OLC OD Resources

In 1992 two members of the Electric Power Research Institute (EPRI) visited the College of Engineering at San Jose State University, where Bob McQueen was a professor, to find resources they could use in supporting the US Electric Power Industry. After visiting Bob’s Process and Quality Improvement Research Center and reviewing the resources being made available by the Center to local industry to help improve performance, EPRI decided to establish a similar Process and Quality Improvement Applied Research Group. However, they could not contract with a university so Bob with 2 colleagues, Laurie Uden and Ron Murata, established the Organizational Learning Center (OLC) and won the contract. Chuck Ralston, Carrie Cabak and Bill Dunkel joined the OLC team. Over the past 30 years our small team has done many projects in a variety of industries with the primary focus of concurrently improving prosperity, partnership and the quality of working life. The resources that have been included under this tab are ones that we believe might be most helpful to others.

Subtab 1 is a case study of a one day off-site undertaken at a middle school, but the methodology is applicable for use in any organization. Fifty middle school teachers and staff participated in the off-site which resulted in improved partnership among the participants and the implementation of many changes that improved student education. Some of the teachers continued to work on their improvement initiatives for years after the off-site. Subtabs 2 through 5 provide resources that were developed on the EPRI program and have been used successfully in many different industries. EPRI does not consider the research to be proprietary and makes available reports on the work to those that request them. These 4 resources are part of a learning and change system that helps an organization establish a high-performance partnership organization and a high-quality working life. Subtab 6 provides a list of the many OLC led process improvement pilot projects undertaken on the EPRI research program in which the resources described in Sub Tabs 2 through 5 were developed and validated. The list also includes many courses and workshops provided by OLC throughout Asia on the methodology for building process-based partnership organizations. There is a separate “How” Tab on this website which provides the network of PowerPoint presentations that were used in these courses and workshops.

1. Middle School Project

2. Organizational Partnership Assessment

3. Employee Partnership Survey

4. Pilot Performance And Partnership Improvement Project

5. Establishing a Partnership Organization Case Example

6. OLC power Utility Improvement Projects and Training Provided in Asia

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