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		<title>Six Sigma Blogs at the iSixSigma Blogosphere</title>
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		<description>Six Sigma Blogs at the iSixSigma Blogosphere</description>
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			<title><![CDATA[Six Sigma Blogs: Business Scenarios]]></title>
			<link>http://blogs.isixsigma.com/archive/business_scenarios.html</link>
			<description><![CDATA[How do you describe a process to a team? There are lots of tools in the toolkit including value stream mapping, functional swim lanes, context diagrams and SIPOC to name a few. But I find they can be “a little cold” for a non-technical or cross-functional team and I want to “bring it to life”.
Take a simple example from the area I work in, general insurance. To describe the customer claims process in any depth takes time. So when you have a cross-functional team covering front, middle and back office it can mean (even with the tightest time keeping and agenda) that the people at the end of the process don’t get a look in as most of the day has been spent at the beginning/middle of the process, where all the customer interaction happens. So you end-up leaving people out. 
As the title suggests my recommendation is Business Scenarios. Rather than cover the generic customer claims process, cover it in a series of business scenarios like

The policy holder’s vehicle collided with a lamppost, no one else was involved, it happened at 11:45pm
The policy holder’s vehicle was hit by a 3rd party vehicle from behind, both vehicles were drivable, no one appears injured at the scene, 3rd party was insured and traceable
The policy holder’s vehicle collided was a 3rd party vehicle on a narrow street, liability is unclear, 3rd party injured and vehicle undriveable
If you start with the simplest scenario where nothing goes wrong (sunny-day) then you can rapidly walk the whole process.  You can add complexity as you need to. Maybe include failures in the process and known exceptions (rainy-day) e.g. 3rd party had no insurance. 
This approach really opens up the discussion as you are talking to people in the language they relate to. You get to see the true degree of variation required of the process which allows for more robust solutions.]]></description>
			
			<author><![CDATA[Robin Barnwell]]></author>
			
			<category>
			<![CDATA[General&nbsp;,&nbsp;Methodology]]>
			</category>
			<pubDate>Mon, 28 Sep 2009 08:41:11 -0800</pubDate>
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			<title><![CDATA[Six Sigma Blogs: Parachute in the Fire Fighter]]></title>
			<link>http://blogs.isixsigma.com/archive/parachute_in_the_fire_fighter.html</link>
			<description><![CDATA[Organisation in chaos? Emergencies erupting? Been blind-sided by the unexpected? Project a few years late and still does not work? Need to get things under control? Make way for the Corporate Fire Fighter. (Phew!)
This trusted pair of hands hits the ground running….makes rapid assessment of situation….. takes urgent action …... reports an outstanding success …….moves onto the next big fire. 
You could be thinking, “Hey that’s me!”. Agreed fire-fighting can be fun, exhilarating and very rewarding for those involved. Your organisation may place a high degree of recognition and reward on people with these skills.
But is this a measure of a healthy and successful organisation? 
Would an alternative model be of a highly organised machine where everything fits strategically together; risks are identified and addressed early; projects invariably deliver on time, cost &amp; quality; business metrics provide robust leading indicators. Achieving that level of capability is difficult, very difficult.
An organisation may not have this level maturity for any number of reasons. They may be a business start-up and just about managing to keep a lid on issues as the business grows. They may be working in a highly innovative sector where new products and competitors frequently appear to “eat your lunch”.
But what about the fire starters? The leaders who raise the alarm? Is this the right thing to do?
I am no expert on management leadership &amp; behaviour theory. It might be just the right thing to do to keep people on their toes? Creating a crisis can be a good way to drive things forward. Or is it a reactive and costly approach?
Ultimately I think it comes down to looking at the root-cause and fixing what/who caused the crisis in the first place rather than heroic fire-fighting.]]></description>
			
			<author><![CDATA[Robin Barnwell]]></author>
			
			<category>
			<![CDATA[Change Management&nbsp;,&nbsp;General&nbsp;,&nbsp;Leadership]]>
			</category>
			<pubDate>Tue, 09 Jun 2009 05:27:45 -0800</pubDate>
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			<title><![CDATA[Six Sigma Blogs: What is truth?]]></title>
			<link>http://blogs.isixsigma.com/archive/what_is_truth.html</link>
			<description><![CDATA[Over the last 5 years I have invested considerable time &amp; energy in trying to become a skilled continuous improvement practitioner. I am a strong believer in continual learning via direct deployment experience.
Over this same period, continuous improvement has become a main-stream product. Any business without an Operational Excellence, Process Improvement, Process Excellence, Continual Improvement (and so on) capability is now way behind the curve. This dramatic growth has brought a large increase in the number of CI professionals.
Here is the point; these days I have conversations with other CI professionals that make me wonder I have learnt the right things, things like:

The scientific way of experimenting is to change one factor at a time 
The most important factor in sampling is population size 
Reducing overall process time has nothing to do with becoming Lean
Where did I go wrong? Case in point is the ex-GE Master Black Belt. Now I don’t like to generalise and easily the best MBB I have ever met was from GE, but my other experiences have not been so good. Ever had to explain proportion tests and what a chi-square test does to a ex-GE MBB?
How to conclude? Maybe we could agree a single version of the truth and certify against this? Maybe it’s just part of the evolution of CI? I just don’t know. But I feel the CI world changing.]]></description>
			
			<author><![CDATA[Robin Barnwell]]></author>
			
			<category>
			<![CDATA[General]]>
			</category>
			<pubDate>Fri, 15 May 2009 10:03:36 -0800</pubDate>
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			<title><![CDATA[Six Sigma Blogs: Thinking the Unthinkable]]></title>
			<link>http://blogs.isixsigma.com/archive/thinking_the_unthinkable.html</link>
			<description><![CDATA[In our BB training we use the terms Divergent &amp; Convergent thinking during the Improve phase. We cover a raft of brainstorming &amp; lateral thinking techniques to encourage people’s divergent thinking. So please take a few moments to answer this question:

How many uses can you think of for a Brick?
How many did you get? Maybe you got just the one, “build a wall”? Or maybe you freely came-up with half a dozen? We could possibly use brainstorming here; try answering the question as if you were Pablo Picasso. Does that work?
Looking in more detail at this took me to Liam Hudson who devised this simple test to illustrate people’s thinking styles. But what Liam did was look deeper into the way we are educated to be Convergent thinkers.
The school system is based on achievement of exam results. This means being able to understand information and produce Model Answers that most accurately match what the examiner wants to see. Being good at this convergent thinking brings its rewards, recognition and good jobs become available. 
Equally to what degree is divergent thinking encouraged. Starting an exam paper with, "I think the real question to answer here is......" or “I have looked at the course curriculum and believe it should be changed here and here”.
So what is the potential impact of focussing on Convergent thinking without balancing Divergent thinking? To what degree do the most successful people across industry focus on having a sense of imagination to challenge an approach? Who were the people who looked at the risks building in the financial system and saw the consequences?
It seems we should be regularly training and rewarding people for Divergent thinking rather than having as a small part of a BB training they might attend.]]></description>
			
			<author><![CDATA[Robin Barnwell]]></author>
			
			<category>
			<![CDATA[Innovation&nbsp;,&nbsp;Research]]>
			</category>
			<pubDate>Tue, 14 Apr 2009 09:36:21 -0800</pubDate>
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			<title><![CDATA[Six Sigma Blogs: Six Sigma really sucks!]]></title>
			<link>http://blogs.isixsigma.com/archive/six_sigma_really_sucks.html</link>
			<description><![CDATA[Picking-up on Sue’s recent Home blog, I’d like to talk about my recent experience at home.
Over this weekend my wife and I had  “words” about the work I do helping on the home chores. There were a number of areas such as cooking, washing dishes, ironing, cleaning toilets, shopping, washing clothes, making beds, tidying-up, planning meals, and so on. I had no idea of the number of NVA factories at work and being a strong believer in Six Sigma I committed to resolve this problem. 
I dedicated my Saturday evening and produced what I believe to be a very polished piece of work. I reviewed the key processes and created a core set of current-state value stream maps. For each of these I developed some slick data collections sheets to baseline current performance. I even identified some time saving quick wins. I shared my work and must say I was most surprised by the reaction and being told exactly where to stick my data collection sheets.
But I am a committed practitioner and realised I may have misunderstood the problem statement and goals. It seemed helping to do the chores was more important than improving current performance? So Sunday night I cooked the evening meal and over dinner suggested we discuss our differences. Luckily to support this I had previously produced a fishbone diagram and recommended a rapid brainstorming exercise followed by constraint busting 5-whys to get quick results……. 
Back at work on Monday morning, I am having a tough job trying to explain my black eye. I’m sleeping in the spare bedroom and the kids think I am an idiot. 
Six Sigma really sucks!]]></description>
			
			<author><![CDATA[Robin Barnwell]]></author>
			
			<category>
			<![CDATA[General&nbsp;,&nbsp;Methodology]]>
			</category>
			<pubDate>Wed, 01 Apr 2009 01:46:53 -0800</pubDate>
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			<title><![CDATA[Six Sigma Blogs: Sampling Poser]]></title>
			<link>http://blogs.isixsigma.com/archive/sampling_poser.html</link>
			<description><![CDATA[I thought I would share my views on a question frequently posed by newly trained belts. I imagine you to may have encountered this situation. I do not have a clear answer but have come-up with a theory. Could be right, could be wrong. 
We talk about the discrete sampling equation used to calculate minimum sample size
Minimum Sample Size = Square of (1.96 / Precision) * Est. Proportion * (1 – Est. Proportion)
For example, what is the sample size required to find, within 5%, the number of people who are left-handed using a starting assumption that 10% of the population are left-handed?
Minimum Sample Size = Square of (1.96 / 0.05) * 0.1 * (1 – 0.1) = 138
But what people ask is, what if there are more than two categorise? What if you want to know the sample size required to find the proportion of calls split into:

New Business Quotes 
Renewal Quotes 
Change of Service Quotes 
Administrative
Now I haven’t been able to find much of an answer to this question. I have come-up with a theory but I do not think it is statistically robust. Interested on comments and if there is an off-the-shelf statistical solution I have missed and can apply:

Build an exploratory sample- Start by assuming each category is equally weighted. So the estimated proportion for each is 25%. Using quite a wide precision (e.g. 10%) you get the sample size of 72. - To allow for the extra categorise multiple by the total number and divide by two, hence 72 * 4 / 2, to give a final sample size of 144. The result gives you a “feel for the proportions” but is by no means accurate.
Develop the proportions- You now have a feel for the proportions e.g. 60%, 30%, 10%, &amp; 10%. - Because sampling theory says that 50% proportions require the highest sample size use the proportion nearest to 50%. In this case the 60% one.- Calculate your sample size based on 60% so using 5% precision you get 369- Including the extra factor to allow for multiple categorise you get 369 * 4 /2, to give a final sample size of 738- You can then find your confidence interval from the results obtains
I have made-up this approach and have no idea if it will stand-up to scrutiny. Hopefully I am on the right-track. 
You never know it might become true like 1.5 sigma-shift…… ]]></description>
			
			<author><![CDATA[Robin Barnwell]]></author>
			
			<category>
			<![CDATA[General&nbsp;,&nbsp;Research]]>
			</category>
			<pubDate>Mon, 02 Mar 2009 07:55:44 -0800</pubDate>
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			<title><![CDATA[Six Sigma Blogs: Targets – Part 2]]></title>
			<link>http://blogs.isixsigma.com/archive/targets__part_2.html</link>
			<description><![CDATA[In my last blog, Targets, I covered the situation of hitting time targets in a services environment. I thought I was onto something but wasn’t sure just what…….. 
Just to recap, people are targeted on delivering work within a certain time frame e.g. reply to a customer letter within X number of days. There was an understanding that this “drives the wrong behaviours” but no clarity on what to do. Here is what I have come to. 
What I did was look at the current measure and split time into value and non-value as shown.

Then I looked at the two time components and put together two principles:
1. The time an item is waiting in a queue should not be the handler’s problem; it’s a management problem. The idea of pushing people to “work harder” because of variation in demand doesn’t work and alternative solutions are required.2. The time that a handler is working on an item should not be driven by a time target but should be against a quality target. We want our people to do a great job as quality drives down rework, defects and costs.
Now the tricky bit, how to translate these principles into actual measures. What I looked for were rules for defining the measures and came to these from Vanguard


The measure should help in understanding and improving performance – capability measures rather than targets

The measure must relate to purpose – measure what is important to the customer

The measure must be integrated with work – the measures must be in the hands of the people who do the work
 Looking at these and my principles I came-up with two measures:


Lead Time - The time from receipt to when work starts. Leadership and not handlers own this. They are responsible for improving Lead Times by changing the system not “cracking the whip”

Right First Time – This is not a time measure but a quality measure. For each step in the process, the “Must-do” &amp; “Optional” requirements are defined. These are the items that ensure the work is done correctly without defects being created. It is as simple as a check-list to ensure work is done as required.
The approach extends across the whole life-cycle. This splits the process into value and non-value adding steps. It focuses the right people on doing the right things – leadership to reduce Lead Time by reducing waste in the process – handlers to improve Quality by defining, doing and measuring what is required. 
Sound good? I am already getting challenges and resistance. Would appreciate comment on the logic and how I could make the proposal even better….. ]]></description>
			
			<author><![CDATA[Robin Barnwell]]></author>
			
			<category>
			<![CDATA[Change Management&nbsp;,&nbsp;General&nbsp;,&nbsp;Lean&nbsp;,&nbsp;Methodology]]>
			</category>
			<pubDate>Fri, 20 Feb 2009 10:18:00 -0800</pubDate>
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			<title><![CDATA[Six Sigma Blogs: Hitting Target]]></title>
			<link>http://blogs.isixsigma.com/archive/hitting_target.html</link>
			<description><![CDATA[Targets appear in all shapes &amp; sizes. Sometimes seen as positive, “we operate a target-driven culture” and sometimes negative, “targets drive the wrong behaviour”. So what is true? Given the sheer diversity of targets, I want to focus on a specific area, daily work targets in a services environment. Let’s look at a scenario.
Imagine an operator works in a services business. Work comes in three types and timing tests show each type can be completed within 20 minutes in most cases. Now imagine the operator being given items of work and being asked to work under two different management controls:

Control 1, Work items are targetted to be completed within 22 minutes. 
Control 2, There are no targets and work items must be completed regardless of the time required
Statistically speaking, an assessment of the two approaches could be made, something like:

Ho = There is no difference between the time taken to complete work items under control 1 or control 2
I am looking at running some tests to see if there is a difference as this is related to a project I am working. But what is your gut feel on the expected performance difference?
I have tried this in a very small trial and found that when working under a time target, you focus on the time target. As the pressure builds on any individual work item because you are watching the clock you find it more difficult to focus on the task in hand and end up missing the target. You lose valuable time because of the target.
So what does this show? Does this describe an example of why targets drive the wrong behaviour? Does it show that getting it right first time saves money? Does this show operator’s pulling work? Does this show a difference between batch and continuous flow?
I’m not sure but I feel I am looking at something quite important here, just not sure exactly what it is yet……..]]></description>
			
			<author><![CDATA[Robin Barnwell]]></author>
			
			<category>
			<![CDATA[General&nbsp;,&nbsp;Innovation&nbsp;,&nbsp;Lean&nbsp;,&nbsp;Research]]>
			</category>
			<pubDate>Tue, 13 Jan 2009 10:39:06 -0800</pubDate>
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			<title><![CDATA[Six Sigma Blogs: Tip-Top Tip]]></title>
			<link>http://blogs.isixsigma.com/archive/tip_top_tip.html</link>
			<description><![CDATA[Happy New Year! Today, rather than talk about something deeply insightful I thought I would share one of the tools I like to use. 
Ever had to arrange a project meeting? Did you need to get say 10 people’s diaries aligned, usually at short notice? Was it fun?
There are many ways to approach this simple but sometimes frustrating task. 

You could swap lots of e-mail with everyone till you get agreement 
You could force the date &amp; location and that’s it 
You could ask someone else to do it for you 
You could forward plan and have a meeting schedule defined well in advance 
Your calendar software might even find the best date for you
Here is one way I find useful. There are a number of free on-line survey site on the internet. I take a couple minutes to set-up a survey and send it out as shown below.

Then sit back and wait for the responses.

