The founder of KaizenOcho Consulting has always been a natural systems person.  Growing up one of the many middle kids in a large family, he has always been able to see underlying organization while others only saw the chaos in a process.  In a big family, you learn early on the importance of collaboration.  As with leading any type of group of people, the keys to any successful systems implementation is an understanding of group dynamics and collaboration.

To truly understand a process, it is necessary to break it down to the fundamental components; a philosophy John learned as an industrial engineer.  As an industrial engineer at a Japanese company, he became familiar with the concept of ‘Kaizen’, a Japanese term for process improvement.  As a kaizen lead, John brought various department leads (quality, operations, supervisors) together to watch different parts of a process and implement changes to the process.  This collaborative approach helped bring change and process improvements in a more rapid manner.

He took this philosophy to the next phase of his career, implementing enterprise systems.  The challenge of implementing systems became very intriguing and natural for him, he switched to becoming a subject matter expert in enterprise applications. As a subject matter expert and developing software at a software company, he worked with dozens of Fortune 500 companies implementing various enterprise systems at large companies.  John not only understand how to implement Commercially-Off-The-Shelf (COTS) software packages, he has a keen understanding to how software systems are customized and the efforts required to support these customizations.  He spent his first four years at a supply chain software company working with the software development team; helping to develop a commercially viable product that has helped large fortune 500 companies solve their plant scheduling problems.

Understanding the software applications and IT process of projects, the next phase of his career lead him to become a project management leader.  For the past 10 years, he has been a certified project management professional (PMP) bringing people together to implement systems on-time and on-budget.  Having seen projects both fail and succeed, he understands that the core to any quality implementation is the same to a productive kaizen group –  the ability to collaborate as a team to find solutions to a problem.  This insight and after working with various clients in an Agile implementation environment, lead John to become a certified Scrum Master (CSM).

John has an undergraduate degree in Industrial and Systems Engineering, with a minor in Psychology and a Masters degree in Strategic HR and Organization Development. In his spare time, John brings his same philosophy from his professional career to his volunteer activities.  For the past 5 years, John has been an Odyssey of the Mind coach for elementary students, teaching them to collaborate as a team and to understand how to share ideas with their team to bring solutions together.  He starts by teaching kids to understand how to brainstorm together with ideas and to understand the storyboard process to problems.  He then helps the team identify their individual strengths as part of the solution so they can come together as a team for their final performance. Not unlike working in an organization, helping facilitate a group process to a successful conclusion!

KaizenOcho –  Process management plus organizational change equals lasting transformation.

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