If your business has a successful Service Excellence transformation programme in place, the introduction of an Academy can be invaluable in helping with both broadening and raising the capability of the key staff on your improvement team.

These people will be instrumental in facilitating change, and will eventually be able to achieve business transformation through customer service excellence, so it’s important you give them the tools and the confidence to be successful.

An Academy can play a key role. It can help you address the challenge of capacity, both in terms of increasing Lean understanding across all employees and growing the size of your improvement teams. It can provide thought leadership in the implementation of Service Excellence, framing the ‘one common language’ and ‘one methodology’. Finally, it can help support the transformation in your business, regardless of the scale and complexity involved.

Succeeding with honours

At Gobeyond Partners we have identified five key principles that form the foundations of a successful Academy:

1. The academy must not be an ivory tower. It should be grounded in the operation – with the people and by the people, for the people.

2. Training delivered by the Academy must be linked to real business improvement. Trainees benefit from experiential learning and delivering real and measured benefits

3. The Academy should be underpinned by a recognised accreditation programme that assures the delivery
content and is seen as valuable to trainees.

4. The Academy should be a self improving institution.

5. The Academy should provide a strong link between the improvement teams and the business operations.

What does an Academy need to succeed?

To achieve rapid credibility and kudos, the Academy should have senior level sponsorship and a charter, together with a formal governance structure. For example, the CEO or COO could act as Chancellor of the Academy.

Strong internal marketing is required to create a real interest and demand. It’s why the Academy needs to develop its own prospectus with a clear hierarchy of accredited training and developmental products.

Constraints such as how the Academy will work with existing learning & development organisations will also need to be ironed out, while coaching should always support and reinforce the training.

Finally, the Academy needs an appropriate measures dashboard to confirm that its own performance is being managed effectively and that it is delivering value for money benefits to the business.

An Academy can provide one of the vital ingredients required for long-term sustainability and success. It will help broaden capability, expand learning and help you effectively and efficiently grow the size of your current improvement team.