CCVO News
Nonprofit Sector Goes Lean
This spring, MPI Associates, Alberta Employment & Immigration and CCVO have joined together to pilot a project introducing nonprofit organizations to the principles of lean thinking. The idea of lean has been applied with success across the manufacturing and banking sectors, and more recently in health care delivery but until now has had no application within the nonprofit sector. The purpose of this project is to demonstrate how the application of lean has the potential to improve organizational efficiency and productivity and how principles of lean thinking could be replicated and shared with nonprofit organizations throughout Alberta.
The term "lean processing" refers to a set of organizational design principles that guide an organization to deliver its mandate with increasing efficiency; continuously improving service delivery, systematically reducing "waste" and ultimately contributing more positively to society. Lean thinking looks at each organization as an interconnected system and provides a method for every department and every staff person to work together to improve the quality of their work and to eliminate anything that does not add value to their service or mandate.
Following a day long workshop and selection process, the Distress Centre of Calgary (DCC) was selected as the pilot organization to take part in the project. In May 2009, MPI Associates began to work with DCC to introduce lean thinking to the agency, establish an in-house "lean team" and begin the organizational assessment process. MPI will work in with the DCC lean team in September to prepare and deliver training for the team before moving forward to apply lean thinking to DCC's volunteer management system. CCVO will keep you informed of this pilot project as it develops and will document and communicate learnings from this pilot process to the nonprofit sector in Calgary.
For more information contact:
Mike Grogan
Director, Workforce Development
403-261-6655 ext. 227
mgrogan@calgarycvo.org