Process Improvement - Barriers and Opportunities for Teaching and Training

Barriers and opportunities associated with professionals are considered. Practical possibilities for increasing the understanding and implementation of process improvement are discussed, including the use of webinars, possibly with open badges to record and encourage participation. The use of MOOCs, potentially leading to on-line assessed qualifications, could increase the number of practitioners with the relevant knowledge, particularly in more remote regions. Changes to SFIAplus could enhance awareness of process improvement, and so encourage employers to authorise relevant training. The lack of relevant knowledge and experience of teachers and lecturers is considered, together with the problems of pressures by other topics on academic courses. The actions that could be undertaken to promote and assist the teaching of process improvement in colleges and universities range from provision of suitable case studies to the inclusion of process improvement within the accreditation of courses. The opportunities associated with the new higher apprenticeships could provide potential practitioners with process improvement skills for the future. Changes in the requirements by professional bodies for syllabus content for accredited courses, aligned with enhanced SFIAplus, could increase awareness of process improvement. The syllabus could be aligned with professional courses, such as by the ECQA course, so students could obtain the professional qualification as well as their degree. Taking the long term approach of ten years plus, the relevance of quality and process improvement could be introduced at the appropriate stages into the new schools computing curriculum, started in 2014 in the UK, to raise awareness of the need for process improvement to the future workforce.