6 Sigma Road Blocks

Six Sigma is defined as a metric for measuring defects and improving quality; a methodology to reduce defect levels below 3.4 Defects Per Million Opportunities (DPMO); a means to manage process variations that cause defects; and a way to systematically work towards managing variation to eliminate those defects. The objective of Six Sigma is to deliver world-class performance, reliability and value to the end customer.

In some aspects of quality improvement, Total Quality Management (TQM) and Six Sigma share the same philosophy of how to assist organizations in accomplishing total quality. They both emphasize the importance of top-management support and leadership. Both approaches make it clear that continuous quality improvement is critical to long-term business success. However, why has the popularity of TQM waned while Six Sigma's popularity continues to grow in the past decade?

Unlike TQM, Six Sigma was not developed by technicians who only dabbled in management and therefore produced only broad guidelines for management to follow. The Six Sigma way of implementation was created by some of America's most gifted CEOs - people like Motorola's Bob Galvin, Allied Signal's Larry Bossidy and GE's Jack Welch. These people had a single goal in mind: making their businesses as successful as possible. Once they were convinced that tools and techniques of Six Sigma could help them do this, they developed a framework to make it happen.

Current State of Six Sigma Application and Roadblocks:

Several companies have attempted to implement Six Sigma, and the results proved disappointing; what happened?

1. Do you really need Six Sigma at your company/organization/department?
2. Perhaps the wrong person was chosen as your Black Belt.
3. Maybe someone at the top didn't get behind the initiative.
4. Perhaps key team members didn't understand Six Sigma, and therefore could not implement it effectively.

Company-wide understanding of Six Sigma

Company-wide understanding of the Six Sigma process is required by company-wide buy-in and, ultimately, company-wide success. In general, projects are tied to business goals that can be found in the balanced scorecard, or another system that allows a company to make sure their efforts are directed to critical areas.

If 90% of the projects were no longer in place, then we would be looking at champions and process owners. The most difficult part is if we can't get the process owners to implement these changes, what chance do we have of getting them to implement the common sense changes?

Six Sigma betters an organization at all levels. At the highest level, this involves moving the entire organization from Three or Four Sigma business process to Six Sigma Business processes, which requires reducing defects by a factor of more than 20,000, completely transforming the organization's culture. But this can't be accomplished by simply tweaking the process; it requires creativity. And the greatest enemy of creativity is hierarchy.

Because hierarchy in a traditional firm controls all of the resources - material and human - an individual employee must obtain permission from someone to use any resource. If the resources required to pursue a creative idea are controlled by several positions in the hierarchy, the employee must get permission from each. And when one asks permission, only a "yes" answer moves things ahead.

Six Sigma's magic doesn't lie in statistical or high-tech razzle-dazzle. Six Sigma relies on tried-and-true methods that have been around for decades. In fact, Six Sigma discards a great deal of the complexity that characterizes TQM. By one expert's count, there are more than 400 TQM tools and techniques. Six Sigma takes a handful of these methods and trains a small cadre of in-house technical leaders, known as Six Sigma Black Belts/Green Belts, to a high level of proficiency in the application of these techniques. To be sure, some of the methods used by Black Belts/Green Belts, including up-to-date computer technology, are highly advanced. But the tools are applied within a simple performance-improvement framework, known as Define-Measure-Analyze-Improve-Control (DMAIC), which is analogous to the older TQM model known as Deming Cycle: "Plan-Do-Study-Act."

Anyone with more than the most cursory exposure to Six Sigma is familiar with the DMAIC cycle. DMAIC is almost universally used to guide Six Sigma process improvement projects. Although truly dramatic improvement in quality requires transforming the management philosophy and organization culture, the fact is that projects must be undertaken sooner or later to make things happen. Projects are the means through which processes are systematically changed; they are bridges between the planning and the doing. However, DMAIC is not a method of planning projects. Project planning is a subject in its own right. Although projects and plans are closely related, they also differ in many respects.

Six Sigma's bottom-line results flow from Six Sigma projects.

Properly defined Six Sigma projects meet certain criteria:

• They have clearly defined deliverables
• They are approved by management
• They are not so large that they're unmanageable, nor so small that they're unimportant or uninteresting
• They relate directly to the organization's mission

Acording to a recent benchmarking report, successful Six Sigma initiatives share three common characteristics:

1. Implementation teams led by senior executives
2. Well-organized training programs
3. Ability to create a corporate culture that values objective performance measurement

Organizations that attempt to implement Six Sigma initiatives without addressing these three areas are far less likely to reap the rewards enjoyed by successful Six Sigma programs. Leadership, execution and results make any of these programs successful or unsuccessful.