Nancy Lea Hyer is Associate Professor at Vanderbilt's Owen Graduate School of Management. At Vanderbilt she teaches executive and MBA classes focused on project management, process development and improvement, and team leadership and facilitation. Professor Hyer has also taught at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill and at Indiana University-Bloomington. She has won executive program, Executive MBA, and MBA teaching awards, and both school and university-wide awards for excellence in undergraduate education.Prior to joining Vanderbilt, Professor Hyer was Operations Research Manager at Hewlett-Packard's Network Measurements Division. In that capacity she was a project manager responsible for leading teams focused on operational and strategic improvement. Her research focuses on lean processes and project management. Her publications have appeared in Harvard Business Review, California Management Review, Decision Sciences, IIE Solutions, Journal of Operations Management, Business Horizons, International Journal of Production Research, Manufacturing Engineering, and other scholarly and practitioner outlets. She is the co-author of Reorganizing the Factory: Competing through Cellular Manufacturing, which was awarded a 2003 Shingo Prize for "outstanding contribution to the body of knowledge in the field of manufacturing excellence." She serves on the Editorial Review Boards of Decision Sciences Journal of Innovative Education and Production & Inventory Management Journal. In addition to her corporate experience as a project manager at Hewlett Packard, Nancy has worked with a number of organizations to provide focused project management and process improvement training and to create and lead strategic planning sessions, retreats, and retrospectives. Recent clients include Community Health Systems, Commerce Bank, Provident Bank, Compaq, Hewlett-Packard, WebMD, Cheekwood Botanical Gardens and Museum, Cigna, and RR Donnelley. Professor Hyer earned her MBA and Ph.D. from Indiana University and holds an undergraduate degree from the University of Richmond.