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Lean, Six Sigma, and quality provide a set of tools and a framework for achieving excellence in any process. Quality professionals are able to help organizations determine if customer requirements are properly defined and if the organization is meeting those requirements. Lean practitioners have a set of skills that can be used to eliminate waste in the way things are done. Six Sigma can drive variation and errors out of processes. For the sake of discussion, let’s call these the “process excellence professions.” By applying these methodologies in the manufacturing arena throughout the past five decades, the lean, Six Sigma, and quality professions have helped increase productivity manyfold, while driving errors and quality problems to levels so low that society has begun to believe that it is possible to produce risk-free products, an illusion that previous generations could not even conceive.
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Barriers to Lean Six Sigma
At ASQ World, Kaiser Permanente explained how their quality folks are "improvement advisors", not green belts or black belts. This helps avoid the dojo metaphor and fattening resumes.
A year ago, Joe DeFeo said we need to lower the barriers to Six Sigma--jargon, etc. I agree. To accelerate the "diffusion" of Lean Six Sigma, we have to simplify and streamline the delivery.
I disagree that everyone needs to know math and statistics to do Six Sigma. Why terrify people with statistics when affordable Six Sigma software will do the analysis for them. Let's get people get started, then let them learn more as needed.
Less than one person out of 100 works on an assembly line where everything in the Six Sigma body of knowledge is needed. Let's stop teaching everyone else everything there is to know about Six Sigma and start teaching them only what they need to know to start solving problems immediately.
And I have found that teaching people just the tools they need to know to solve their current problem, then coaching them for a day or two to solve that problem transfers the skills and abilities quickly and effectively. People learn on projects, not in classrooms.
It doesn't take weeks, months or years to get results when we focus on projects, not training. It doesn't take years to develop competence with the right training techniques and a real problem to be solved.
Jay Arthur
Barriers to LSS
Jay:
You commented..
"I disagree that everyone needs to know math and statistics to do Six Sigma."
Everyone is the key word. Is that applicable to those whom we call Black Belts, or do you mean the employees in the process who work on the project teams?
"And I have found that teaching people just the tools they need to know to solve their current problem, then coaching them for a day or two to solve that problem transfers the skills and abilities quickly and effectively. People learn on projects, not in classrooms."
I agree with the last statement, which is why our teams attend training ONLY with a project, and training is centered on solving that problem. But when you teach only the tools needed to solve THAT problem, do you leave behind the competence to solve the next problem if it is different? Are the trainees really learning to become change agents?
By the way, I've seen affordable software with electronic "advisors" for data analysis provide answers regardless of the validity of the data (garbage in, garbage out), leading to really poor decision making. Sometimes you really do need an "expert" to coach and lead...
Regards,
Andrew Banks
Everyone = 99 people out of 100
Black belts are perhaps the one person out of 100 that need to know statistics. But truthfully, their SPC software should know statistics; they should know when to use a statistic.
Based on our QI Macros customers, even the biggest companies only train about 250 Green Belts and 5 Black Belts a year.
This leaves 10,000+ employees in the dark about Lean Six Sigma. No wonder it takes forever to implement and often fails. No wonder it's so slow to catch on.
Again, there are a handful of tools--Post-it Notes, control charts, pareto charts, histograms and fishbone diagrams--that will solve 90% of all quality problems, especially in service industries. Teaching participants anything else is "overproduction" and overkill. Training too many belts is overproduction. Companies need "Money Belts" who can find ways to save time and money.
Data: All data has been systematically distorted to make someone look good during their annual review. The good news is that the data is systematically distorted, so we can use it to make improvements. I've never seen "bad" or "invalid" data. Some data is just more useful than others.
We have to stop kowtowing to people who say the data's not valid or we need to do more analysis. I say that if they've got better data, bring it or shut up. Recently, Donald Wheeler said in an QD interview that "the best analysis is always the simplest analysis that produces the needed insight." Anything else is overkill.
Frankly, most of the training being done is overkill. The amount of time spent on most projects is waste. Projects can be done in days, not weeks or months. Skill can be acquired in days, not months or years.
Lean Six Sigma needs to drink its own Kool-Aid and slash cycle time, defects and deviation to achieve results faster than most people believe is possible.
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