Process Improvement Project Leader

Summary

The Continuous Improvement group optimizes processes and instills a culture of continuous improvement throughout NYPA. The Process Improvement Leader will work collaboratively with the process owners and participants across NYPA in analyzing and optimizing processes. They identify performance metrics to capture relevant data to demonstrate the effectiveness of each process improvement engagement. They lead teams of owners/stakeholders on projects that focus on reducing waste, balancing risk, streamlining processes, and enhancing customer satisfaction. Lead the organization in adoption of new tools and practices that bring cross-functional teams together to understand, document and simplify processes. The Process Improvement Leader works closely with teams on programs and projects that enhance business processes, improve reliability, increase simplicity, and enable growth by using Lean Six Sigma data-driven, problem-solving methodologies to deliver tangible business results. #LI-VB1

Responsibilities

• Develops and refines metrics to assess the effectiveness of a process, project or initiative, including the success of the project. 
• Identifies areas for improvement, prioritizes and develops strategies for sustaining improvements with controls and change management practices; identifies any problems or issues to implementation that may have affected the program's outcomes.
• Examines processes, procedures, and tools to identify strengths and weaknesses; develops and implements countermeasures, processes, procedures, and tools to improve efficiency, effectiveness, and overall performance.
• Executes and oversees change and improvement implementation strategies across NYPA; fosters the usage of changes principles, practices, methodologies, and toolkits through, apprenticeship, coaching and training efforts; develops and maintains inventory of initiatives to ensure balanced and coordinated efforts across the organization; work to increase change comfort and adaption rate.
• Creates and designs process to meet specific business objectives by identifying the steps, inputs, outputs, and resources needed to complete the process efficiently and effectively; defines the scope and objectives of the process, stakeholders, and their requirements, as well as any regulatory or compliance requirements.
• Continually improves a collection of countermeasures, methods, and improvement tools (including automation) intended to enhance efficiency, minimize errors, and boost productivity; tests and validates these in actual process applications to ensure effectiveness.

Knowledge, Skills and Abilities

• Ability to organize and manage multiple large-scale projects. Apply voice of the customer requirements and specification limits to process capability analyses. 
• Has played key roles in the improvement of throughput and increasing the ratio of value-added activity to nonvalue-added activity by reducing waste, cycle time, and work in process.
• Experience with collecting and analyzing data that aids evaluation of a process and its effectiveness such as descriptive statistics, histograms, boxplots, control charts, regression, and Pareto distributions
• Highly adept with aligning department-level metrics to organizational metrics and supporting sustainable reporting capabilities that enable management and staff to monitor and improve processes.
• Expert at chairing team meetings, maintaining focus on performance goals, and communicating progress toward process goals to associated teams. 
• Highly adept with coaching/mentoring process champions/owners, and junior continuous improvement professionals in continuous improvement and problem-solving methods e.g., Lean, Six Sigma, TPS, and process design. 
• Has coached managers and frontline staff through their development of SIPOCs, A3 thinking and standardized work exercises that illustrate their problems and enables effective process design.
• Experienced in the use and coaching of Lean knowledge and tools like 8 wastes, DMAIC framework, standardized work, FMEA, Value Stream Mapping, Kanban, 5-S, Just-In-Time delivery etc.
• Great at building process standards and visual management control systems that support daily measurement and management e.g., has coached leaders and front-line staff in the development of process goals, targets, standardized work, and check sheets
• Experienced with gathering stakeholder critical requirements.
• Experienced in Six Sigma analysis and tool deployment like Statistical Process Control, FMEA, Gage R&R, capability analysis, and regression, Quality Function Deployment, Pugh Matrixes, and TRIZ etc. 
   

Education, Experience and Certifications

• Bachelor’s degree in a STEM field required.
• Minimum 7 years of progressive continuous improvement, analytical, project management or business analysis experience.
• Minimum of 5 years of increased responsibility leading process improvement projects.
• Certifications: Lean Six Sigma Green Belt required (Black Belt preferred). Project Management Professional (PMP) preferred. 
• Experience in managing and delivering large scale transformation efforts with Lean Six Sigma methodologies is preferred

Physical Requirements

Approximately 30% to 40%  travel primarily within NY State