<?xml version="1.0" encoding="iso-8859-1"?>
<rss version="2.0">
	<channel>
		<title>Six Sigma Blogs at the iSixSigma Blogosphere</title>
		<link>http://blogs.isixsigma.com/RSS2.asp?action=full</link>
		<description>Six Sigma Blogs at the iSixSigma Blogosphere</description>
		<language>en-us</language>
		<copyright>Copyright 2004-2009 iSixSigma</copyright>
		<managingEditor>blogosphere@isixsigma.com</managingEditor>
		<webMaster>blogosphere@isixsigma.com</webMaster>
		<generator>iSixSigma Blog 1.0.5</generator>
		<lastBuildDate>Fri, 20 Nov 2009 14:50:02 -0800</lastBuildDate>
    	<ttl>60</ttl>

		<item>
			<title><![CDATA[Six Sigma Blogs: A Spoonful of Sugar]]></title>
			<link>http://blogs.isixsigma.com/archive/a_spoonful_of_sugar.html</link>
			<description><![CDATA[I've been thinking a lot lately about resistance to change.  The Rogers Adoption / Innovation curve (innovators, early adopters, early majority, late majority, laggards) is referenced in some form by most people involved in change management.
Now, I'm not an innovator myself.  My special form of creativity doesn't manifest itself by coming up with new ideas that no one else has thought of, or completely new ways to do things.  I'd tag myself as being in the early adopter or maybe early majority categories most of the time.
So it can be a stretch for me to work with the late majority or laggards.  "Don't you know this will be good for you?" I ask incredulously.  "Can't you see all the benefits and advantages that you will have once you've made this change?"  I confess that I get very impatient sometimes.
Fortunately I have great team members that a) calm me down and prevent me from sending career-limiting emails, and b) remind me that you catch more flies with honey than with vinegar.  Or, as the movie musical "Mary Poppins" character sings, "Just a spoonful of sugar helps the medicine go down."
(Of course, as she's singing that, she's snapping her fingers and making the children's clothes go back into the drawers without any effort on anyone's part.)
But in the real world, it's good to ask ourselves what's in it for the stakeholders, and try to see what would make the change more palatable.  The trick is, it has to been seen as a value-added return even before the gains are realized.  For example, a promise that the work will be easier might not be believed, even if you know it will be true.
Have you found a good way to engage stakeholders who might need a little extra encouragement to buy into a change plan?  It would be most helpful if you would share your experiences!]]></description>
			
			<author><![CDATA[Sue Kozlowski]]></author>
			
			<category>
			<![CDATA[Change Management&nbsp;,&nbsp;Leadership&nbsp;,&nbsp;Management]]>
			</category>
			<pubDate>Mon, 16 Nov 2009 13:20:37 -0800</pubDate>
		</item>

		<item>
			<title><![CDATA[Six Sigma Blogs: With Thanks]]></title>
			<link>http://blogs.isixsigma.com/archive/with_thanks.html</link>
			<description><![CDATA[I had a very nice phone call today, from a colleague who had chatted with me earlier about a current project.  She called to say thanks for allowing her to bounce ideas around, which helped her clarify some things about her approach to the process.
Naturally I felt good to receive this feedback, and it made me think about my many associates who are in the process improvement community with me.  Sometimes it feels like skiing downhill, but sometimes it feels like I'm trying to go uphill without the ski lift.  It's during the tough times that I really rely on my fellow improvers to help me see a clear direction.
My colleague said that she had felt lost in the trees and confused about the path out of the forest.  I know I've felt like that sometimes too, and I told her that I'd probably be calling her soon so she could return the favor!
And, it reminded me to say a heartfelt "thanks" to the many people who have helped me to see more clearly when my own path seemed confused.
And also to say a sincere "thank you" to those of you who have read, and contributed to, this blog over the past three years.  It's hard to believe that this will be my 100th post, which milestone I would not have reached without your continuing support and responses!  I hope that you will keep on giving me your feedback - your conversations have been spirited, inspiring, generous, truthful, and above all educational!
With thanks for your time, your sharing of feedback with the iSixSigma blogosphere, and your efforts on behalf of your customers,
 Sue K.]]></description>
			
			<author><![CDATA[Sue Kozlowski]]></author>
			
			<category>
			<![CDATA[Change Management&nbsp;,&nbsp;Leadership]]>
			</category>
			<pubDate>Tue, 20 Oct 2009 14:19:50 -0800</pubDate>
		</item>

