leading change through a FAS Active Daily Engagement (ADE) huddle
  • Learning Lean at UCSF, through an external agency, or studying independently and applying concepts to an improvement at UCSF

Step 2: Demonstrating application of A3 Thinking and Lean tools

  1. Show your understanding of Lean by developing an A3 to tell the story of your improvement project. This should be work on a real project that benefits your organization while solidifying Lean practices. (Please see UCSF PMO A3 template image to the right)
  2. Once you have implemented at least one cycle of change and have measureable results, complete your A3 using this UCSF Lean Practitioner Application to document your results and learnings (Please see Results and Learnings template image to the right)
  3. Email your application to [email protected] and cc: [email protected]. The application is peer-reviewed by the PMO Lean Instructors and coaches against the review criteria explained on the left and right margins of the A3 template.

Step 3: Presenting your A3

To celebrate and share your improvement work, you will have 5-7 minutes to present your A3 and the results and learnings slide to your supervisor, teammates, and leadership. Following each presentation will be 3 minutes of catchball.

What is catchball? Catchball involves moving ideas and information from one person or team to another

How is it used? Presenters pitch their A3s to the audience, and the audience pitches questions back to help expand and deepen their thinking.

 

A3 Template
Part 1: Standard A3 Template (Included in Lean Practitioner  Application Template)

 

Part 2: Results and Learnings (Included in Lean Practitioner  Application Template)
Coaching Kata: The Five Questions
Coaching Kata is used as a guide for asking questions during Catchball

 

 

Lean Practitioner Certification Criteria 

Your A3 Application must stand-alone to tell a cohesive story.

"Left Side Thinking"

Title: Clear topic, does not contain a solution. Connects to True North Pillar.

Background: Describes context for why this is important right now, what the business case is, who the story is about.

Current Conditions:

  • offers evidence of current work conditions; specific things or patterns that are actually happening/observed at the gemba
  • Includes process map or data describing the current condition
  • does not contain possible ideas or root causes

Problem Statement:  Focuses on work processes.

  • Is not a solution written as a problem
  • Is one sentence summarizing a critical condition to address the current state based on understanding the type of gap you have (caused or created)
  • written in performance and measurable terms; Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, Time-Bound (SMART)

Target Conditions (Goals):

  • Describes what needs to be brought into existence
  • written in performance and measurable terms; Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, Time-Bound (SMART)

Gap Analysis/ Root Cause Thinking:

  • root causes were derived using cause-effect tools (include image of 5-whys, fishbone if used)
  • if 5-whys analysis is used, logic should make sense when reversed or worked from the bottom up.

"Right Side Thinking"

Experiments/Ideas to Test: Proposed countermeasures tie back to a root cause it intends to reduce or eliminate.

  • lists in-process metrics to be measured for each countermeasure and reviewed regularly as evidence of progress

Action Plan: Details what needs to be in place in order to begin/run your experiments

  • what, by who, how much, and by when
  • includes who will measure what, where, how and whenthey will be collected and reported

Study: Describes conditions you will watch for in order to see whether experiments are working

Reflect: Includes metrics to explain what worked, what didn't, and what the next steps are

Plan Next Steps:

  • lists how ongoing plan-do-check-adjust (PDCA) will happen (who, what, where, when, how often)
  • Indicates other things you still need to think about, or do after completing some of the proposed experiments, or to be done concurrently
  • include a task for author to update this A3 when new information becomes available

Remember: A3 Thinking/ Problem Solving supports a continuous improvement culture at UCSF

We Show Respect for People by
  • Engaging others/ Catchball early and often
  • Finding ways to share your thinking and learning
We Continuously Improve by
  • Solving problems to make improvements as part of the regular work
  • Using PDCA to make incremental changes until the causes of the problem are eliminated, constraints are overcome, barriers are no longer in your way

    What Comes after Certification?

Consider submitting your improvement project to an open call or attending an Improvement conference: