Critical Success Factors of Six Sigma Projects

In my previous post (Six Sigma Champion), I mentioned there that a Champion must be someone who is skilled in being able to align the Six Sigma projects with company’s goals. By aligning, you are ensuring that the initiative itself is not a waste of time, effort, and money.

Bruce Hayes has this to say, “The organizations that focused on continuously measuring and driving management behaviors, including aligning initiatives and priorities, yield a much higher return on their programs than those who leave it to chance.”

Hayes should know what he’s talking about. He’s been been involved with Six Sigma since its beginnings at Motorola and later as a consultant to GE as well as dozens of other companies. He has experienced a variety of cultures and management systems and their relationship to quantitative results.

He further observes that aside from this failure to align, organizations altogether scrap their Six Sigma projects not because of low returns but because the project team failed to focus on the success factors. And at the first sign of trouble, it’s so easy to revert to the old way of doing things. Then pow! Your Six Sigma initiative collapses.

What then are these succcess factors? Hayes categorized them into three: executive engagement; communications; and projects.

Executive Engagement

• Assuring linkage of Six Sigma to corporate strategies.
• Clear prioritization (relative to other initiatives, programs and priorities).

Critical Success Factor – Communications

• Creation and communication of a Human Resources plan to support Six Sigma roles.
• Regular written communications on Six Sigma news and successes.

Critical Success Factor – Projects

• Establish a documented 1-year Six Sigma project inventory (and refresh regularly).
• Assure linkage of Six Sigma projects to critical business and customer needs.
• Establish projects of appropriate scope and size (significant savings & achievable).

Read more…

Taking note of these factors is just the first step. A more important task really is drawing up a more quantitative method for measuring, aligning and closing gaps in management performance and behavior, especially that Six Sigma is fact- and data-based.

Aligning therefore requires that you are able to collect a large sample of data from the various layers of the organization based around a series of factors and sub-factors. These data must be gathered objectively and be referenced to a quantitative scale (e.g. 0-7). To determine the sub-factors, the data must be “drilled,” demographically sorted, summarized, and analyzed. When you are able to do all these, you will see your projects’ strengths, weaknesses, and even gaps in the deployment.

You can see now that this organizational or management alignment is a poweful tool to to measure, monitor and improve both the alignment and behaviors of an organization implementing Six Sigma. Just imagine how your organization can benefit from a comprehensive database of both statistical and informative data of issues. It will be easier for you to monitor the behaviors (may be isolated or company wide) of every department, check, and then improve them.

Filed under: Deployment

No Comments » |

Six Sigma Champion

In my talks of Six Sigma projects and deployments, I would mention Green Belts and Black Belts, or even Yellow Belts. There is another important role in Six Sigma deployments that I think I’ve missed to mention here—the Champion(s).

A champion is middle- or senior-level executive who sponsors a specific Six Sigma project, ensuring that resources are available and cross-functional issues are resolved. They are thought to remove roadblocks. They can help defuse any issues that may arise between a Black Belt and another person in the organization. A champion’s role is even made more important in issues involving someone with a higher formal position in the company. Fruther, the Champion should serve as a buffer that avoid a head-to-head confrontation of a Black Belt with Managers, Vice Presidents, and Directors in the company. Once confrontations are kept at bay, Black Belts gain the freedom to focus on the project or the process improvement project unhampered.

This kind of buffering is the most fundamental function of the Champion. I say this is not an easy task at all. The Champion has to be a diplomat with superpowers.

Needless to say, Champions must be skilled and experienced in the following areas:

1. Business and operations interface. They should know the nature of their business and the technology used to operate the processes. They have to make sure that the goals of the Six Sigma project are in line with the company’s goals. Also, they must be able to assess that the project is progressing as it should be and identify the areas of improvement, if need be.

2. Project selection. This is the most controversial part of the deployment. The solution is alignment—being able to relate the need for such a project to the company’s overall direction or need.

3. Pace mediation. The best Six Sigma deployment plan is a combination of an internal expert (Business, Six Sigma, and Change) and the Six Sigma provider or consultant. Time element is very important deployment factor. Slowing a Six Sigma initiative too much may cause it to die. People should be committed to seeing the project completed. Completion of a project should be the only measure of success.

4. Results implementation. When a project is completed, everyone will look for the calculated potential savings. The savings should have a financial measurement and be time bounded. And the Champion is accountable for that metric. The metrics will drive the performance. Accurate projections and timely implementations require a metric on them.

As I’ve said these are challenging tasks. Therefore if you want the Project Champion to be able to perform these tasks well, you better establish sound metrics right from the start of the project deployment.

Source: The Champion’s Role In Successful Six Sigma Deployments

Filed under: Deployment

No Comments » |