Very useful tool.]]></description>
			
			<author><![CDATA[Robin Barnwell]]></author>
			
			<category>
			<![CDATA[Methodology]]>
			</category>
			<pubDate>Fri, 09 Jan 2009 08:54:48 -0800</pubDate>
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			<title><![CDATA[Six Sigma Blogs: Christmas Challenge]]></title>
			<link>http://blogs.isixsigma.com/archive/christmas_challenge.html</link>
			<description><![CDATA[This is just for fun and to win a real prize you need to have been very good all year and have a generous expense account.
Good old Santa wants to give you a Christmas present. He’s checked if you have been naughty or nice and the news is not good, so you have to pick the right present. One of the presents holds the all expenses-paid trip to iSixSigma Live (Miami - January 13-16) the other two presents hold copies of that classic text Statistical Analysis of Cointegration Vectors.

But Santa is a kind fellow and knowing you are a statistician decides to give you a choice. He asks which present you have picked, maybe it was B. He looks thoughtfully and tells you the prize is definitely not present A, would you like to change your mind? What will you do? Click the link to see how you do.

No thanks Santa, I’ll stick with what I picked
Thank you Santa, I’ll change my mind
Interested in the stats? Take a look at this: Monty Hall.
Wishing you all a Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year!]]></description>
			
			<author><![CDATA[Robin Barnwell]]></author>
			
			<category>
			<![CDATA[General&nbsp;,&nbsp;iSixSigma Live Events]]>
			</category>
			<pubDate>Thu, 18 Dec 2008 10:49:34 -0800</pubDate>
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			<title><![CDATA[Six Sigma Blogs: Thriving on Chaos]]></title>
			<link>http://blogs.isixsigma.com/archive/thriving_on_chaos.html</link>
			<description><![CDATA[I used to work in the IT business and we were always on the look-out for the next “big thing” to cash in on. It was things like moving from mainframes to open systems and onto Microsoft Windows, relational databases, business intelligence systems, OLAP reporting and CRM systems. 
So while I was travelling home from Sydney (around 1995) after a weeks consulting, I read about the next big thing, it was called the World Wide Web. This was going to be big, bigger than big. People working in IT should get ready to cash in on this next big growth market. Turns out to have been more than right, but the article didn’t go BIG enough!
And how the world has changed. In the olden days (pre-WWW) my options to get information were limited. Today I can access just about anything directly on my computer. Not to look a gift horse in the mouth, but working in such an information rich environment does have its challenges.
I sometimes feel a bit overwhelmed by the sheer number of options, methods and approaches I can choose from. There does not seem be a part of human existence that someone hasn’t studied, developed a methodology and written a best selling book. I struggle to know which to believe or which to follow. Every year there are new crops of ways to solving problems, things like Blue Ocean/Red Ocean and Good to Great. So I have come-up with a way to deal with information over-load
I recently went into a second-hand book-shop and couldn’t believe my luck. I managed to buy a first-edition copy of the Tom Peter’s classic Thriving on Chaos for only £1. I don’t think the copy I bought had ever been opened let alone read! What Tom offers is a series of about 40 lessons in management &amp; leadership. 
So here is what I do. Along comes the next radical break-through innovation that will completely change the world, just like the World Wide Web. I thumb through Thriving on Chaos to see how it was done back in 1987. It’s my baseline.]]></description>
			
			<author><![CDATA[Robin Barnwell]]></author>
			
			<category>
			<![CDATA[Book Review&nbsp;,&nbsp;General&nbsp;,&nbsp;Innovation]]>
			</category>
			<pubDate>Tue, 25 Nov 2008 06:32:55 -0800</pubDate>
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			<title><![CDATA[Six Sigma Blogs: Sticky Solutions]]></title>
			<link>http://blogs.isixsigma.com/archive/sticky_solutions.html</link>
			<description><![CDATA[You invest 4 months of your life. You work in close co-operation with the operational teams. You gain buy-in and agreement on an innovative solution to enhance business performance. You build sustainability into the solution. You identify clear benefits in terms of financial, process, people and customer. It’s a text-book project. 
So return in 6 months time and what do you find? Rip-roaring success? No it’s been forgotten, the benefits were never banked and the pilot performance improvement was just a blip. Everything is back to “normal”.
It was a simple solution. Implement a feedback-loop to support continual learning. 
When information is passed from team A to team B, team B return feedback to team A on the accuracy of the information supplied. Team A review this feedback and continually improve their process. Everyone wins……..or do they. Team A had more work to do in learning from the feedback and decided not to learn. 
What can I learn from this? Thoughts go off in all directions on why there was the resistance to change. Maybe it was the feeling that they were being “done to”? Maybe it was because they weren’t being incentivised on achieving the improvement? Maybe it was because there is so much change in progress that this got lost in the fog? Maybe more people should have been hired to allow the change to happen? Maybe, maybe, maybe.
Tips please on how to make solutions stick.]]></description>
			
			<author><![CDATA[Robin Barnwell]]></author>
			
			<category>
			<![CDATA[Change Management&nbsp;,&nbsp;General&nbsp;,&nbsp;Management]]>
			</category>
			<pubDate>Wed, 12 Nov 2008 06:22:35 -0800</pubDate>
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			<title><![CDATA[Six Sigma Blogs: My journey towards Lean]]></title>
			<link>http://blogs.isixsigma.com/archive/my_journey_towards_lean.html</link>
			<description><![CDATA[When I started in continuous improvement (CI) four years ago it was via the traditional Six Sigma DMAIC route. I was indoctrinated into the Six Sigma world and have earned my ASQ CSSBB and can do impressive stuff with statistics. Lean was not even on the radar for me, it was just another approach that was used to solve the easy stuff. It did not have the rigour to make lasting improvements.
Then Lean appeared through our training material and we merged it to become Lean Six Sigma. But it was an unequal partnership. We had the DMAIC model with Lean as a bolt-on included in the Analyse phase. It focussed on analysing and removing waste in the process. It was a pretty easy concept; by removing waste you become a Lean business. And that’s how it stayed, everyone understood Lean.
Meanwhile I had nagging doubts that pure Six Sigma did not provide a complete package. There are the obvious issues around needing to include project management, stakeholder management, soft-skills training and deployment program management. There was also the concern that it was too generalist as specialist niches become prevalent, e.g. Customer Experience theory now goes way beyond the VoC approach. 
It started with The Goal. I really liked the concept of managing your process around exploiting the constraints &amp; bottle-necks. Then I met a few people who had started their CI journey from Lean who talked about different concepts &amp; approaches. Then I met someone who was a Systems Thinker and they thought Six Sigma was just plain wrong. Give these quotes a go, (more in a follow-up blog as I am still reading the book):

It starts with ‘define’ so the wrong problems get tackled, not the actual problems, which will only be revealed when you study the organisation as a system.
Loads of money is spent on training tools, most of which will never be used; and tools are not the means for changing the system. 
The reporting systems ensure benefits are ‘realised’ but they are, most often, spurious e.g. claiming productivity improvements through speeding up part of a process with no knowledge of the impact on the end-to-end process 
It has been used to focus on cost; managers should instead get focused on value as the better way to reduce costs and increasing capacity. 
In short, Six Sigma is a classic packaged invention aimed at gullible managers. The wrong facts are misleading; we should salute its demise.
All good stuff to challenge the orthodoxy. So I have been studying pure Lean. First problem I had was translating the tools out of manufacturing into a service organisation. With things like SMED you seem to have to abstract the concept and look for applications. Or 5S, it’s not a safety issue having a messy desk and I am doubtful on the benefits (I have a clean desk). But as I got deeper I found this doesn’t do Lean justice, the fundamental principles and practises go way beyond “just eliminate waste”. Lean seems to provide much more in terms of the complete package and inparticular around empowering people.
As ever, I still have my doubts e.g. how does break-though innovation happen in a Lean environment? And what about the “Lean is just removal of waste” label? But it has definitely shifted my thinking. Now I am "Learning to See" I wonder if there are any other approaches I should be looking at?]]></description>
			
			<author><![CDATA[Robin Barnwell]]></author>
			
			<category>
			<![CDATA[Change Management&nbsp;,&nbsp;General&nbsp;,&nbsp;Lean&nbsp;,&nbsp;Methodology]]>
			</category>
			<pubDate>Fri, 17 Oct 2008 06:46:13 -0800</pubDate>
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			<title><![CDATA[Six Sigma Blogs: Company Policy – Help or Hindrance?]]></title>
			<link>http://blogs.isixsigma.com/archive/company_policy__help_or_hindrance.html</link>
			<description><![CDATA[I recently bought some registry cleaning software on the internet using PayPal. My mistake, it was a scam. I made contact with the PayPal Dispute Resolution team to see if I could get my money back. Followed the highly efficient process (no human interaction) and made repeated attempts to contact the supplier before escalating to PayPal to resolve. Automated e-mail response, it is not their company policy to resolve this type of situation. I sent a follow-up e-mail but got another response talking about, “we are unable to blah, blah, blah….” So made contact with my credit card company and they gave me an immediate refund, their company policy was to resolve this type of situation.
Given I represent about 0.000000001% of their revenue I’m not a big loss, but to what degree can company policy be an incentive or disincentive to the customer experience?  
A company policy sets the guidelines for a companies activities and helps staff in areas where there appears to be latitude in deciding how best to operate. You could see company policy as one-way of defining the culture of the company and what is seen as important.

In a bureaucratic culture the policy might be shown as over complicated forms, slow decision making and having to always follow the company defined process
In a cost-cutting culture the policy might be shown as looking to use the cheapest channels to market (e.g. web &amp; e-mail) with a gradual decline in overall proposition
In a profit-driven culture the policy might be shown in overuse of cross-sell and up-sell and constant marketing communications
In a political culture the policy might be shown as a fragmented proposition as different teams use customers for their own political games
In a customer-centric culture the policy might show empowered staff being given the flexibility to do what’s right for the customer 
So when designing a customer policy it seems the key question to answer is, “from whose point of view should it be done?” From a Lean Six Sigma perspective this should be “outside-in” focussing on the Voice of the Customer. Not, to quote Carol from Little Britain, “Computer says no”. ]]></description>
			
			<author><![CDATA[Robin Barnwell]]></author>
			
			<category>
			<![CDATA[General&nbsp;,&nbsp;Management&nbsp;,&nbsp;Methodology]]>
			</category>
			<pubDate>Fri, 03 Oct 2008 08:03:20 -0800</pubDate>
		</item>

		<item>
			<title><![CDATA[Six Sigma Blogs: Manufacturing]]></title>
			<link>http://blogs.isixsigma.com/archive/manufacturing.html</link>
			<description><![CDATA[For a hobby last year I started making cider (hard cider in the US). Below are some of the demijohns of apple juice I fermented. 

I cracked open a finished bottle and it looked &amp; smelt great, but the taste…. it was insipid, slightly acidic and low in alcohol. Not good. Being in the business of continuous improvement and this being my second year I am ready to develop my manufacturing process.
I have researched the issues and my proposed solutions are.

Insipidness: I believe was due to using just eating apples, it should have been a blend of eating, cooking and crab apples. Here is a sample of my raw materials



Acidity: I have my pH tester and acid reduction solution.

Alcohol: I have my hydrometer and bag of sugar to up the alcohol content. 
So the question is what makes the perfect product? What better than to design an experiment. Being by no means an expert in the practical design of DoE, here is my endeavour. The factors &amp; levels seem to be:




 Factor
 Levels

 pH reading 
 Two levels. Initial pH of blend or set to pH of 3.8 (which is highest recommended level)

 Sugar content
 Two levels. Initial natural sugar content or adjusted to give final product of 7% alcohol

 Apple Blend
 Tricky, I want to try different combinations but not at the extremes of 100% of any one. I would like to get my blends by having variations of eating apples from 40 to 80%, cooking apples from 40 to 80% and crab apple from 0 to 20%. Not sure on this bit yet, could do with some help
The output will be taste tests scored from 0 to 10. I have a limited number of trails as I only have 8 demijohns. this should create the product to scale-up next year. Any tips on the best design to ensure I get good results?]]></description>
			
			<author><![CDATA[Robin Barnwell]]></author>
			
			<category>
			<![CDATA[General&nbsp;,&nbsp;Methodology&nbsp;,&nbsp;Research]]>
			</category>
			<pubDate>Wed, 10 Sep 2008 03:35:13 -0800</pubDate>
		</item>

		<item>
			<title><![CDATA[Six Sigma Blogs: Small Change Big Impact]]></title>
			<link>http://blogs.isixsigma.com/archive/small_change_big_impact.html</link>
			<description><![CDATA[Across the globe food prices are rising rapidly. The potential causes are many including big ticket issues like rising demand in emerging markets, oil prices, bio fuels, trade tariffs, global warming, population growth and tight supplies. With all that lot stacked-up its no wonder that prices are going up. Big problems call for big solutions and we have innovations such as GM technology and global cooperation coming to the fore.
But just how efficient is the value-chain of food production? How much waste is built into the process? 
Here in the UK, a recent study by Waste &amp; Resources Action Programme estimated that one third of food people buy is thrown away unused. The report makes incredible reading and examples of annual waste include 1.2 million sausages &amp; 4.4 million apples. This inflates the cost of food as more has to be produced to compensate for the waste.
What kind of improvement could we get if we just ate what we bought? 
Another example is the European Union’s food quality standards that specify the dimensions that fruit &amp; vegetables must reach in order to be class one. Hence if it’s out of spec it doesn’t get through. The food is not dirty, rotten or diseased just misshapen. Luckily these rules are planned to be rolled-back as commented by an EU spokesperson, “People are saying that prices are too high, it makes no sense to be chucking food away. We want to have two classes, allowing supermarkets to sell funny shaped vegetables”. It’s just another form of waste. I have no figures on how much is lost in this part of the value-chain.
I noticed a recent example in the US election. There was talk about how to solve demand for oil and the need to start drilling offshore. Barack Obama comes in with “keep your tyres correctly inflated”. Not sure on the math but throw in cars with better mileage and I would guess its going to have an impact.
The point is it’s just the same in business; there are always the low-hanging fruit (and veg?). Start by doing the big easy wins that cut unnecessary waste. In general they are not particularly radical but can have dramatic outcomes.]]></description>
			
			<author><![CDATA[Robin Barnwell]]></author>
			
			<category>
			<![CDATA[Change Management&nbsp;,&nbsp;General&nbsp;,&nbsp;Lean]]>
			</category>
			<pubDate>Mon, 18 Aug 2008 13:54:30 -0800</pubDate>
		</item>

		<item>
			<title><![CDATA[Six Sigma Blogs: Return to Sender]]></title>
			<link>http://blogs.isixsigma.com/archive/return_to_sender.html</link>
			<description><![CDATA[
In 1660 King Charles 2nd officially established the General Post Office by act of parliament. In 1840 the first adhesive stamp, the penny black, was introduced. There's a fair degree more history I skipped because I want to talk about a recent innovation.
Pricing in Proportion was launched on the poor unsuspecting customer in 2006 . This changed postage prices from being based solely on weight to being based on weight and letter dimensions. Here is the gauge that is installed at post offices to determine the price band for your letter. If your letter is more than 5mm (0.2 inch) then it costs more.

