CHAPTER 7 – How and Where Should We Start Our Efforts?

SUMMARY

Start with clarifying your Objective, your Scope, and your Timeframe.

Your objectives may be of three levels.

1. Business transformation—doing a “culture change,” such as creating customer-focused attitude, building greater flexibility, abandoning old structures.
2. Strategic improvement—addresses strategic or operational weaknesses or opportunities. They take the form of speeding up product development, enhancing supply chain efficiencies, or building e-commerce capabilities.
3. Problem solving—fixing specific areas of high cost, rework, or delays such as shortening application processing time, decreasing volume of past-due receivables.

Your scope can be influenced a lot by your position in the organization.

The question would be, “What’s feasible?”

Determining feasibility involves three factors.

1. Resources—candidates, time frame, budget
2. Attention—capacity to focus
3. Acceptance—willingness to do it

Defining your timeframe puts some urgency for your organization to see the results.

Whatever it is, you need to start it. There are suggested on-ramps to the Six Sigma Roadmap, which parallel your levels of objectives.

a. Business transformation on-ramp where you identify core processes and key customers. In this phase, you may want to limit your scope to 1 or 2 core processes and at the same time select strategic and/or problem-solving projects.

b. Strategic improvement on-ramp where you define customer requirements. Your options would be to identify issues that reflect broader transformation challenges, limit scope to key customers, and at the same time launch problem-solving projects tied to strategic initiative.

c. Problem solving on-ramp where you expand and integrate the Six Sigma system. Your options would be to launch an effort to define core processes and key customers.

Regardless of the scale and scope of your Six Sigma start-up, a “piloting strategy” is a very important component. Piloting allows you to minimize the challenges that arise along the way and to learn from them, and will test the whole approach. Some of the elements of a Six Sigma start that can be considered for piloting are:

1. orientation of business leaders
2. project selection
3. project team makeup
4. team leader selection
5. measurement methods
6. training design and content
7. training logistics and scheduling

Once you’re ready to start, remember the following:

1. Plan your own route, the best that suits your organization.
2. Define your objective, prioritizing your needs and assessing your readiness.
3. Stick to what’s feasible even if it means starting on a small scale in an area you can manage. This is often a great way to start.

COMMENTARY

You must decide way ahead where and how you start your Six Sigma initiative before jumping into the bandwagon so to speak. Else, you will be doing everything all at the same time, which is a sure path to failure.

The benefits Six Sigma promises are awesome that you may be tempted to want them all, and all at once. Resist the temptation! It will just lead to nowhere—a case of “too much too soon.” This is not to say, too, that you should be hesitant or tentative with your initial efforts.

The best way really is to be very clear and specific with what you want to accomplish and prioritize them according to the impact it will have on your organization.

After all, there is virtue in planning ahead.

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