Elisabeth Swan
Executive Consultant

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Pitney Bowes needed a Green Belt course, but one that didn't require key leadership employees to travel. Elisabeth designed a comprehensive online course that combined real projects, fast-paced instruction and one-on-one coaching. The result
was a highly successful, custom-designed course that enabled efficiency gains on a manageable schedule.

Starwood Hotels and Resorts wanted to launch a worldwide Lean Six Sigma initiative to improve margins and gain market share. In the course of the initiative roll-out, Elisabeth trained and coached project leaders within a union environment, leading to project benefits averaging $30 million per year from 2004 through 2008 for North America alone. Elisabeth also assisted in the design and implementation of a project-transfer and process management initiative that helped to expand gains from best practice projects to all 700 properties.

The Mobile Devices Department of Alberta Health Services needed to improve the province-wide process for request and delivery of smart phones to all AHS personnel. Elisabeth employed Just-in-Time training workshops to enable the Mobile Devices team to target improvement opportunities within the process. The team is on track to cut the rework rate in half and eradicate long approval wait times with innovative "opt-out" strategies.

Bahamas Telecommunications Company needed to implement a Performance Management System to surface and align quality initiatives. Elisabeth collaborated on the design and implementation of a company-wide performance management process resulting in the alignment of strategic corporate goals from VPs to coordinated targets for front-line technicians. In addition to Performance Management, Elisabeth also trained and coached teams to reduce fault repair turn-around time in a 100% unionized workforce.

Charles Schwab had a variety of new projects and needed new project leaders to achieve their goals. Elisabeth trained and coached improvement teams resulting in the reduction of the new account open cycle time by 75%. In addition, in order to help the Program Management Group manage their growing pipeline of projects, Elisabeth created a project selection tool that brought consistency and objectivity to the process for prioritizing.

The University of Alberta Hospital needed a cross-functional project team to achieve implementation of four large-scale projects within a four-month timeframe. Elisabeth collaborated on the development of cross-functional working groups comprised of physicians, nursing staff, and front-line health care personnel and developed simulations to test solutions for all four initiatives. She and her team coordinated the implementation of an integrated plan of care within 90 minutes of decision to admit; streamlined bed coordination to balance the wards; implemented daily "bullet-rounds" to update care team members on patient status changes; implemented a patient white board to address patient and family information needs. All projects completed successfully and on time.

Devon Energy was making process improvements to it's project approval process, and needed to educate its field organization on how to use the system effectively. Elisabeth assisted with the development of a training materials that introduced the new forms and procedures, as the design team simultaneously developed the new process. She delivered the program with internal partners to 100s of members of asset teams and regional leadership with consistently high participant evaluations.