It’s a long trip to the post office and its easy to make a mistake so I tend to put extra stamps on letters to be sure it will get to the destination. What an imaginative revenue opportunity.
But it’s the rework process that really jars with me. If a letter is sent with insufficient postage it’s the recipient who is asked to pay the additional postage plus an administration fee. If you don’t pay you don’t get your letter and you have no way of knowing what you’re paying for. I wouldn’t mind too much except this happens quite regularly with the most common cause being the kid’s birthday cards with badges on the front.
This change has introduced additional complexity and to get around this people like me are regularly over-paying to avoid the risk. So the question is, “what poka-yoke device would sort this out?”]]></description>
			
			<author><![CDATA[Robin Barnwell]]></author>
			
			<category>
			<![CDATA[General]]>
			</category>
			<pubDate>Tue, 17 Jun 2008 10:35:18 -0800</pubDate>
		</item>

		<item>
			<title><![CDATA[Six Sigma Blogs: Looking for Inspiration]]></title>
			<link>http://blogs.isixsigma.com/archive/looking_for_inspiration.html</link>
			<description><![CDATA[Our Lean Manufacturing program is stepping-up a gear and as part of this we are looking to present the approach to a large audience of about 200 people. And I am looking for some inspiration.
If anyone has a good ice-breaker, simulation, case study or other activity that would take about 30 minutes and engage a large audience then please let me know.]]></description>
			
			<author><![CDATA[Robin Barnwell]]></author>
			
			<category>
			<![CDATA[Innovation]]>
			</category>
			<pubDate>Sat, 31 May 2008 14:49:04 -0800</pubDate>
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		<item>
			<title><![CDATA[Six Sigma Blogs: Hard Reality]]></title>
			<link>http://blogs.isixsigma.com/archive/hard_reality.html</link>
			<description><![CDATA[The Adam Smith Institute has set June 2nd as UK Tax Freedom Day. This means we spend more than 5 months each year working for the government. How do we spend what’s left? Our gasoline is currently £1.23 per litre (that’s $9.15 a US gallon). If you avoid the car then our train prices are the highest in Europe. The cost of living is surging with increases coming in daily across the board. Set this against a falling housing market and a credit squeeze and people are stopping or delaying spending.
Accordingly business confidence has dropped dramatically. Unless you are in a hot, experiential market, e.g. iPhone, Indiana Jones or Wii, adapting to this challenging environment of lower growth, rising prices &amp; chasing revenue will mean an even greater focus on cash flow and controlling costs.
With high capital expenditure projects such as new IT systems unlikely to get sign-off, does this offer a great opportunity to really focus on customers, processes and removing the hidden waste? To do so immediately and relatively cheaply? To start banking benefits within weeks? To build into a full business transformation? 
As price starts to rank as the top criteria for buying decisions, so businesses will need to ensure they can reduce costs and maintain quality. Now must be the time to be ramping-up &amp; investing in the Lean Six Sigma technology.
 ]]></description>
			
			<author><![CDATA[Robin Barnwell]]></author>
			
			<category>
			<![CDATA[General]]>
			</category>
			<pubDate>Mon, 26 May 2008 16:41:54 -0800</pubDate>
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		<item>
			<title><![CDATA[Six Sigma Blogs: New Kid on the Block]]></title>
			<link>http://blogs.isixsigma.com/archive/new_kid_on_the_block.html</link>
			<description><![CDATA[Now I have achieved my ASQ Black Belt certification and with my brain still packed full of Lean Six Sigma information, I thought I would see if I could collect some more badges. So it’s a big “Lean Six Sigma Certification” welcome to the British Standards Institute (BSI). 
My experience with BSI goes way back to my very first job as a polymer engineer and developing industrial ‘O’ rings to quality standard BS 5750 (I found the company still exists – James Walker).
Things moved on from BS 5750 and it became ISO 9000 and the ISO 9001:2000 kitemark is an international quality standard adopted by over 500,000 companies across 149 countries. 
They seem a little late to market, but I think the brand and its values will bring a lot to developing our profession and giving confidence to our customers.]]></description>
			
			<author><![CDATA[Robin Barnwell]]></author>
			
			<category>
			<![CDATA[General]]>
			</category>
			<pubDate>Fri, 11 Apr 2008 09:48:33 -0800</pubDate>
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		<item>
			<title><![CDATA[Six Sigma Blogs: Total Innovation]]></title>
			<link>http://blogs.isixsigma.com/archive/total_innovation.html</link>
			<description><![CDATA[In our business we are passionate about achieving breakthrough innovations and I’d like to share a few examples of how we really push the envelope. Lets start with the fire alarm. It’s seldom used for real but reaches right across the whole campus with a very clear message:

“Emergency, please leave the building by the nearest exit.” 
We tapped into this paradigm to alert our numerous project managers to consistently achieve the weekly status report deadline with a very clear message to instruct people wherever they are:

“Emergency, all project managers submit their status report immediately.” 
Imagine the employee delight we achieved with this regular reminder, a simple but really effective change.
Or how about the “Six Sigma Results Tree” we erected in head-office? Our black belts come and randomly pick a low-hanging fruit (project opportunity) and return when complete with a green-paper leaf for each £100k saved. It goes to prove that money does grow on trees.
What about group dynamics in meetings? We reviewed the Six Thinking Hats methodology and didn’t really understand it. So what did we do? We innovated of course! We took the Six Thinking Hats’ one-dimensional concept (e.g. creativity, optimism &amp; judgement) to the next dimension and applied the Roger Hargreaves’ management methodology. We found the Hargreaves - Mr Men approach provided a much richer set of one-dimensional characters as shown: 

We started strongly with clear insights from Mr Clever and outstanding levels of quality from Mr Perfect. Things started to wobble when we found Mr Quiet hiding in the cupboard and Mr Lazy would never show up for meetings. But we had to call a halt when Mr Tickle took his role too passionately and Little Miss Sunshine made a formal HR complaint! But we did enjoy seeing them run around and around the meeting table, “Here comes Mr Tickle……Tickle Tickle Tickle”.
I could share other groundbreaking innovations but I need maintain confidentiality to retain our truly competitive edge!]]></description>
			
			<author><![CDATA[Robin Barnwell]]></author>
			
			<category>
			<![CDATA[General&nbsp;,&nbsp;Innovation&nbsp;,&nbsp;Methodology]]>
			</category>
			<pubDate>Tue, 01 Apr 2008 01:37:34 -0800</pubDate>
		</item>

		<item>
			<title><![CDATA[Six Sigma Blogs: ASQ CSSBB]]></title>
			<link>http://blogs.isixsigma.com/archive/asq_cssbb.html</link>
			<description><![CDATA[In January I looked through the ASQ body of knowledge (BoK) for Black Belt and said to myself, “I know most of this stuff now”. So put in my entry and passed the Mar’08 exam. I thought I would share the experience, as I believe a number of practitioners may have looked at the ASQ exam. Get a good foundationI reviewed the ASQ exam a couple of years ago and concluded I did not have the experience to guarantee a pass. So waited until I had delivered the projects, trained the Black Belts and invested my spare time in learning the tools. After all this I decided I had the right foundations in place. ASQ recommend three-years work experience and that seems about right.
Find what you don’t knowReading through the BoK and doing the sample exam I identified clear areas of weakness. Coming from a Transactional background, there were manufacturing areas I had never covered in particular around Measurement Systems and Design of Experiments.
Invest the time in preparationI went through every section of the BoK. Be ready for set-piece questions that require calculating from equations, things like confidence intervals and probability. If you are used to having Minitab do the work, practice doing the equations. I invested in the QCI Exam CD and although I found some of the questions infuriatingly ambiguous it does help.
On the dayThe exam is open book and covers 150 questions over 4 hours so it’s a bit of a slog. I found my collection of books &amp; materials were good enough and included Six Sigma, Lean, DFSS, Statistics and quick-reference books. I found I needed to refer to all of these during the exam.
Next StepsI found the brief review of the industry greats, Deming, Juran, Ohno &amp;Taguchi whet my appetite and am keen to learn more. Now I have covered the BoK I am ready to move on and am looking now at understanding the big-picture stuff like strategy planning, target operating model and other related areas
Good luck if you are planning to gain ASQ, let me know if any questions.]]></description>
			
			<author><![CDATA[Robin Barnwell]]></author>
			
			<category>
			<![CDATA[General&nbsp;,&nbsp;Lean&nbsp;,&nbsp;Methodology]]>
			</category>
			<pubDate>Fri, 14 Mar 2008 09:46:33 -0800</pubDate>
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		<item>
			<title><![CDATA[Six Sigma Blogs: Right First Time, Every Time!]]></title>
			<link>http://blogs.isixsigma.com/archive/right_first_time_every_time.html</link>
			<description><![CDATA[Imagine a world in which we routinely do things Right First Time, Every Time. There would be no more rework as first time yield is 100% and no need to coach &amp; mentor as green &amp; black belts hit the ground running. Unfortunately it tends to be the case that in order to be Right First Time you need to Get It Wrong Lots of Times First. It’s just a people-thing, they learn from their mistakes.
But that’s where Six Sigma comes into play. Why bother getting improvements wrong when you can accurately define the key output as a function of the key inputs (DMAIC) or design new processes clearly linked to customer needs (DFSS)?
Now I have done numerous projects that require detailed technical analysis and lots of problem solving tools to get the root-cause. Extensive re-engineering follows with major IT changes. So it was nice to have a project that presented as essentially poor end-to-end process management. I have been looking forward to doing Kaizen for some time and must say it works. 
The change in style is important in order to get the people involved and engaged in owning and delivering improvements to their own processes. It’s all about looking to embed the idea that they own the continual improvement of their process rather than having a project come and “Do It” to them. It’s all about getting them into the habit of wanting to improve rather than trying to get it Right First Time. 
I guess it defines the difference between process improvement – highly targeted projects and continual improvement – people repeatedly improving their process?
 
 ]]></description>
			
			<author><![CDATA[Robin Barnwell]]></author>
			
			<category>
			<![CDATA[Change Management&nbsp;,&nbsp;General&nbsp;,&nbsp;Methodology]]>
			</category>
			<pubDate>Thu, 13 Mar 2008 08:00:36 -0800</pubDate>
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		<item>
			<title><![CDATA[Six Sigma Blogs: Anti-Me]]></title>
			<link>http://blogs.isixsigma.com/archive/anti_me.html</link>
			<description><![CDATA[Over my career I have taken many personality &amp; skill tests. For example, I know my Myers Briggs Indicator Type, mapped myself across the Insight Discovery Wheel, discovered my rating on the Management Assessment of Proficiency, found the next number in the sequence, found the wrong shaped shape and generally been tested in every conceivable way. Actually I quite enjoy the tests because I have done so many I can predict what score I will get when asked to do a new one. I like to rapidly read through the results and may say, “yes, that’s a reasonable approximation”. But I dread the HR interviewer who will explain the test scores with open questions like, “did you know you were XYZ?”. You don’t say, I must try to get my left &amp; right brain hemispheres talking more! On one test at the start of my career I got the HR question, “did you know you are too honest?”. That threw me, but with a number of year hindsight I can see the point.
But all of this got me thinking and I once asked the question at an HR interview, “this is me, but how do I relate with people who are the complete opposite of me, the Anti-Me?”. I got given a very interesting book called Dealing with people you can’t stand. 

It describes a series of annoying behaviours and the underlying reasons why the person acts the way they do. Behaviours like, The No Person, The Whiner or The Know It All. I read through it and found me in some of the behaviours and then started to understand why people act like they do. This was a great insight. Once you can see past the behaviour and understand what is important to the person you can deal with them much more effectively. Hope this helps.]]></description>
			
			<author><![CDATA[Robin Barnwell]]></author>
			
			<category>
			<![CDATA[Book Review]]>
			</category>
			<pubDate>Tue, 29 Jan 2008 11:25:06 -0800</pubDate>
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		<item>
			<title><![CDATA[Six Sigma Blogs: The Decision Point – Transactional Defect Bonanza]]></title>
			<link>http://blogs.isixsigma.com/archive/the_decision_point__transactional_defect_bonanza.html</link>
			<description><![CDATA[Having now delivered many transactional projects I have noticed common themes repeatedly occurring. These include:

IT Systems that have been poorly designed or operated
Inadequately thought through policies &amp; procedures
Opaque, non-existent or duplicate processes
Lack of viable information on process performance
But there is one area I would like to focus, decision points. People play a big part in the execution &amp; success of many transactional processes. Every day, many times over, they need to rapidly assimilate a situation and make the right decision on what action to take for success.
Consider a manufacturing process; say a bottling factory continually producing 20-40% defective products. I suspect that would seem unbelievable. They may well go out of business. But in a transactional environment that kind of defect rate is not unusual and can sometime go much higher.
Take a look at a generic example, the IT Helpdesk; this front-line support team receives numerous requests each day. They review the details and forward the request to the relevant technical support team.

The core value-adding element here is to understand the issue and deliver it to the correct team. What sort of influences impact on correctly making that decision?

Staff Training, Skills &amp; Experience
Policies &amp; Procedures
Information Available
Incentives
Now imagine the IT Help Desk’s primary metric is based on the time taken to pass a request on. The business is looking for efficiency, do it quick…..no quicker…..no quicker than that!
So here we are at the most vital part of the process, the key point where the person is evaluating and making the decision, they are adding the value and what happens, they rapidly scan it and forward on to the most likely candidate, job done, service level hit, a new defect has been created. Into the rework loop we go, technical team A calls technical team B to see if they should have got the request, they then call technical team C to see if they will take it. Technical Team A passes the request onto Technical Team C (the hidden factory).
But it’s a balancing act between being effective and being efficient? Can’t have unlimited time the business can’t afford the cost.
Being effective means securing the right outcome, getting the request to the right team. Being efficient means securing the right outcome, with the minimum of waste, expense, or unnecessary effort. A process that is not firstly effective can never be efficient no matter how cheap it is to run (look at Rolled Throughput Yield).
And this is why Lean &amp; Six Sigma combines so well in a transactional environment. The Six Sigma part focuses on the root-causes for ineffectiveness it provides a wealth of tools to understand and address the vital few. The Lean part strips the waste out of inefficient processes. Does that mean you go DMAIC and include Lean or Value Stream Management and include statistics? I think its about removing the defects then speeding the process by removing the waste, but its different for every project.
 ]]></description>
			
			<author><![CDATA[Robin Barnwell]]></author>
			
			<category>
			<![CDATA[Change Management&nbsp;,&nbsp;General&nbsp;,&nbsp;Methodology&nbsp;,&nbsp;Research]]>
			</category>
			<pubDate>Thu, 17 Jan 2008 06:42:42 -0800</pubDate>
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		<item>
			<title><![CDATA[Six Sigma Blogs: Half-Life]]></title>
			<link>http://blogs.isixsigma.com/archive/half_life.html</link>
			<description><![CDATA[Every morning and every evening I walk to and from work. It can go from cold rainy days (like today!) to balmy summer evenings. I enjoy the exercise and get to watch the changing of the seasons. 
For those of you with a statistical bent this is the season to “guess the population distribution”.  On my return to work on Jan 2nd, I counted numerous joggers with new gear out pounding the streets. Over that week the numbers appeared to be quite similar. The following week saw a good showing but definitely down on the previous week. Now in the third week of Jan I think we have passed the half-life. Come February it will be back to normal.
I have nothing against joggers and have completed a couple of half-marathons in my time. It’s just interesting to notice as I steadfastly continue my regular journey. A bit like the tortoise and the hare. Look forward to special-cause next year.]]></description>
			
			<author><![CDATA[Robin Barnwell]]></author>
			
			<category>
			<![CDATA[General]]>
			</category>
			<pubDate>Wed, 16 Jan 2008 13:43:39 -0800</pubDate>
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		<item>
			<title><![CDATA[Six Sigma Blogs: How to approach Improve]]></title>
			<link>http://blogs.isixsigma.com/archive/how_to_approach_improve.html</link>
			<description><![CDATA[The very first Six Sigma book I read was “The Six Sigma Way”. The first page describes the story of a CEO jumping to solutions and being educated by a Black Belt on the methodology. He is turned around and states, “We’re not in the ‘Just Do It’ mode anymore”. My take-away being, we take a disciplined and structured approach we improve the right things in the right way.
The lack of an official “Six Sigma” can mean different versions being taught. Overall I think there is broad agreement on the approaches and tools we use in Define, Measure &amp; Analyse. Of course, the setting drives the specific tools we use (see What Flavour Are You). But if you are looking for variation take a look at Improve. 
Over the years I have been using the ASQ Black Belt body of knowledge as the basis for my continual learning, working through subjects in my own time to ensure I really understand them. I have got to Improve and there is a problem. Now the approach I was taught and deliver to our Green &amp; Black Belts is to:

Use creative thinking to develop a long-list of potential solutions
Use convergent thinking to develop the optimal solution
Establish and mitigate risks
Run pilots and DoE to establish and prove solution achieves goal
Develop implementation plan ready for toll gate
Reading through my now wide collection of books this is quite an orthodox approach with two exceptions. Firstly, the ASQ BoK I use describes Improve as below.

Design of experiments
Response surface methodology
Evolutionary operations
I checked and the newest version now introduces Implementation Planning, Risk Analysis and the Lean concepts of Waste, TOC &amp; Kaizen. Secondly my copy of  “Implementing Six Sigma” covers:

Design of experiments
Response surface methodology
Evolutionary operations
My guess is that the people who developed the ASQ BoK and “Implementing Six Sigma” must have collaborated and describe an Improve phase that is different to a number of other authors. There is no mention of the creative processes:- divergent thinking, six thinking hats, brain writing, or lateral thinking. 
As a practitioner what it means to me is I learn both and decide which to apply and when.  I am also updating my copy of the ASQ BoK to the latest version.
 ]]></description>
			
			<author><![CDATA[Robin Barnwell]]></author>
			
			<category>
			<![CDATA[General&nbsp;,&nbsp;Innovation&nbsp;,&nbsp;Methodology&nbsp;,&nbsp;Research]]>
			</category>
			<pubDate>Fri, 04 Jan 2008 03:50:26 -0800</pubDate>
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			<title><![CDATA[Six Sigma Blogs: Christmas Conundrum]]></title>
			<link>http://blogs.isixsigma.com/archive/christmas_conundrum.html</link>
			<description><![CDATA[
Here is a take on the Christmas challenge for you, Retrograde Chess. Your aim is to identify the missing piece. This position was reached only through legal chess moves.

