I thought this month we would get away from the stats of the last few columns. Hey, quiet down! How can anybody read over all that cheering?

There’s something missing from most Six Sigma implementations—a gap that, if left unattended, leads to wasted time and money, as well as the failure of the effort itself. This topic will help you make and maintain the business case for doing Six Sigma, since it will become integral to achieving the business’s objectives.

This gap comes from the interaction of two systems that, in my experience, are missing in most companies. If the main purpose of Six Sigma is to identify and reduce the costs of poor quality, this begs the question that we’re working on the right initiatives to do that, or even if reducing the costs of poor quality is the most effective activity to increase profit. Secondly, even if we have selected the correct things on which to work, have we done a good job of translating these company imperatives into projects for people to complete?

So it boils down to two systems that need to be working well: Policy deployment, and project prioritization and selection. The scary thing is that unless both systems are working well, your Six Sigma efforts may not help, and in fact may even hurt the competitiveness and profitability of your company.

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