EMBA student Marco Rodriguez-Tapia has transformed Lean Six Sigma training at Pepsi-Co into a virtual Minecraft-based game during the Covid-19 pandemic.
Marco Rodriguez-Tapia, of the Oxford Executive MBA September 2020 cohort, has already made use of some of the insights he gained from the very first module of his course, ‘Leadership Fundamentals’, to create and complete a new project for PepsiCo.
The project addresses a challenge many business leaders currently face: how to engage and train teams when pandemic restrictions make in-person workshops impossible.
In March 2020, PepsiCo stopped in-person process improvement training based on Lean Six Sigma, assuming it would be a temporary decision. By July, it became clear that an alternative format was needed. The previous in-person training had been getting very positive feedback, and had included travelling to interesting locations for team-building and social activities as well as the core Lean Six Sigma training, but the first iteration of online training could not replicate this. Soon feedback became negative, as employees were undertaking eight solid hours of online training without any of the social, fun or interactive elements that had previously made developing as a team so effective.