A word of caution, its tough, it took me a few days to crack and I found coming back to it a regular intervals helped. If you decide to try it, good luck!
Merry Christmas]]></description>
			
			<author><![CDATA[Robin Barnwell]]></author>
			
			<category>
			<![CDATA[General]]>
			</category>
			<pubDate>Tue, 18 Dec 2007 01:52:43 -0800</pubDate>
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		<item>
			<title><![CDATA[Six Sigma Blogs: Give me the power]]></title>
			<link>http://blogs.isixsigma.com/archive/give_me_the_power.html</link>
			<description><![CDATA[While reading about type I &amp; II errors and specifically beta-risk I realised that although I was happy with alpha-risk I didn’t recall seeing beta-risk in any of our sampling or hypothesis equations. Being curious, I wondered why I was only accounting for type I errors in my work?
Just to review, we need to be aware of and manage our risks when running a hypothesis test. We term the potential errors as Type I &amp; II and they can be quite insidious:

Type I – False Positive – You call a difference when there isn’t oneOn March 23rd 1998, Professors Fleischmann &amp; Pons announced they had achieved sustained thermonuclear reactions in a test tube. They believed they had created Cold Fusion. Unfortunately it was not to be.
Type II – False Negative – You do not call a difference when there is oneThe effects here can be devastating, such as releasing harmful new drugs or missing production defects in car-tyres. Imagine a control chart showing no issues while bad product is being pumped-out?

Our (abbreviated) process for hypotheses testing being:a. Define Hob. Set the alpha-risk (normally 95%)c. Calculate p-value for the hypothesisd. Accept or reject Ho
No mention of beta-risk here. I reviewed assorted materials to get up to speed and discovered all about beta-risk. Here is the concept (not the math), big disclaimer, I might be wrong or have missed something.
Imagine you draw a sample from a process and get an estimate for the mean and confidence interval. You decide the process needs a touch of improvement. You draw a sample from the new process and get the mean and confidence interval. Where the beta-risk comes into play is the when looking at the potential degree of overlap of the second sample with the first. 
In the first picture (below) the red &amp; green lines show the respective samples 95% confidence intervals. The two sample distributions are miles apart. Not much beta-risk here.

In the second picture (below) the two distributions overlap. So for any given sample from B there is a probability it will be in the zone to the left of the red-line, the 95% confidence interval of sample A, hence accepting Ho when the two means are different.

The shapes of the sampling distributions are governed by the sample size, alpha and standard deviation and have not given you the resolution to see the change in mean. The distributions are too wide. So the beta-risk is the probability of drawing a sample from B in the region left of the red-line, within the 95% interval of sample A.
You can find the beta-risk for any given hypothesis test in Minitab under Stats--&amp;gt;Power &amp; Sample Size. If you find you have a low score, The Power of the Test, you may wish to change your key parameters, sample size, and alpha, to improve the sampling resolution.
My conclusion on why beta-risk does not appear more prominent in our manuals is because we look for “big improvements”. If our process improvement has shifted the mean by a small-margin (so that beta-risk applies) then its not much of an improvement. Bit of a generalisation and am sure there must be exceptions.]]></description>
			
			<author><![CDATA[Robin Barnwell]]></author>
			
			<category>
			<![CDATA[Methodology&nbsp;,&nbsp;Research]]>
			</category>
			<pubDate>Fri, 14 Dec 2007 09:24:01 -0800</pubDate>
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		<item>
			<title><![CDATA[Six Sigma Blogs: Time – Cost – Quality]]></title>
			<link>http://blogs.isixsigma.com/archive/time__cost__quality.html</link>
			<description><![CDATA[The triple constraints triangle (below) is used to show the tensions a project needs to balance when meeting its objectives. Normally set at the beginning of the project, a scope change in any one dimension will have an effect on at least one other dimension e.g. a reduction in time can increase costs or reduce quality. This straightforward approach helps explain the challenges a project can face.

Now individual scope decisions are always highly specific, but I have seen a clear preference across stakeholders in the priority &amp; importance they place on these constraints. 
This preference comes across in how they implicitly judge the success of the project. For example a stakeholder whose overriding belief that Time is the key constraint will typically focus on the project schedule and question what’s stopping the delivery and the blockages. The Cost &amp; Quality constraints are less frequently questioned. Understanding this stakeholder preference helps design communications to fit their needs. 
In a more radical example leadership teams can push one of the constraints to an extreme, e.g. Cost can become the “only” consideration when things turn bad. This focus on delivering the single constraint impacts the other two and can cause unintended consequences such as low satisfaction scores.
I thought you could carve-up the constraints into the “Voice of” framework so when implementing an improvement project put the Cost &amp; Time constraints into VoB and the Quality into VoC, but I have found this difficult to explain and did not add much value. Anyone with better insight here please advise.]]></description>
			
			<author><![CDATA[Robin Barnwell]]></author>
			
			<category>
			<![CDATA[General]]>
			</category>
			<pubDate>Wed, 05 Dec 2007 05:10:48 -0800</pubDate>
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			<title><![CDATA[Six Sigma Blogs: Customers]]></title>
			<link>http://blogs.isixsigma.com/archive/customers.html</link>
			<description><![CDATA[Customer relationship, customer insight, customer retention, customer proposition, customer experience, customer journey, customer-centric, customer analytics, customer loyalty, customer value, customer satisfaction, customer equity, customer intelligence, customer contact strategy……the poor customer they have been so slice-n-diced by so many people over so many years they must be a messy pile of little cubes on the floor. So finding something new about customers is always a pleasure.
Now I have been dabbling a little in the area of Customer Experience.  I’m working on a project where we are modelling the behaviour of our customers over the last three-years and linking this to the interactions they have with us. A bit of research took me to material on Customer Journey so accordingly I got in contact with our in-house team. This resulted in me getting a copy of “Building Great Customer Experience” by Beyond Philosophy.
Start by imagining you’re a Lean Six Sigma practitioner and you invest considerable time on Voice of the Customer research to understand what your customers care about and gather their explicit &amp; implicit needs. It is likely this would include focus groups, kano-analysis, affinity diagrams and moment of truth analysis to produce a clear and rational CTQ-Tree. You have your well defined targets e.g. deliver within 5 minutes of appointment time, include follow-up call to confirm customer satisfied, greet customer by name on arrival. 
All this is great, we can define the physical things we need to deliver for a great customer experience. But what this book gave me was one of those ‘Aha!’ light-bulb moments. They take the customer experience one step forward. Take for example two scenarios of checking into a hotel:
Scenario 1: Arrive 6pm direct from busy day in officeClerk very busy and have to wait 10 minutes (CTQ: - 5 min max). Telephone rings and clerk takes call while dealing with me (CTQ: - customer comes first). Room key doesn’t work and need to return for new key (CTQ: - right first time).

Am I bothered? Not really, stuff happens.
Scenario 2: Arrive 11:45pm after 7-hour dreadful journeyThe situation is exactly the same as before.

Am I bothered? Light the blue touch paper and stand well back.
In a nutshell what they say is, “The physical CTQ’s are great and without them you will always struggle in business, but people’s emotions play a bigger part in the decision making process”. So obvious but its good to have it explained and gives my VoC a new dimension, variable CTQ’s. I believe this came from the original work of Daniel Goleman on Emotional Intelligence. Extremely useful to know about.]]></description>
			
			<author><![CDATA[Robin Barnwell]]></author>
			
			<category>
			<![CDATA[General&nbsp;,&nbsp;Research]]>
			</category>
			<pubDate>Fri, 21 Sep 2007 09:24:38 -0800</pubDate>
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			<title><![CDATA[Six Sigma Blogs: Lets be Pragmatic]]></title>
			<link>http://blogs.isixsigma.com/archive/lets_be_pragmatic.html</link>
			<description><![CDATA[I believe Deming may have said something in this area, but given I couldn’t find a famous quote I made one up.

80% of business issues come from the process and only 20% from the people who work at the business
If someone told me that, I’d say, No! Look at the things people do that cause no end of cost and impact on a business.

Not returning messages or only half-answering questions
Not investing time in communications
Not seeing a strategy through to completion
Not having a strategy in the first place
Not making decisions or making them too late
Not taking responsibility for the customer
Not taking ownership of the process
You get the idea……
The fact the process fails seems to be the end-result of poor leadership, planning, and execution. It seems wrong to blame the process when 5-whys can rapidly get back to the root-cause. Let me touch on one aspect of this people-dimension. 
You may have heard of business buzzword bingo, you may have even played it in meetings with words and phrases like “Absolutely”, “Mission Critical” and “On boarding”. But the phrase that fills me with dread is “Lets Be Pragmatic”. 
I have no problem with pragmatism and sign-up wholeheartedly to being pragmatic. As the dictionary says, “of or pertaining to a practical point of view or practical considerations”. You would be hard-pressed to find someone in business that claimed to be anything other than pragmatic. It’s the non-dictionary definitions that trouble me, the hidden meanings people have like:

I don’t like taking risks
Our focus should be on the next quarters results
My incentive plan is more important
Major improvements always fail
I do not support this solution
Of course in business it is good to have balance and sceptics drive-out holes in a solution. But get the balance wrong and you end-up with a business that can’t deliver change and can’t react to customer demands. The business becomes paralysed into inaction or makes seemingly random and half-hearted attempts to change.
I think there are times when we should dream, push the envelope, be radical, take risks, look beyond the here and now, see it from the customer’s point of view. Lean Six Sigma puts you at the vanguard of business change and it is our duty to be bold and square up to the fake pragmatists.
 ]]></description>
			
			<author><![CDATA[Robin Barnwell]]></author>
			
			<category>
			<![CDATA[Change Management&nbsp;,&nbsp;Leadership]]>
			</category>
			<pubDate>Mon, 17 Sep 2007 07:36:25 -0800</pubDate>
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			<title><![CDATA[Six Sigma Blogs: I have been blind]]></title>
			<link>http://blogs.isixsigma.com/archive/i_have_been_blind.html</link>
			<description><![CDATA[Now I like to think I am quite an objective &amp; freethinking person and don’t always follow the herd when I think something is wrong. I’m not a complete contrarian but am willing to “go it alone” when I feel something is important. So it is a great disappointment to me to say I have only recently discovered DoE. Let me explain the circumstance of enlightenment first.
Over about a month, one of our processes fires two letters and an outbound telephone call to our customers to achieve a particular goal. The process is about 50% effective and we were discussing options for improvement. People talked about changing the wording on the letters or the call date. During the meeting, memories rushed-in of me in BB training, adjusting the settings on a catapult and measuring the distance the ball travelled and I slowly said, “we…could...design...an...Experiment”. I nearly pulled it off but didn’t quite have the confidence or conviction to convince people that DoE would fit the bill.
As I do, I dived into the DoE material, we had a classic 3-factor, 2-level, factorial experiment and I didn’t see it! How could I have got myself into a situation where I have ignored one of the fundamental tools of Lean Six Sigma? How could I have been so blind?
Since my earliest days on BB training when we covered DoE, the picture was painted of a tool used in manufacturing that really does not transfer into a transactional environment. The exercise was “manufacturing”, the examples were manufacturing. The books I have give manufacturing DoE examples; one of the more transactional books completely ignores it and most give a passing reference. My coaches have never really talked about using DoE and when they did they talked about it being difficult to apply in a transactional environment. 
I never really challenged the orthodoxy here and feel I have really missed out. Am making serious amends and it’s a strict study diet of confounding, blocking, attribute response, response surface design and loss function for me.]]></description>
			
			<author><![CDATA[Robin Barnwell]]></author>
			
			<category>
			<![CDATA[Change Management&nbsp;,&nbsp;General&nbsp;,&nbsp;Leadership&nbsp;,&nbsp;Methodology]]>
			</category>
			<pubDate>Wed, 05 Sep 2007 11:28:45 -0800</pubDate>
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			<title><![CDATA[Six Sigma Blogs: Seeing the wood from the trees]]></title>
			<link>http://blogs.isixsigma.com/archive/seeing_the_wood_from_the_trees.html</link>
			<description><![CDATA[I have been working with my colleague, Dave Baker, here at Aviva and we have been researching the long-term behaviour of our processes. 
Now I am not going to go down the path of process capability analysis, Cp, Cpk, Zshift and the like. Take a look at this simple time series plot to see why.

Over the long-term some of our processes are extremely seasonal and what we were interested in is understanding was how much of the process variation was due to seasonality, long-term trend or random process variation. It has been a bit of the blind leading the blind; we have reviewed statistics books, experimented in Minitab and tried to figure this out. 
What we found was Minitab has a capability to decompose the data and with a bit of experimentation we produced an output that showed the seasonal variation and long-term trend.

From this we could eyeball when the process (black-line) moved away from the seasonally expected value (red-line) and also the long-term trend. We then found how to strip-out the seasonal-variation to see the process performance as shown below.

So we believe we have discovered the basics for long-term trend analysis and some of the benefits appear to be:

Ability to see degree to which seasonality affects process performance 
Ability to better understand long-term trends 
Gain a clearer picture of process performance without seasonal interference 
Ability to address short-term customer issues that can be explained by seasonality.
We have some way to go yet but feel we are moving in the right direction and this is getting us a lot of success on a current project.]]></description>
			
			<author><![CDATA[Robin Barnwell]]></author>
			
			<category>
			<![CDATA[General&nbsp;,&nbsp;Methodology]]>
			</category>
			<pubDate>Thu, 30 Aug 2007 09:29:37 -0800</pubDate>
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			<title><![CDATA[Six Sigma Blogs: My Secret Weapon]]></title>
			<link>http://blogs.isixsigma.com/archive/my_secret_weapon.html</link>
			<description><![CDATA[I have a secret weapon, let me explain.
At the start of a 6-week project, I put together a detailed data collection plan to pull data from one of our legacy systems. Worked with IT and received the schedule next day, 2-weeks analysis, 2-weeks build &amp; 2-weeks test. Not good news! The project was planned to finish by the time IT came good. Did I panic? Nope, I deployed my secret weapon. Here’s how it went.
Spoke with the programmers to understand if SQL access was possible. Managed to obtain read-only access to the database for a couple of hours to have a quick look at the data. About 11pm that night I packed-up, job done, data secured.
You see my secret weapon is I am an expert in data warehousing. I believe I can get data out of just about any IT system going. So deployed this to pull the project back from Red (we sometimes say Brown) to Green. 
This is not a unique situation. The inclusive nature of our community brings people from many areas into the project team and their specialist skills &amp; experience can support the project in unexpected ways. It goes beyond the core reason for someone being included in the project team.
For example I never progressed much past drawing stick-men in art and accordingly my slide packs are too factual, so it’s great to have someone on the team with artistic talent. I have started to actively identify and use people’s other skills to support the project, the secret weapons.
I have a few other secret weapons but I can’t tell you what they are because they’re secret.]]></description>
			
			<author><![CDATA[Robin Barnwell]]></author>
			
			<category>
			<![CDATA[General]]>
			</category>
			<pubDate>Thu, 02 Aug 2007 07:01:19 -0800</pubDate>
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			<title><![CDATA[Six Sigma Blogs: Innovation]]></title>
			<link>http://blogs.isixsigma.com/archive/innovation.html</link>
			<description><![CDATA[I have struggled for sometime to appreciate the relationships between Lean Six Sigma and Innovation. Part of this is because I have never really given it much thought and also a couple of things worry me. I think I need to cover what this baggage is before talking about how I think they the two relate. But it’s a huge subject; I suspect the latest thinking is far beyond where I have got to so far.
My first concern is the incredible ability of people to innovate. Did Einstein have a secret black belt? Was Leonardo DaVinci an MBB? People are going to innovate regardless of Lean Six Sigma. Innovation happens in all industries from advertising to engineering and there are countless examples such as:

Henry Bessemer’s innovative development of the first inexpensive process for the mass production of steel 
Thomas Edison’s innovative development of commercial light bulbs from Humphry Davy’s initial invention 
Jethro Tull’s agricultural innovation of the seed drill for sowing seeds instead of being cast upon the ground.
My second concern is that I believe innovation is a very personal endeavour rather than a group endeavour. What I have seen a number of times is innovation happening like a spark, suddenly someone gets it, they have a startling flash of insight and the innovation occurs. The innovation may well happen in a group setting (e.g. brainstorm) but its still up to the individual.
Accepting the arguments that people are naturally innovative and innovation is essentially a personal endeavour where is the relationship with a team-based continuous improvement methodology? 
It would seem that Lean Six Sigma creates the conditions for targeted (customer, product &amp; process) innovation in three ways.

