Craig Szelestowski is a Lean government and transformation specialist with close to two decades of experience implementing dramatic turnarounds in Canadian government. He started Lean Agility Inc. in 2010 to apply Lean to government organizations. With his coaching, his clients have reduced lead times by up to 80%, increased capacity by up to 200% and created outstanding levels of employee engagement. He is one of Canada’s leading thinkers and practitioners of applying Lean to non-transaction processes such as the development of policy, plans, reports, briefing notes, communications, and other products where the subject varies widely, the work is highly customized and volumes are low.
In his public service career, as Vice President of Human Resources, Lean and Quality, he led the Royal Canadian Mint’s Lean transformation which helped move the organization through a challenging era of cutbacks and job losses into an extended period of financial and organizational health and stability. During his tenure, the Mint realized tens of millions of dollars of Lean improvements, dramatically reduced the time and effort to deliver its products and services, moving from a financial loss, to a profit of over $68 million. In terms of employee engagement, it improved from 100 grievances per year to 20 per year and was named by Maclean’s magazine as one of “Canada’s Top 100 Employers”from 2007 to 2010.
Craig has led the development of Lean Agility’s training curriculum including: White, Yellow, Green and Black Belt Certification, Lean Document Creation and Approval, Results – Not Resistance, Lean Management Systems and Lean Strategic Planning and Deployment. He is widely regarded as one of Canada’s foremost experts on the application of Lean to both knowledge/project based work as well as to more transactional work such as permits and applications.