1. MethodologyInnovation is baked into the DMAIC approach; there is even a stage for it. So LSS starts by creating the conditions for innovation.
2. ToolsWe have a wide range of tools to support innovation. I suspect there are a number we do not use, but it’s just a matter of research to get a comprehensive list.
3. JourneyWe are on a continuous improvement journey. So each time we push the target, from 5 days to 5 hours, from 85% to 99%, from customer satisfied to customer promoter we have to innovate, there is no other option.
There are numerous other approaches, methodologies and tools you could use, but it seems LSS is built to order.]]></description>
			
			<author><![CDATA[Robin Barnwell]]></author>
			
			<category>
			<![CDATA[General&nbsp;,&nbsp;Innovation]]>
			</category>
			<pubDate>Fri, 27 Jul 2007 06:00:50 -0800</pubDate>
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			<title><![CDATA[Six Sigma Blogs: Micro map]]></title>
			<link>http://blogs.isixsigma.com/archive/micro_map.html</link>
			<description><![CDATA[A couple of days ago, during a particularly boring meeting I started to doodle. But it wasn’t one of those doodles where you draw a box, then put a cross in it, then shade it, add a couple of surrounding circles, give it legs etc…. it was a doodle with purpose, I started doodling Lean Six Sigma!
It started with a SIPOC. I think the SIPOC has huge value and is somewhat a misunderstood tool. I started drawing the relationships between the SIPOC and other tools used in Define. Things just started appearing around it. I have had a go at distilling some of the areas with the “mind map” below. I have journeyed from Define to Improve on paper so far.

I hunted around the Internet to see where this has been done before so I can see what the finished article would look like. But in terms of models, most describe Lean Six Sigma from 30,000 ft or describe things like which tool to use and when, the outputs at each DMAIC stage, the roles and responsibilities required, the maturity of the deployment and the best structure and critical success factors. All these are extremely useful, but not quite what I was after.
What I imagined was an A3 size poster with all the tools shown with the inter-relationships, a picture that would “jigsaw” all the tools together. Not sure if one exists, so am pursuing my own endeavours.]]></description>
			
			<author><![CDATA[Robin Barnwell]]></author>
			
			<category>
			<![CDATA[General&nbsp;,&nbsp;Methodology&nbsp;,&nbsp;Research]]>
			</category>
			<pubDate>Mon, 23 Jul 2007 04:22:47 -0800</pubDate>
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			<title><![CDATA[Six Sigma Blogs: Benefit Pit-falls]]></title>
			<link>http://blogs.isixsigma.com/archive/benefit_pit_falls.html</link>
			<description><![CDATA[One of the foundations of Lean Six Sigma is its clear link to benefits. Take a look at some of the quoted benefits from the Lean Six Sigma behemoths:

GE saved $12 billion over five years and added $1 to its earnings per share
Honeywell (AlliedSignal) recorded more than $800 million in savings
Six Sigma reportedly saved Motorola $15 billion over the last 11 years
Unfortunately our deployment is by no means as mature; we aspire to reach these levels. Along our journey we have learned just how important it is to get the benefits story right. Here are some of the pit-falls encountered and may be of assistance.
Tangible means financial?I see people using of the terms tangible and financial interchangeably based on the idea that financial benefits are the only tangible and anything else is intangible. We have a simple rule; if you can measure it it’s tangible otherwise it’s intangible. Simple as that. So for example you can have for tangible benefits covering:

Customer - e.g. Customer satisfaction
Financial - e.g. Revenue growth
Process -  e.g.Product defects
People - e.g. Increased pay
You’ve got to grab the benefitsWe sometimes find we have multiple projects working on a process some being Lean Six Sigma and some not. If the process improves which project bags the benefits? We look to get an agreement between the various projects on the allocations. Looking forward we hope to become more sophisticated based on the Y=f(X) approach and the X’s can always be other improvement projects.
You’ve got to bank the benefitsAgain sounds simple but I have found not all tangible benefits translate into Business Benefits. 
For example removing non-value activities in a process makes it more efficient. But if you don’t make use of that improvement by for example increasing the volume or redeploying people to other areas then you haven’t achieved a business benefit.
Another example is we sometimes run DMA projects where we do rapid analysis down to root-cause and identify the benefits available. We don’t do so many of these now as we realised the improvements were not sticking and you can’t achieve a Business Benefit until you have delivered the improvement 
These are a few examples of the pit-falls encountered. What is important is making sure every single project can clearly define and manage its Business Benefits.]]></description>
			
			<author><![CDATA[Robin Barnwell]]></author>
			
			<category>
			<![CDATA[General&nbsp;,&nbsp;Methodology]]>
			</category>
			<pubDate>Fri, 22 Jun 2007 07:43:41 -0800</pubDate>
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			<title><![CDATA[Six Sigma Blogs: ANOVA]]></title>
			<link>http://blogs.isixsigma.com/archive/anova.html</link>
			<description><![CDATA[In my on-going journey to master the tools &amp; techniques of Lean Sigma I have been reviewing the materials on ANOVA. How useful this has been, it has really moved me on a level.
ANOVA comes across in training as a very useful tool and Tukey’s pairwise comparison really hits the spot. However in our business with samples of skewed non-normal distributions with unequal variance, I infrequently meet the assumptions for use, “Samples must be normally distributed and of equal variance” and swap over to Mood’s Median Test. 
So when I reviewed this topic in my own time I was surprised to read in Principles of Applied Statistics that “in practise the normality and equal variance assumptions are not important” I was intrigued. Not having a statistical background I had always assumed these were fixed assumptions and used the tools accordingly. Could it be that I had misunderstood the theory? What about the other statistical tests based on the normal distribution e.g. 1-sample t-test, 2-sample t-test, paired t-test and F-test for equal variance, could these be used as well?
I started doing some empirical tests in Minitab. Useful research but did not answer the questions. I then reread my collection of Six Sigma books. These gave differing and sometimes vague advice on how to handle hypothesis tests on non-normal &amp; unequal variance samples. From this I got two things, first I needed to look outside of my “Universe” to find an information source I could trust, second I needed to be more specific in my questions. So I framed the questions:

To what degree does non-normality impact the hypothesis test? 
To what degree does unequal variance impact the hypothesis test?
To find an information source I could trust I went to the library and borrowed the biggest academic book on statistics I could find, Introduction to the Practice of Statistics. It went in-depth in the areas I was looking for guidance.
In terms of output I wanted to produce a simple table of practical advice that could be used. Here is what it looks like now, still working on it and going through the theory.




Hypothesis Test
 Non-normal Data
Unequal Variance

1-sample t-test
Robust test except against outliers or strongly skewed data. Samples less than 15 - must have normal data, less than 40 - no outliers or strongly skewed and greater than 40 - no outliers but can be skewed
 No significant impact

2-sample t-test
 In research
 In research

Paired t-test
In research
In research

F-test
Do not run test, use Levene’s test
In research

ANOVA
In research
Largest standard deviation should be less than twice smallest standard deviation
This is the start of the research and joins the growing body of knowledge I am building in the subject. What it does is provoke the next set of questions, things like what is the risk of using the results, how does sample size impact on confidence intervals in these situations, what other situations should be considered e.g. outliers &amp; different distributions and when should non-parametric tests be used.
Anyone out there with the answers?]]></description>
			
			<author><![CDATA[Robin Barnwell]]></author>
			
			<category>
			<![CDATA[General&nbsp;,&nbsp;Methodology&nbsp;,&nbsp;Research]]>
			</category>
			<pubDate>Wed, 06 Jun 2007 03:41:38 -0800</pubDate>
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			<title><![CDATA[Six Sigma Blogs: The Next Generation]]></title>
			<link>http://blogs.isixsigma.com/archive/the_next_generation.html</link>
			<description><![CDATA[From Gauss defining the normal distribution to Galton designing his theories on correlation to Onho developing the Toyota Production system, we are proud of our rich heritage and the number &amp; variety of sources that have come together to create the Lean Six Sigma model.
So it is encouraging to see what may be an example of the next generation of methodology. I was doing a bit of research on Business Process Management and found the BPMG web site. This covered the 8 Omega framework which included:

The 8-step DADVIICI approach
Six defined roles, and the skills and responsibilities assigned to each of these roles
Four dimensions (Strategy, People, Process, Systems) of organizational alignment that must be addressed to achieve excellence
Education, training and skill building spanning the entire 8 Omega performance model

Sounds an exciting break-through innovation and I wondered if anyone had any experience in its use?
 ]]></description>
			
			<author><![CDATA[Robin Barnwell]]></author>
			
			<category>
			<![CDATA[General&nbsp;,&nbsp;Leadership&nbsp;,&nbsp;Methodology]]>
			</category>
			<pubDate>Thu, 17 May 2007 06:59:58 -0800</pubDate>
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			<title><![CDATA[Six Sigma Blogs: Treat the symptoms, not the cause?]]></title>
			<link>http://blogs.isixsigma.com/archive/treat_the_symptoms_not_the_cause.html</link>
			<description><![CDATA[Here is a situation encountered on a recent project. I have abstracted the key-points here.
The project started as a textbook DMAIC engagement with all the elements you would expect to find including impact on customer, strategic problem, clearly measurable benefits and well-defined goals. 

The project was too tackle rework created at a certain process step producing a 5% defect rate. Although the defect rate was known, the number being fixed was not. Rapidly cracked-open the rework process and came up with a fix rate of 50%. So simple goals:

Reduce the defect rate from 5% to X%
Improve the rework from 50% to Y%
Attention moved onto the root-causes for the defects and as the analysis continued it became clear that the customer was unintentionally creating the defects and there were many many reasons why the customer could create the defect.
As an analogue it’s a bit like treating people with back pain. In a week any number of people can suffer and there could be any number of root-causes. It’s the treatment of the symptoms that becomes important with any number of root-causes to address. 
So the project came a crunch point, what to do. 

Could launch a DfSS project and rebuild the process from the ground-up with the goal of avoiding the defect situation in the first place. Not likely, way too big a project.
Could relentlessly quantify and address each and every root-cause. Decided against this, as I like getting rapid results. It would cost a lot of time &amp; money and most factors are out of my control anyway. (Although am pushing forward a few highly targeted improvements here.)
I decided to focus on the rework process. It consists of three main steps and at each point the defect can be corrected.  I am setting-up a DOE trial that will change these and other factors to find the optimum setting for fixing defects. Hence I am treating the symptoms not the cause. It feels wrong, but it happens!
 ]]></description>
			
			<author><![CDATA[Robin Barnwell]]></author>
			
			<category>
			<![CDATA[General]]>
			</category>
			<pubDate>Fri, 11 May 2007 05:14:46 -0800</pubDate>
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			<title><![CDATA[Six Sigma Blogs: What Flavour Are You?]]></title>
			<link>http://blogs.isixsigma.com/archive/what_flavour_are_you.html</link>
			<description><![CDATA[I recently had an opportunity to talk with someone involved in a manufacturing deployment. What struck me was how different their deployment was to ours. This worried me into thinking we were somehow doing it wrong and not doing real Lean Six Sigma. I think I have now rationalised the experience and here is what I have concluded.
I started by considering the common characteristics across our deployments. We share a common foundation within the methodology with items such as:

High-impact, short-duration projects
Projects strategically aligned to stakeholders needs
Scope, problem definition and goals clearly defined
Focus on meeting defined customers needs
Clear sponsorship in place
Sustainable solutions delivered
Benefits modelled and measured
So what was different between our deployments? It seems to come down to tools. As you know in Lean Six Sigma we have a near “nuclear arsenal” when it comes to sophisticated tools. But what seems the mark the differences are the emphasis placed on and the lack of use of specific tools.
Operating in a Transactional environment I have yet to need a continuous gauge R&amp;R although the attribute gauge R&amp;R works. Never used Andon, SMED or Spaghetti Diagrams. I also suspect I “over-use” areas such as process mapping, process ownership and reviewing IT &amp; MI systems when compared to manufacturing. 
Apart from the Manufacturing to Transactional split, the other split that seems to influence tool use is Volume to Consultancy business model. We are a volume business, for example one of our product lines is consumer car insurance. It’s all about helping the customer assess our proposition to rapidly reach a buying decision. We measure and manage at volume e.g. conversion, acquisition, renewal and cancellation rates. The alternative being the consultancy business model where each customer brings a unique and individual set of requirements. Managing for volume just doesn’t figure, its all about customer intimacy so force-field analysis, account plans, VOC and kano analysis.
What does this mean? It seems the business model and manufacturing/transaction split seems to describe the core tools we come to rely on with four main flavours of tool usage across volume manufacturing, volume transactional, consultancy manufacturing and consulting transactional. Does this model stand-up to scrutiny?]]></description>
			
			<author><![CDATA[Robin Barnwell]]></author>
			
			<category>
			<![CDATA[General]]>
			</category>
			<pubDate>Fri, 20 Apr 2007 06:00:11 -0800</pubDate>
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			<title><![CDATA[Six Sigma Blogs: Mission Impossible]]></title>
			<link>http://blogs.isixsigma.com/archive/mission_impossible.html</link>
			<description><![CDATA[After last year’s run-in with my broadband provider, here is an equally nonsensical situation encountered with my wireless provider. It highlights another core business issue. 
My mobile phone (cell phone) broke, so I ordered a new one and it arrived the next day. Handed over the broken phone and started-up the new one. Hold on, where are the 5-years worth of telephone numbers I have accumulated! 
Emergency call to customer services, seems I should have backed-up the information onto my PC. OK, so can I have my old phone back? No, our contract states that once the phone has been taken it can’t be returned. Yes, but I need it back, its been less than an hour since it was taken, the courier will still have it. No, it is impossible, the contract states that once taken it can’t be returned. And so it went on.
Emergency call to the account management team, explained situation and asked if they could intervene. No, it is impossible the phone has gone; it will be in a skip with hundreds of others by now. The contract states that once the phone has been taken…… 
So I call the courier business, can I get my phone back? No, it is impossible our contract is with the wireless provider we are not authorised to return phones. But it must be possible? No, our contract states that…….
This called for drastic measures. I call the courier business again and ask to be put through to the local depot. I get the job number for the delivery and eventually discover the phone will be delivered back to the local depot at 9am the next morning. After a number of calls I get agreement from both head-offices that I can retrieve the phone. Drive the 20 miles next morning and physically pull the phone out of the process. Have to replace it with the new working phone as they are contracted to return a phone to be scrapped else they have to pay a £200 charge! 
Order new phone and discuss with courier (during maximum of 4 minutes allowed for in contract). Seems this situation happens all the time, never known anyone who has managed to retrieve a phone before. Has had directors begging to get their phones back but the contract states……. 
I imagine the team that designed this process with its strict polices &amp; business service levels must feel very proud. It runs like clockwork. One phone delivered one phone returned, prid pro quo. All accounted for, none lost, perfect, possibly giving an extremely high sigma metric for the Big Y. Some imaginative poka-yoke included, its impossible to return a phone, no rework, simple message to customers, everyone complies. 
It’s the unintended consequences that concern me here. The impact on the secondary process metrics and impact on the customer. I get the impression that the process is more important than the customer. 
As you all know three data points makes a clear trend, so interested to see if telco’s get a third mention here.]]></description>
			
			<author><![CDATA[Robin Barnwell]]></author>
			
			<category>
			<![CDATA[General&nbsp;,&nbsp;Methodology]]>
			</category>
			<pubDate>Tue, 03 Apr 2007 04:01:56 -0800</pubDate>
		</item>

		<item>
			<title><![CDATA[Six Sigma Blogs: Tough Nut To Crack]]></title>
			<link>http://blogs.isixsigma.com/archive/tough_nut_to_crack.html</link>
			<description><![CDATA[Last week was a difficult week in the office with a number of day-to-day issues going the wrong way. As the week drew to close I found myself feeling low and faced with a 4-hour drive home.
On the way home I indulged in some negative brainstorming around people’s job titles e.g. Director of Infuriating Customers and Head of Senseless Processes. This didn’t get me very far but got me thinking about progress in delivering our long-term objectives. I tried to come up with the right analogy for this multi-year venture. 
I am not sure if there is an industry standard analogy, so here are my attempts.
I started with the idea of the battle of good against bad. But this didn’t work as we are all on the same side. With so much intricacy, politics/agendas, networking, reorganisations and other variables involved the good/bad analogue is just too crude. 
So how about steering the super-tanker off the rocks and into safe waters? If only it was so simple, single process, single issue, job done. Afraid we are much too complex with a number of different businesses and operating divisions.
How about the expert coach leading the team to triumph at the Olympics? We are all about delivering sustainable results not one off successes. 
Possibly the expert surgeon who precisely operates on the sick patient? Feels a bit nearer, but still random in terms of who comes through the door.
Then it struck me, what I needed was a happy ending. So the analogy is each LSS deployment is a story, the length can run from a short article to a massive novel. I am merely in the middle of a difficult chapter.
For me a happy ending, the gods of motorway traffic smiled and I got home in only three and a half hours. Just in time to read both children their bedtime stories.]]></description>
			
			<author><![CDATA[Robin Barnwell]]></author>
			
			<category>
			<![CDATA[General]]>
			</category>
			<pubDate>Wed, 21 Mar 2007 02:45:23 -0800</pubDate>
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		<item>
			<title><![CDATA[Six Sigma Blogs: What is your structure?]]></title>
			<link>http://blogs.isixsigma.com/archive/what_is_your_structure.html</link>
			<description><![CDATA[A review of the information covering Lean Six Sigma deployments shows a clear focus on such items as.


Roles &amp; responsibilities: - e.g. champion, process owner, MBB, and BB

Critical success factors: - e.g. Leadership commitment, alignment to strategy and suitable training/accreditation system

Project selection &amp; sponsorship
But what I have been interested in is how to structurally construct the deployment. In this area the materials are lacking. I suspect this is because every business is different and has very different requirements. Coming from a transactional background I describe my experience and provide 4 example deployment structures. I accept there are other potential approaches. 
1. The Big Ticket DeploymentLooking for full-size and rapid benefits? Call in the experts. Hire a team of lean six sigma experts so you can hit the ground running. They may be expensive but you get real value and immediate results.
2. The Practise DeploymentHighly motivated and able practitioners combine to deliver Lean Six Sigma across the business. Reporting to their MBB and ultimately the Champion they deliver strategic projects into any target business line.
3. The Embedded DeploymentThe BB/GB works directly for the process owner to first baseline and then introduce continuous improvement in core processes. A small central team of MBB’s provide coaching, mentoring and other support services.
4. The One Stop Shop DeploymentThe internal business consultancy division offers continuous improvement among its suite of capabilities. Lean Six Sigma people can be deployed among other related change and strategic technologies.
I suspect no one business is a pure play is any deployment structure and is more likely to be a hybrid. It is of course the unique merits of each structures benefits and risks that will drive the decision on which way to go. But its a big decision to make because it commits your people and cash to a delivery approach. 
Does your preferred deployment structure match the approach chosen by your business? ]]></description>
			
			<author><![CDATA[Robin Barnwell]]></author>
			
			<category>
			<![CDATA[General&nbsp;,&nbsp;Management]]>
			</category>
			<pubDate>Mon, 05 Mar 2007 15:56:44 -0800</pubDate>
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		<item>
			<title><![CDATA[Six Sigma Blogs: Hello World]]></title>
			<link>http://blogs.isixsigma.com/archive/hello_world.html</link>
			<description><![CDATA[My understanding of Lean Six Sigma is mainly based on the projects and the people I work with here at Aviva. Being one of the biggest businesses in the UK, Aviva gives me great opportunity to work on complex problems &amp; processes. But it has its limitations.  I work exclusively in the financial services market and the projects are entirely transactional and heavily related to people and IT driven processes. This worries me. As Donald Rumsfeld said (rather him than me) "we know what we know, we know that there are things we do not know, and we know that there are things we don’t know we don’t know" 
But its OK, as with everything these days, there is some theory and a model for this. You start top-right and work your way around as you become more aware and knowledgeable.

For example, when I first came into LSS I had no idea that I didn’t know about confidence intervals but I learnt about them and now understand them. I’m definitely not top-left, where I can do brilliant things without knowing how I do them.
I don’t know anything about LSS in manufacturing. Nor how LSS is applied in other industries e.g. oil &amp; gas or health. I haven’t seen many other LSS deployment models or businesses with different levels of sponsorship. So I don’t know how we benchmark.
I’d like to say ignorance is bliss but that goes right against the basic principles of LSS. But the more I read and do the more I realise how big the subject really is. So if you are 10-years along the journey do you still feel there is a mountain in front of you and can you see the top?]]></description>
			
			<author><![CDATA[Robin Barnwell]]></author>
			
			<category>
			<![CDATA[General]]>
			</category>
			<pubDate>Fri, 23 Feb 2007 09:36:36 -0800</pubDate>
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		<item>
			<title><![CDATA[Six Sigma Blogs: Road To Nowhere]]></title>
			<link>http://blogs.isixsigma.com/archive/road_to_nowhere.html</link>
			<description><![CDATA[A little off message today, but (eventually) topical.
Britain’s ancient roads have carried people and livestock for centuries. But it was the engineering skills of the Romans who transformed our road transportation system. In the first 100 years after their invasion in 43AD they built at least 8000 miles of road so even the most remote hamlet was never more than 10 miles from an engineered road. With the Roman withdrawal in the 5th century, no hard roads were built until the 18th century. People made do with what the Romans had left, bridges collapsed and surfaces disintegrated.
As trade developed in the 16th century travel was a dangerous and expensive procedure. The poor state of the road network limited trade and the economy. Many roads were impassable in the winter and travellers were subject to frequent hold-ups by highwaymen. To address this in the 17th century the local parishes were made responsible for the upkeep of roads in their parishes. The locals were required by law to give 6 days free labour to work on the roads. This was inefficient and in many cases not done at all.
By the end of the 17th century it was apparent that another method was needed. The obvious answer was to charge road users and the money used for highway repairs. The use of tolls and turnpike roads was slow to catch-on and it was not until the middle of the 18th century that the system came into its own. Long distance journey times were slashed (e.g. Norwich to London from 50 to 19 hours). However charges were very unpopular. Many people avoided the tolls and numerous attacks on toll keepers made it a capital offence. But by the end of the 18th century turnpikes were accepted and generally used.
Today, London's congestion charge zone doubled in size with a westward expansion coming into force. The £8-a-day road toll scheme now takes in most of Westminster and Kensington and Chelsea in west London. 
West London residents are planning a demonstration against the new charge later on Monday. They believe it will damage businesses and cost residents hundreds of pounds a year. "Surveys indicate that of all areas adjacent to the zone, congestion is most intense in the west where there are severe delays throughout the working day." A spokesman for the National Alliance Against Tolls said: "This extension of the charge zone is a lose-lose situation for Londoners. It will increase congestion everywhere else including the existing zone."
Also, the UK government is running an on-line petition which has 1,600,000 signing-up to oppose the govenment (Government has a tough job!):

The idea of tracking every vehicle at all times is sinister and wrong. Road pricing is already here with the high level of taxation on fuel. The more you travel - the more tax you pay.
It will be an unfair tax on those who live apart from families and poorer people who will not be able to afford the high monthly costs.
Please Mr Blair - forget about road pricing and concentrate on improving our roads to reduce congestion.
And how does all this relate the Lean Six Sigma? It raises the question, “How do you improve a situation where the improvement you believe in is diametrically opposed to the customer’s view?”]]></description>
			
			<author><![CDATA[Robin Barnwell]]></author>
			
			<category>
			<![CDATA[General]]>
			</category>
			<pubDate>Mon, 19 Feb 2007 04:58:09 -0800</pubDate>
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		<item>
			<title><![CDATA[Six Sigma Blogs: Root-cause effects]]></title>
			<link>http://blogs.isixsigma.com/archive/root_cause_effects.html</link>
			<description><![CDATA[Because I’m currently reviewing the materials on cause and effect I seem to be noticing it everywhere, I wonder why? Either way finding root-causes is an essential part of my job and I have a wealth of tools available such as Ishikawa diagrams, correlation, regression models, DOE and multivariate charts. In reviewing the on-line materials I discovered the limits of my understanding here and plan to stick with this for some more time. 
But what struck me was not the ability to discover a root cause but people’s reaction to its discovery. There seem to be a range of responses and here are some examples.
“Well of course that’s the root-cause, you should have asked me”In the morning when I wake-up it gets light. After many months of careful record keeping I have discovered a perfect correlation with the appearance of the Sun. By using Occam’s razor I propose that the Sun is the root-cause! 
“By the time I’m old they’ll have a cure”Lung cancer is the leading cause of cancer death and 87% of lung cancer deaths can be attributed to tobacco use. SURGEON GENERAL'S WARNING: Smoking Causes Lung Cancer, Heart Disease, Emphysema, And May Complicate Pregnancy.
“I doubt the root cause it’s a natural phenomena”Global average near-surface atmospheric temperature rose 0.6 ± 0.2 ° in the 20th century. The prevailing scientific opinion is that "most of the warming observed over the last 50 years is attributable to human activities.” The main cause is the increased atmospheric concentration of greenhouse gases (GHGs) such as carbon dioxide (CO2).
“Its cheaper to address the rework”“I agree with the results but the real issue is .....”“You can’t measure peoples behaviour with statistics”“This report really hit the spot, I’ll let you know”
Sometimes, "We need to fix this immediately" So for all the sense of accomplishment in making the fundamental discovery, it’s just a part of the job. It also includes persuading and gaining other peoples support and driving the decision making process.]]></description>
			
			<author><![CDATA[Robin Barnwell]]></author>
			
			<category>
			<![CDATA[General&nbsp;,&nbsp;Methodology]]>
			</category>
			<pubDate>Wed, 24 Jan 2007 02:41:21 -0800</pubDate>
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		<item>
			<title><![CDATA[Six Sigma Blogs: Minitab User Group]]></title>
			<link>http://blogs.isixsigma.com/archive/minitab_user_group.html</link>
			<description><![CDATA[As part of becoming an MBB I need to really understand statistics. I spend a lot of my own time studying and use Minitab to support this. But I was surprised to find there was no Minitab User Group where I could meet like-minded people to share my experiences and accelerate my learning.
So I thought, why not start one? But of course it can only work if there is an equal level of demand from other practitioners. To test this I thought I would introduce the idea here. If you are interested in becoming a founding member of an independent and not-for-profit Minitab User Group then please read on.
The Minitab User Group will be for people who use Minitab as part of Six Sigma or for statistics in general. It will exist to expand the knowledge of the people involved. This can be from informal web site discussions, through sharing and using on-line resources, to attending user group workshops &amp; training events. 
As a user group member you will be able to interface with like-minded specialists working in different areas and organisations. To support the widest range of members, subjects will be geared around the Minitab product. For example, the section on Statistical Process Controls will include tutorials, workbooks &amp; projects, articles &amp; links and industry specific content. 
Although independent, the user group will actively work with Minitab for the benefit of our members. A close working relationship provides a chance to offer direct feedback on products and services plus a chance for Minitab to update and assist our members. Minitab fully endorses this intuitive.
The intention is the user group will be funded principally by member’s subscriptions, plus possible donations from others. This means activities will be geared to the amount of money available. It is noted that those setting up the organisation will not receive any remuneration except for out-of-pocket costs, like postage and phone calls. 
Does this interest you? Would you like to get involved in setting-up the Minitab User Group and defining its direction? Please make contact by e-mail, info@minitabusergroup.com to get involved.]]></description>
			
			<author><![CDATA[Robin Barnwell]]></author>
			
			<category>
			<![CDATA[General]]>
			</category>
			<pubDate>Fri, 19 Jan 2007 07:30:06 -0800</pubDate>
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		<item>
			<title><![CDATA[Six Sigma Blogs: Mainstream]]></title>
			<link>http://blogs.isixsigma.com/archive/mainstream.html</link>
			<description><![CDATA[Middle manager of a mid-sized business with an average market share makes a New Year’s resolution, “I must improve our performance!”. Hits the Internet to discover what’s out there and is absolutely bombarded with the latest thinking and best practise in how to improve their business.
KISS…4P…5P…Burning platform…Blue Ocean…7S…PRINCE2…MBWA….Seven Habits…CMMi…Governance…Scenario Planning…Six Sigma….Innovation…Kotler…Activity Based Costing…Balanced Scorecard…Six Hats…ITIL….Results 1 - 10 of about 9,340,000
Given the number of options, it should come as no surprise that without clear executive sponsorship, managers looking for “home-grown” solutions could be reluctant to invest any time in Lean Six Sigma. There are any number of good reasons not to get involved. Gianna is currently on reason number 37 and still counting!
Even if they focussed on continuous improvement there is a lot to choose from e.g. Lean, Six Sigma, ISO, MBNQA, TRIZ, TPS, EFQM, TOC, TQM ….no, this is all too complex, not today thank you, I’ve got some fire-fighting to do!
Name a soft drink, quality automobile, or MP3-player and it brings to mind an immediate response. I think we have achieved a high degree of customer mind share. But in what categories should Lean Six Sigma hold mind share? Product Launch; Business Strategy; Performance Management, Innovation, Profit? 
Our technology is proven and the tools work. It seems a question of marketing. I’m reminded of the early works of Geoffrey Moore like Crossing the Chasm. How do you cross the chasm from being a product used by selected niches and specialist areas into a de facto business tool?

Product Adoption Curve
The move into mainstream is about making Lean Six Sigma easy to do business with. One aspect of this is standardisation. I will draw on a couple of examples from the IT industry. 


During the nineties there were a series of competing approaches to software engineering. Adoption of modelling techniques was slow as customers were not sure which methodology to back. The resolution was the creation of a single industry standard Universal Modelling Language (UML).

Again in the nineties there were a series of competing approaches to networking. Customers could base their networks on technology such as token-ring, IPX/SPX, DECNet, NetBEUI, SNA or TCP/IP. Now the industry has settled on TCP/IP.
This relentless standardisation has continued in spreadsheets, word processors, operating systems, databases, and ERP systems. Mainstream customers like a dominant player (800lb gorilla) with a second choice in case they fall-out with the gorilla.
Another aspect is simplification (I discovered there is a Six Sigma for Dummies). Mainstream customers like simple messages and easy to follow processes. What would constitute the core of Lean Six Sigma without affecting integrity? Would it be suitable for a mainstream audience?
I believe an industry designed “Sigma Lite” that is ratified by say ISO would be a step in the right direction for customer adoption. This would draw on all best practice (including ISO 9004) to produce a cut-down version for the mainstream. 
Of course every consultancy will challenge this to describe how they are better than the average. Not sure if the Six Sigma Green Belt is already the lowest level of abstraction to support continuous improvement? ]]></description>
			
			<author><![CDATA[Robin Barnwell]]></author>
			
			<category>
			<![CDATA[General&nbsp;,&nbsp;Leadership&nbsp;,&nbsp;Methodology]]>
			</category>
			<pubDate>Tue, 02 Jan 2007 03:23:24 -0800</pubDate>
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		<item>
			<title><![CDATA[Six Sigma Blogs: Acceleration]]></title>
			<link>http://blogs.isixsigma.com/archive/acceleration.html</link>
			<description><![CDATA[Consider a Lean Six Sigma programme with a number of projects in-flight. It’s a good mix of projects with varying delivery-timescales and range of benefits. Projects are run by dedicated black belts who manage the DMAIC phases in the waterfall approach. Its what you might call the “standard” approach to delivery.

The customer couldn’t care less about DMAIC they want benefits delivered quickly. So how could we shorten the average delivery life cycle by say 20%?
Before I go build a VSM, gather the facts and find the root-causes, I wondered if anyone has already looked at this?
Couple of immediate thoughts comes to mind, (aaarrrggghhh solution-mode!). 
What if you moved people around projects to clear blockages (TOC)?
What if you created specialist silos for the various phases something like:

Define Team: - Own the project hopper; can develop a project charter in under two-days; well skilled at building realistic benefits picture
Measure Team: - Could get data out of a stone; have deep understanding of interviewing and surveys; own the enterprise process model
Analysis Team: - Centre of excellence for analytics and statistics; develop clear insights and root-causes
Improve Team: - Push the envelope; think outside the box; lateral but pragmatic
Control Team: - Well versed in baking improvements into a business and realising benefits.
Please let me know if this has already been solved.]]></description>
			
			<author><![CDATA[Robin Barnwell]]></author>
			
			<category>
			<![CDATA[General&nbsp;,&nbsp;Management]]>
			</category>
			<pubDate>Thu, 07 Dec 2006 02:11:46 -0800</pubDate>
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		<item>
			<title><![CDATA[Six Sigma Blogs: Change Agent]]></title>
			<link>http://blogs.isixsigma.com/archive/change_agent.html</link>
			<description><![CDATA[One of the main reasons I signed-up to Lean Six Sigma was because I had discovered a great set of tools to help me deliver change quicker &amp; better. Through my training I wondered how I had survived so long without sampling &amp; confidence intervals, SPC’s, regression and FMEA. Being able to look at a trend chart and understand that a couple of percent improvement can be statistically insignificant was a real revelation.
But I was wary of was being labelled a black belt. Not because of the negative spin from the naysayers. But because it would imply I was limiting my options for delivering change to only Lean Six Sigma. To me it was a toolset not a life-style.
Now I have been on the job for a couple of years has my view changed? 
Well change continues to come in all shapes and sizes. Some basic definitions include:

Strategic change - where you realign your business against changing external factors e.g. new competitors and break through technology. This tends to cause widespread change e.g. business acquisitions or the launch of new products. 
Organisational change - where you realign your people to meet your strategic objectives e.g. developing an off-shore model or moving from field to web-based sales. We tend to term these business transformations.
Process change - where you deliver continuously improving processes e.g. meeting cost control targets or improving customer satisfaction. 
These types of change are happening all the time in our business and what I have definitely found is DMAIC/DFSS cannot be shoehorned into every situation. But I suspect you all knew that anyway. What I have found is two of the underlying principles help shape how react to new business issues. 
First is “what are the facts”. I don’t rush into solution-mode anywhere near as much as I used to. 
Second is “its not what I want to deliver, its what does the customer want”. Its very easy to think about how a new product or process should be designed from the process owners perspective. The discipline is in understanding what the customer wants.
Still not keen on the “black belt” label but I do like the handle “change agent”.
 ]]></description>
			
			<author><![CDATA[Robin Barnwell]]></author>
			
			<category>
			<![CDATA[General]]>
			</category>
			<pubDate>Wed, 06 Dec 2006 05:02:58 -0800</pubDate>
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		<item>
			<title><![CDATA[Six Sigma Blogs: Lean Madness]]></title>
			<link>http://blogs.isixsigma.com/archive/lean_madness.html</link>
			<description><![CDATA[I recently took a long train journey to Wales to attend a user group for a software package that defines Enterprise Architecture (Zachman et al). More details in a future IT blog. But what caught my eye was an article in The Times newspaper:

Tax staff told to clear their deskBeing told to clear your desk used to be synonymous with dismissal. But civil servants have been asked to remove photographs, food and mobile phones in an attempt to improve efficiency.
Under an edict sent to Revenue &amp; Customs staff in tax offices, desks have to be tidy, clean and free from clutter to promote “efficient business processing”. The so-called Lean programme, designed to improve productivity in government offices, has provoked a work-to-rule among 14,000 civil servants.  An internal memo from a senior manager in North Wales outlining the process evoked claims from the Public and Commercial Services Union that the organisation was trying to “dehumanise” working conditions.
Revenue &amp; Customs said that staff had been invited to work with managers, and that unions had been consulted.
Its not often you see Lean in the national press and this didn’t seem to be the right message. 
My immediate thoughts were around the benefits of implementing 5S to keep desks clear. Revenue &amp; Customs is a colossal government agency with a budget in the billions. Even a few percent in savings translates into considerable sums. So I expect the data showed a clean desk policy will have a realisable impact. I also wondered if 5S would extend into the virtual world of information stored on-line, documents on file servers, plans in Excel, messages stored in e-mails?
I suspected what I was reading was just the tip of the iceberg so I did a little more research.
PA Consulting was engaged to drive the Lean programme and they provide a good write-up of the programme. Equally the Public and Commercial Services Union provide a good counter-argument to this Lean madness. I must say I found this viewpoint rather alien to me. I have never worked in the public sector and was surprised with the resistance to change.
But overall it put into perspective the issues I have in getting stakeholder agreement, process owners on board and cross-functional teams working together. Central government is in a different league.]]></description>
			
			<author><![CDATA[Robin Barnwell]]></author>
			
			<category>
			<![CDATA[General&nbsp;,&nbsp;Leadership&nbsp;,&nbsp;Management]]>
			</category>
			<pubDate>Thu, 16 Nov 2006 04:19:50 -0800</pubDate>
		</item>

		<item>
			<title><![CDATA[Six Sigma Blogs: Cassandra]]></title>
			<link>http://blogs.isixsigma.com/archive/cassandra.html</link>
			<description><![CDATA[On 31st October, Sir Nicholas Stern, working for the UK Government, released the Stern Review. This review looked at the potential economic costs for global warming with a headline that global warming could shrink the global economy by 20% and up to 200 million people could become refugees as their homes are hit by drought or flood. 
This is grim news and it worries me. We appear to be heading for a catastrophic disaster and there is absolutely nothing we can do to stop it. 
Let me tell you what else happened on 31st October. The tradition of Halloween’s trick or treat is one of the many things we have imported from the US. We had a Halloween party and took a gang of kids out. We loved it. I will use Halloween here as a microcosm of a much wider issue.
Before Halloween, the supermarkets had aisles dedicated to products. There were dressing-up clothes, scary masks, make-up, balloons, and every type of plastic thingamajig you can think of. Around the globe, similar scenes were duplicated in thousands of supermarkets.
Lets look at the value-chain here. A Halloween product is designed and commissioned. Raw materials are gathered from around the world and shipped to a manufacturing plant possibly in China. The product is assembled and shipped, possibly by airplane, into the UK. The product is shipped by road to the supermarket for sale. The product is used for one evening. The product goes into a landfill. 
The annual Halloween value-chain produces a lot of CO2. I would imagine mainly from transportation. In a world that is looking to dramatically reduce CO2 production, this value-chain may become unsustainable. It may be that we need to re-evaluate our true needs as consumers?
So what’s this got to do with Lean Six Sigma? Or to put it another way, how can Lean Six Sigma be applied here? I don’t know, but its worrying me.]]></description>
			
			<author><![CDATA[Robin Barnwell]]></author>
			
			<category>
			<![CDATA[General]]>
			</category>
			<pubDate>Mon, 06 Nov 2006 08:19:59 -0800</pubDate>
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		<item>
			<title><![CDATA[Six Sigma Blogs: Defects!]]></title>
			<link>http://blogs.isixsigma.com/archive/defects.html</link>
			<description><![CDATA[When it comes to defects here is a great example I suspect other readers may have experienced. But as you will see it has made me question the Six Sigma approach. I would like to ask for guidance. It’s an example I find is happening with increasing regularity and seems to be linked to the proliferation of web-only businesses and poorly skilled call centres.
How it started: - I had a problem with my broadband connection at home. I called the provider and asked if an engineer could take a look. This was agreed and a date set.

Defect 1: - The engineer arrives, says he is a PSTN engineer, can’t help and leaves.
Defect 2: - A Broadband engineer arrives a couple of days later without any notice while I am at work. Concludes there are no problem with connection so must be my equipment.
Defect 3: - Telephone bill includes £45 engineer call out charge, which I was not informed I would incur!
Defect 4: - Call the number on telephone bill to complain. Spend 20 minutes listening to “thank you for holding, your call IS important to us” before I give-up.
Defect 5: - Call first thing next day and get through after only 10 minutes. But its the wrong department, am immediately transferred, “thank you for holding, your call IS important to us”.
Defect 6: - Call the new department and get through after only 10 minutes. But again it’s the wrong department, am transferred, “thank you for holding, your call IS important to us”.
Defect 7: - Call the new department and get told they will take 2 weeks to review the case and make contact when they have made a decision.
I lose it at this point and tried to call the CEO to complain. This has the desired affect and the £45 charge is dropped. As a customer I encountered defect after defect after defect. I felt that everything was wrong.
So lets take a look at Six Sigma.

What is Six Sigma?An approach that produces processes with 3.4 defects per million opportunities
What is a defect? A failure to meet one of the acceptance criteria of your customers
The way I have been taught is to use two methodologies, DMAIC to raise the sigma-level up to about 4 and DFSS to push onto 6. 
Now when you run a DMAIC project and are in Define, a key area is the Problem statement. I have been in meetings where we have taken hours to agree a problem statement. It should be SMART, refer to a process output, not attempt to describe the solution etc…
We know that everything is a process. So I encountered the “field engineer” and the “customer billing” processes both with defects.
So here is where I need guidance. 
I suspect I’m just the squeaky wheel so they probably wouldn’t.  But if by chance the telecom provider decided to launch a project they may start by defining the problem e.g.

We have received over 1000 complaints of customers being charged for engineering callouts in the last 3 months. 
And a few months later they would end-up with a message to the call centre to always inform staff to tell customers that they will incur a call-out charge. Great job done, problem solved. I suspect I am not giving enough credit to a potential Six Sigma team here, but it illustrates the point.
But I had loads of defects of which one may be improved. So the point I am coming too is this. If we get the problem statement wrong the whole project is liable to get a poor result. So it would seem that before we can rush into any DMAIC projects we need to do considerable ground-work to thoroughly understand our customers and the sheer variety and opportunity for defects. This could be through tools like Voice of Customer, CTQ-tree, QFD, and FMEA. Its as though there is a major stage pre-DMAIC where you invest in building the infrastructure and a clear understanding of the customer and all the issues they face in doing business with you. 
If so, this pre-DMAIC stage is not very well communicated in the training or literature. Please let me know what is wrong in my thinking. ]]></description>
			
			<author><![CDATA[Robin Barnwell]]></author>
			
			<category>
			<![CDATA[Methodology]]>
			</category>
			<pubDate>Fri, 20 Oct 2006 09:07:08 -0800</pubDate>
		</item>

		<item>
			<title><![CDATA[Six Sigma Blogs: The Ultimate Accolade]]></title>
			<link>http://blogs.isixsigma.com/archive/the_ultimate_accolade.html</link>
			<description><![CDATA[Yesterday (9th October 2006) I heard that Edmund Phelps was awarded the 2006 Nobel Prize for Economics for his theories developed in the 1960’s on the interplay between inflation expectations and unemployment. This showed that there is a "natural" rate of unemployment, a level below which inflation pressures are likely to intensify. His theories led to increased vigilance against inflation at the Federal Reserve and the world’s other major central banks. What an achievement.
From my days at Siebel, I felt a significant reason I worked for a world-class business was because Michael Spence, winner of 2001 Nobel Prize for Economics, was on the board of directors. To pick-up on Michael Cyger’s blog, From Good to Great Six Sigma, these are great people. The quality hall of fame shows industry greats, Deming, Shewhart, Juran &amp; Ishikawa to name a few. 
But the Six Sigma community celebrates projects, teamwork and delivering best practise as shown in the Six Sigma Excellence Awards. Should we recognise and celebrate those individuals who demonstrate greatness in our industry? There are many potential candidates, Peters, Welch, Smith, Leahy and Womack &amp; Jones. I think we should have an individual award for outstanding contribution to quality.]]></description>
			
			<author><![CDATA[Robin Barnwell]]></author>
			
			<category>
			<![CDATA[Leadership]]>
			</category>
			<pubDate>Wed, 11 Oct 2006 12:50:53 -0800</pubDate>
		</item>

		<item>
			<title><![CDATA[Six Sigma Blogs: Read all about it!]]></title>
			<link>http://blogs.isixsigma.com/archive/read_all_about_it.html</link>
			<description><![CDATA[During my recent travels, I was passing through London on the way to Bristol and bought a copy of the London Evening Standard to pass the time on the tube (subway) from Liverpool Street to Paddington. 
On leaving Liverpool Street I read the front-page headline, “£40m tube refit sends out the wrong signals”. A five-month shutdown of the Waterloo and City train line was agreed because the line was breaking down virtually every day, frequently because of signal failures. The £40m upgrade programme did not cover the replacement of signals, which have repeatedly failed since the line was reopened. Brian Cooke, London’s passenger watchdog said, “I am absolutely astounded by this admission that the signalling system was not renewed”.
At Kingscross I read, “Just one in eight British Airways flights from Heathrow Terminal 1 took off on time”. The timings of departures for the week ending 17 September show 12 per cent of flights were on schedule.
At Baker Street I read, “London shoppers are facing a shortage of organic food.” Industry experts warned of an impending crisis with many farmers unwilling to convert to organic methods. Sainsbury’s CEO said supermarkets were facing a “significant challenge” in trying to secure organic milk supplies. 
Three different business issues that each have a direct impact on the customer experience. 
Now what I am NOT saying is that these businesses do not put the customer at the heart of their thinking and always strive to deliver quality. I’m also not too interested in what the actual root-causes are. I imagine there are perfectly good reasons for these issues.
What did interest me was the concept of journalism and its overlap with Lean Six Sigma.
Journalism is a discipline of collecting, analyzing, verifying, and presenting news regarding current events, trends, issues and people.
I suspect, Lean Six Sigma is the nearest you get to a journalist in business (marketing maybe?).  We are frequently discovering major issues that we report to our sponsors. However some of these are kept confidential for very good reason. We share our process news, both good &amp; bad with our process owners. But what we do, that no journalist would, is to resolve and improve the issues we uncover. We find and fix issues.

 ]]></description>
			
			<author><![CDATA[Robin Barnwell]]></author>
			
			<category>
			<![CDATA[General]]>
			</category>
			<pubDate>Wed, 27 Sep 2006 06:08:01 -0800</pubDate>
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		<item>
			<title><![CDATA[Six Sigma Blogs: What makes a satisfied customer?]]></title>
			<link>http://blogs.isixsigma.com/archive/what_makes_a_satisfied_customer.html</link>
			<description><![CDATA[Here is further article on the use of IT in six sigma projects.  
We are all familiar with using analytical tools such as DOE, regression, and control charts for inferential statistics to model and predict behaviour. One IT tool I have recently had the benefit of using being decision trees. Let me explain.
Take for example a mock-up satisfaction survey with a range of questions spanning relationship management, strategic fit, product quality, and after-sales service. Customers rate their expectation and your performance against each question. The final question of the survey being, what is your overall level of satisfaction? 
When it comes to analysis it is normal to develop descriptive statistics such as magic-quadrants and spider-diagrams. 



What if we asked the question, what makes a satisfied customer? Here we can use a decision tree to discover the answer. Imagine the conventional equation Y=f(x) where Y is the overall satisfaction and x the various survey questions. A decision tree will firstly, similar to regression, identify the statistical significance of each question.

In this mock-up strategic fit and after sales are significant to overall satisfaction. However product quality and relationship management show no impact on overall satisfaction. When we ran a real survey we found this type of result counterintuitive until you think about this from a Kano analysis standpoint. It doesn’t matter how good the offering is for these questions, the customer considers them must be factors not delight factors. For example a web site may be available 24x7 but a customer expects this, it wont get you an excellent satisfaction rating.
For this mock-up I have used just 4 questions. It is not unusual in this type of survey to have over 20 questions so having an IT tool immediately identify the significant questions is useful. So lets see the decision tree for Strategic Fit.

The root node shows the distribution of overall satisfaction scores and the child nodes show how Strategic Fit splits. This spilt can be described as English rules such as:

If Strategic Fit is Poor there is a 100 percent chance that Overall Satisfaction will be Poor.
If Strategic Fit is Acceptable there is a 95 percent chance that Overall Satisfaction will be Acceptable and a 5 percent chance that Overall Satisfaction will be Poor.
If Strategic Fit is Excellent there is a 3 percent chance that Overall Satisfaction will be Acceptable and a 97 percent chance that Overall Satisfaction will be Excellent.
So from decision trees we can identify the statistically significant factors that may affect customer satisfaction and the scores we need to obtain to impact the satisfaction level. We can even predict a customer’s satisfaction level by reviewing the answers to a vital few questions.
The decision tree software came from Angoss Software Corporation if you would like to take a look.]]></description>
			
			<author><![CDATA[Robin Barnwell]]></author>
			
			<category>
			<![CDATA[General&nbsp;,&nbsp;Methodology]]>
			</category>
			<pubDate>Tue, 19 Sep 2006 14:14:59 -0800</pubDate>
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		<item>
			<title><![CDATA[Six Sigma Blogs: What is your destiny?]]></title>
			<link>http://blogs.isixsigma.com/archive/what_is_your_destiny.html</link>
			<description><![CDATA[In my last blog I asked readers to comment on the core reasons for project failure. Well having waded through the flood of 10 responses (thank you all) here is what you said. Projects were split 50:50 between manufacturing and transactional with improving satisfaction levels and reducing costs the main objectives. But what I was principally after were the reasons for project failure. These I have classified into three groups. 
The first two reasons were project issues (scope, time-frame, resources) and external events. But the main reason offered for project failure was buy-in from your management and colleagues. I was left thinking, “this is not enough”, I was looking for a root-cause. Why did they no have management buy-in? Could it be poor communications, lack of alignment to strategic objectives, insufficient benefits, manager moving job?
I was reminded of a story from one of the Star Trek films, can’t remember which one. When Captain Kirk was in star academy training there was a practical exercise all students had to do. The exercise was designed so you always failed no matter what strategy you applied. So when it was Captain Kirk’s turn he flew his spaceship hundreds of parsecs in the opposite direction and so completely avoided the exercise and certain failure. Could the same be applied? Could you predict project failure in the first place? Well possibly.
I researched the Internet only to produce no clear answer. It was my MBB who hit the spot with an article from the Harvard Business Review. A recent study of a few hundred change projects had identified the key dimensions that describe project success &amp; failure. The dimensions being:

D - Duration between formal project reviews (toll-gates?)
I - Integrity and skills of the project team
C1 - Commitment and support of senior management
C2 - Commitment and support of people affected in the process
E - Effort required beyond the normal day-to-day work
Score your project from 1 (Best) to 4 (Worst) in each dimension and use the formulae:
DICE Score = D + 2 * I + 2 * C1 + C2 + E
A score between 7 and 14 means you are likely to succeed, anything over 14 should ring the alarm bells. The original research came out of Boston Consulting Group. So if past experience can be used as a predictor for future performance it may be worth a look. I have started to score my project initiatives to see if it works. 
Still no nearer the true underlying root-causes for lack of commitment and support. Good luck with all your projects!]]></description>
			
			<author><![CDATA[Robin Barnwell]]></author>
			
			<category>
			<![CDATA[General&nbsp;,&nbsp;Leadership&nbsp;,&nbsp;Management&nbsp;,&nbsp;Methodology]]>
			</category>
			<pubDate>Thu, 24 Aug 2006 08:08:21 -0800</pubDate>
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		<item>
			<title><![CDATA[Six Sigma Blogs: Process improvement gone mad]]></title>
			<link>http://blogs.isixsigma.com/archive/process_improvement_gone_mad.html</link>
			<description><![CDATA[I have recently moved to the east of England (Norwich) and one of the first things I did was join the library. Now, every library I have used had a simple process for borrowing books. The book details are recorded and the return date stamped at the front of the book. Sound straightforward? Well not if a process improvement team gets involved!
Here a new process has been deployed. The book details are recorded and a printed slip with the return date inserted at the front of the book. I asked the librarian, why change a process that works? She said this was to improve the speed of getting books processed. However she thought it slowed things down and a few librarians had resigned in protest. Of course when I got home I had lost the paper slip and had to phone the library to confirm the return date. 
This all got me thinking. I bet there are other unsuccessful process improvement projects out there. Projects that make ridiculous improvements or cost more than they save or just get abandoned and people don’t like to talk about them. I imagine even that model of business excellence, GE, has had projects that have been quietly forgotten about. What I thought was, what are the root causes for unsuccessful process improvement projects, the 5-why’s?
What better way to find out than to ask the readers. So I have designed a small online survey that is completely anonymous and allows you to describe an unsuccessful project and why you think it failed. If I get enough responses I will report the findings. Please take a few moments to follow the link below and describe your experiences. 
Online Survey Link]]></description>
			
			<author><![CDATA[Robin Barnwell]]></author>
			
			<category>
			<![CDATA[General&nbsp;,&nbsp;Methodology]]>
			</category>
			<pubDate>Mon, 14 Aug 2006 11:04:41 -0800</pubDate>
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		<item>
			<title><![CDATA[Six Sigma Blogs: Greetings Earthlings]]></title>
			<link>http://blogs.isixsigma.com/archive/greetings_earthlings.html</link>
			<description><![CDATA[Coming from an IT background I am fluent in Techie. I feel right at home talking about NAT, BIOS, ERD, PERL, API, DHCP, IMAP, SMTP, SNMP and so on. With the right audience I can have rapid conversations in what may well sound like utter nonsense. But equally when working with a non-IT person I know I need to slow-down and actively think about how to put points across. Admittedly I still make mistakes.
I am now quite confident in Sigma. I got a feel for the lingo e.g. VOC, DOE, ANOVA, COPQ, and MSA. I may still wonder about some of the depths of statistical analysis but I can bluff my way through a conversation.
However Techie is an arcane language like Medical &amp; Legal. Sigma is a business language. It should be a lingua franca. Take a look at the moniker, Six Sigma, being six standard deviations from the centreline. Take a look at Six Sigma overviews that start with a wonderful diagram of a bell-curve and talk about 3.4 defects per million items. It might make people think it’s a complex statistical something or other?
However, Six Sigma has become a global phenomenon directly focussed on business and achieving business excellence. So something must be going right. I just wish we could be better at conversing in a language that our audience understands and can act on first time without having to have a second explanation.
So as the little green men say, “Greetings Earthlings I am from the planet Sigma take me to your sponsor”.
 ]]></description>
			
			<author><![CDATA[Robin Barnwell]]></author>
			
			<category>
			<![CDATA[General&nbsp;,&nbsp;Leadership]]>
			</category>
			<pubDate>Fri, 28 Jul 2006 06:41:36 -0800</pubDate>
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		<item>
			<title><![CDATA[Six Sigma Blogs: The Long Game]]></title>
			<link>http://blogs.isixsigma.com/archive/the_long_game.html</link>
			<description><![CDATA[In a world where I could call myself the Senior Master of the Highest Order of Black Belts, I have always been a little circumspect of using the Black Belt handle. So after 18 months the time has come. I can now call myself a Six Sigma Black Belt! I have been accredited by our businesses MBB’s and receive my award next week. 
Have I earned it? Well I think the answer is yes. I have helped implement the infrastructure (built the web-site, organised the conferences, managed the training etc.), provided project mentoring, assisted in delivering training and most importantly delivered strategic projects. But I think the single most important reason is the sheer amount of knowledge I have gained through studying, in my own time, the ASQ syllabus. I now feel I have a good grounding in the subject.
When I first started I thought gaining the ASQ certification was critical and went hell-for-leather to acquire as much knowledge as I could to fast track a certification. However I became much more relaxed when I realised that I was in this for the long-term. I could push hard and get an early certification or I could use the syllabus as a catalyst for doing deep-dives into complex material. There are parts of the syllabus that I know absolutely nothing e.g. axiomatic design, TRIZ, and response surface methodology. Is it stopping me being successful? No. Do I want to learn it? Yes, at some point.
So I hope there will come a point on my journey when I will take the ASQ exam. 
As the world’s greatest master black belt said: “It is like a finger pointing toward the moon. Don’t concentrate on the finger or you will miss all that heavenly glory.”]]></description>
			
			<author><![CDATA[Robin Barnwell]]></author>
			
			<category>
			<![CDATA[General&nbsp;,&nbsp;Methodology]]>
			</category>
			<pubDate>Thu, 06 Jul 2006 09:00:08 -0800</pubDate>
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		<item>
			<title><![CDATA[Six Sigma Blogs: Analysis using Maps (Part 1)]]></title>
			<link>http://blogs.isixsigma.com/archive/analysis_using_maps_part_1.html</link>
			<description><![CDATA[



Here is another example of the use of IT in projects. I would like to describe how useful mapping is in data analysis. I will use a fictitious scenario. 
Sigma Industries have a fantastic product that VOC research says should be a phenomenal success. But the problem is product sales are not meeting expectations. As part of initial analysis the project team wish to estimate potential market size and Sigma Industries’ market share.
They have one year of customer sales with details on each customer address. Using a mapping utility these addresses are converted into longitude and latitude and plotted.  This is a start but shows far too much information (thousands of customer dots). 

To see the wood from the trees these individual customers are aggregated into regional grouping using postcode sectors (like zipcodes). The customer hot spots are shown through colouring.

But we wanted to understand the overall market size and our share. So a 3rd party data set is bought containing all potential customers. A ratio is calculated of actual to potential customers. The information is displayed as a bar chart with market size in gold and the market share in black.

Hope this gives a good initial impression of the value of mapping in data analysis. I have found that once the core concepts are understood, it’s all very straightforward and new application keep appearing.
More to come in a subsequent blog.
  
 
 
]]></description>
			
			<author><![CDATA[Robin Barnwell]]></author>
			
			<category>
			<![CDATA[General&nbsp;,&nbsp;Methodology]]>
			</category>
			<pubDate>Tue, 20 Jun 2006 10:20:01 -0800</pubDate>
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		<item>
			<title><![CDATA[Six Sigma Blogs: Go on Daddy!]]></title>
			<link>http://blogs.isixsigma.com/archive/go_on_daddy.html</link>
			<description><![CDATA[Lean Sigma engagements mean I am frequently travelling around the country with many nights in a hotel. This typically means full English breakfast, canteen lunch and hotel dinner. Unfortunately after 18-months it has started to show and I have gone from lean-mean change machine to chubby-mean change machine. 
Imagine the shock on returning home after a weeks-long travel to find a set of scales, measuring tape and two beaming children. They had decided I was too fat. The elder had made a poster at school: - “Go on Daddy!”. The younger has drawn a picture of me on a treadmill. I was duly weighed and my waist measured and the results put on a chart to check weekly progress. 
So I am trying to watch what I eat and do make an effort to use the hotel gym.
But this got me thinking; it was a long journey in the car. The project team had found their project (me) and were measuring two process outputs. What are my key process inputs? What is my process capability? What is my goal? What is my improvement plan? Can I really achieve long-term sustainable results?
What is the size of opportunity here? Picking -up on J P Spencer’s blog, it would seem the principles of Lean Sigma have unlimited potential in the diet industry. A brief search on-line gave no real hits on “Six Sigma Diet”. I think a business using Lean Sigma with a well-structured workbook, wall-chart, reading material and web site would be of great appeal. Maybe the healthcare contingent would like to comment?]]></description>
			
			<author><![CDATA[Robin Barnwell]]></author>
			
			<category>
			<![CDATA[General]]>
			</category>
			<pubDate>Mon, 05 Jun 2006 07:02:40 -0800</pubDate>
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		<item>
			<title><![CDATA[Six Sigma Blogs: On-line Surveys]]></title>
			<link>http://blogs.isixsigma.com/archive/on_line_surveys.html</link>
			<description><![CDATA[I have spent my entire career in IT and feel privileged to have had the opportunity to work in such a fast moving industry and to see the changes from propriety mainframe to open systems to windows and now the Internet. So I have a tendency to want to apply IT to the projects I run. Through my blog I would like to share these experiences and demonstrate that there is more than Minitab out there. The first of these is the use of on-line surveys.
In my last blog I covered national quality awards and their perceived value to this community (results below).  For this I used an on-line survey to gather people’s views. From a kano-analysis standpoint, I now take for granted that I can construct and launch a worldwide survey in an afternoon! 

I have found on-line surveys to be easy to use and highly useful tool in my day-to-day work. New uses keep appearing. To illustrate their power examples of where I have applied them include:
TrainingI use as a booking form for GB/BB courses. They are quick to fill-out and the booking is immediately available. I use for gathering feedback after a course and have the statistics immediately available for review.
Customer satisfactionWorking in a transactional environment the Internet is ubiquitous and asking people to reply to a survey from an e-mail link works. A big difference I have found with going on-line is the comments. With paper surveys questions like, “Any other comments” may get a couple of sentences at best; move on-line and you will get paragraphs of feedback.
General data collectionDuring projects when I need to gather data I may construct a survey as this reduces the number of steps in gathering the data. Rather than re-keying from paper the information is keyed direct and is immediately ready to start analysis.
So the results of my National Quality Award survey. I ran the survey as a test to see how many responses I would get. It was 10 (which is not very good for this blog) so I am not going to give a detailed analysis:

o Respondents split evenly between manufacturing and transactional deployments and most were in North America.
o Most respondents had never considered a national quality award and only a couple of people were actively pursing.
o The majority would not champion an award in their business. But we had near unanimity that an award would have significant benefits and be worth the investment.
I might try running a survey again in a future blog and see if more people respond.
ThanksRobin
]]></description>
			
			<author><![CDATA[Robin Barnwell]]></author>
			
			<category>
			<![CDATA[General]]>
			</category>
			<pubDate>Fri, 26 May 2006 07:38:21 -0800</pubDate>
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		<item>
			<title><![CDATA[Six Sigma Blogs: Who is Malcolm Baldrige?]]></title>
			<link>http://blogs.isixsigma.com/archive/who_is_malcolm_baldrige.html</link>
			<description><![CDATA[Malcolm Baldrige was US Secretary of Commerce (1981-1987) and a leader in quality management. He helped create the US Quality Improvement Act of 1987 and in his honour the annual award is named after him (Malcolm Baldrige National Quality Award). The US President presents the award. 
The US is not unique in having a national quality award. In 1951 Japan established the Deming Prize. The United Nations lists 75 countries with national quality awards from Russia to Brazil from Singapore to Canada. These awards are backed-up by robust and proven methodologies such as the European Excellence Model and the US Criteria for Performance Excellence. This is serious stuff.
Living in the UK I have no idea the degree to which US businesses and their leaders aspire to win the Malcolm Baldrige award but I would imagine it moves quality high up the business agenda. I have discovered that we in the UK have a national quality award as well. When I look at some of the previous UK winners e.g. Rover and ICL it’s a bit of a worry. But it's not entirely fair as a number of winners are strong independent businesses.
So where am I going with this? As Lean Six Sigma practitioners we are at the vanguard of creating a culture of business excellence. National awards are designed exactly for this purpose. So I am interested to understand their perceived value to see if I should review them in-depth. To answer the question I have set-up a small online survey to gauge peoples opinions.
If you click on the link below you will be taken to my online survey page. I have no idea what the response rate will be or of the accuracy of the responses. But I thought I would try it all the same. I will keep the survey open for a week or so depending on responses and will then publish the results. Click here to run online survey 
ThanksRobin]]></description>
			
			<author><![CDATA[Robin Barnwell]]></author>
			
			<category>
			<![CDATA[General]]>
			</category>
			<pubDate>Fri, 12 May 2006 07:49:50 -0800</pubDate>
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		<item>
			<title><![CDATA[Six Sigma Blogs: It's data Jim, but not as we know it]]></title>
			<link>http://blogs.isixsigma.com/archive/its_data_jim_but_not_as_we_know_it.html</link>
			<description><![CDATA[During my black belt training I was introduced to the true scope of the normal distribution. Here was a distribution found extensively throughout nature and industry.  It is a principle building block for the six-sigma methodology from which a number of our essential statistical tools are based including all of the t-tests. We discovered that if our customer specifications were more than six standard deviations from the mean we would be rocking.

 
It was with great expectation that I got back to the office and started looking at our data. Following the basic approach of getting familiar with the data through histogram, time-series and normality test. I was surprised to find during my first project that none of the data was normally distributed and this has continued through my projects. I can count on the fingers of one hand the number of normal distributions I have found.

 
So what could be wrong? Admittedly I work in a heavily transactional environment looking at business processes and data drawn mainly from database driven business applications. Could I be looking at too small a sample? Not likely as I extract millions of records at a time for analysis. Could it be special causes? Possibly but I have tried stripping out the outliers and stratifying across many dimensions and still the distribution plots match none of the usual suspects. My “Individual Distribution Identification” does sometimes get a hit on 3-Parameter Weibull but that does not help much. Could I be looking at the wrong type of data? Possibly but a lot of it has been time-based and financial.

 
Either way I have found I mainly use the tools associated with the binomial distribution and the non-parametric tests and have missed out on the rich-set of tools built around the normal distribution. As my understanding progresses I hope this will change (e.g. start looking at data transformations).

 
So with some positive spin I could say I have discovered the Business Data Probability Distribution but it wouldn’t wash with this audience. It may be better to paraphrase our hero of fact-based decision making and say “Its data Jim, but not as we know it”.
 
 ]]></description>
			
			<author><![CDATA[Robin Barnwell]]></author>
			
			<category>
			<![CDATA[General]]>
			</category>
			<pubDate>Tue, 02 May 2006 01:55:20 -0800</pubDate>
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		<item>
			<title><![CDATA[Six Sigma Blogs: About Blogger: Robin Barnwell]]></title>
			<link>http://blogs.isixsigma.com/archive/about_blogger_robin_barnwell.html</link>
			<description><![CDATA[Robin Barnwell
Process Improvement Manager
Aviva PLC
 
Robin Barnwell is a Process Improvement Manager for Aviva and is based in Norwich, UK. He has spent his entire career in IT principally involved in data warehousing and the delivery of business systems before becoming involved in Lean Six Sigma. 
 
He works in a small core team that is focused on adding value through the delivery of strategic projects and training &amp; coaching green/black belts across the business
 
He first became involved in Lean Six Sigma (Dec-2004) as a subject matter expert on a high-profile project. At the start of the project he confidently predicted the root-cause but found this was wrong. As the project progressed and through the methodical and data-driven approach the true root-cause was found. This was a moment of truth and Robin decided to embark on this new career. He was accredited his Black Belt in July 2006 and ASQ CSSBB certified in March 2008. 
 ]]></description>
			
			<author><![CDATA[Robin Barnwell]]></author>
			
			<category>
			<![CDATA[Blogger Bios]]>
			</category>
			<pubDate>Tue, 02 May 2006 01:54:00 -0800</pubDate>
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