		<item>
			<title><![CDATA[Six Sigma Blogs: Alice in Processland]]></title>
			<link>http://blogs.isixsigma.com/archive/alice_in_processland.html</link>
			<description><![CDATA[A quote from Alice's Adventures in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll (Charles Lutwidge Dodgson), 1865:
"The White Rabbit put on his spectacles.  'Where shall I begin, please your Majesty?' he asked.  'Begin at the beginning,' the King said gravely, 'and go on till you come to the end: then stop.'"
I am sure I'm not the only one who as asked, "Where does this process begin?" only to find a dozen or so different answers, depending on who is asked.  Just how far back doyou go into the decision-making that may trigger a process, and the factors that influence the decision, and the issues that led to the factors being important, etc. etc. etc.?
And, where does the process stop?  For a product, is it when the customer receives the goods?  When they use the item for the first time?  When they finish using the item?  Or, for a service, when they receive the service, or when they utilize the benefits of the service if that's at a later time?
This may seem simple, but, in practice I've seen a lot of conversations get into a circular mode about just what step should be considered the start or trigger for the process.  I'm just wondering if anyone has any words of wisdom, from their experience with process mapping and process analysis - and would you like to share?
 ]]></description>
			
			<author><![CDATA[Sue Kozlowski]]></author>
			
			<category>
			<![CDATA[Change Management]]>
			</category>
			<pubDate>Thu, 24 Sep 2009 11:31:54 -0800</pubDate>
		</item>

		<item>
			<title><![CDATA[Six Sigma Blogs: The Religion Behind Mandated Leadership]]></title>
			<link>http://blogs.isixsigma.com/archive/the_religion_behind_mandated_leadership.html</link>
			<description><![CDATA[If there’s one thing I’ve noticed about the effect the current economy is having on businesses, it’s the polarization of Six Sigma. Programs have either been seen as the reverent coming of the messiah or the two-bit television evangelist that needs to be turned off and forgotten about. For those companies that feel they are struggling for airtime, discussions about revitalization and redeployment have been preached by change agents to the senior leadership team. One of the common beliefs in these sermons focuses on the mandate to promote only those with Six Sigma belt certifications into future leadership roles. The belief is if the converted are the ones in charge, the religion of Six Sigma will continue to be institutionalized within the fold. 
As a knight who chivalrously crusades to protect the reputation of Six Sigma, I have to tell you this belief is not a pragmatic approach to keep face time in the pulpit. First of all, the person in charge to drive the mandate is usually not someone in a Human Resources or Continuous Improvement role, but rather an executive leader, such as the CEO and as a result, the mandate becomes a function of the person (and not the program). I can think of several companies in the past that required future leaders to be at least Green Belt trained only to abandon the requirement when a new executive regime was put in place. What kind of message does this say about your Six Sigma program when two managers had to take different pathways to get to the same role? 
Rather, companies who want to maintain a strong process improvement mindset need to take a two pronged approach. First, there should be a requirement for leaders to have Six Sigma executive awareness training. The training could be similar to a Yellow Belt package but should also involve concepts such as Lean, Practical Problem Solving, ISO, etc. Keep in mind this mandate is different than requiring leaders to be a Green or Black Belt. Senior leadership needs to have understanding, appreciation and respect for the Six Sigma program. They also need in-depth coaching on their role as champions which is generally not taught in Green/Black Belt courses. 
The second part of the approach to revitalization is an assessment to ensure the employee is competent before moving into a leader role. Things to ask to determine a supportive future leader (as you would in a Six Sigma project) are:

Can the employee clearly describe problems, lead a scope of work to resolve them, and achieve results? 
Can the employee work as part of a team? 
Can the employee make sound decisions based of the effective analysis of fact based data? 
Is the work done by the employee sustainable and embedded within the company?
Being a in a Green or Black Belt role can answer these questions, however the mandate to require this designation is not a poke yoke substitution to a solid leadership competency assessment. If these competencies are truly the way a person works everyday, you know they are legitimate future leaders who will be receptive to a data driven problem solving approach (and not someone who is getting a certificate for a one off project they begrudgingly complete).  Also, companies may have other roles such as Lean Coaches, Project Managers who use the PrinceII methodology, etc. 
By creating a Six Sigma mandate to move ahead, resentment occurs invoking competition and before you know it, the organization has a quality jihad on its hands. 
Having a Six Sigma certification is a nice to have, however it does not guarantee you are a true believer nor does it guarantee to the organization someone with the insight of divine right has ascended to the leadership throne and will continue to preach a Six Sigma message. Revitalization can occur if the message is one of respect for complimenting initiatives. Belt mandates for leaders only lead to purgatory with future leaders tying pages of their Six Sigma manuals and certificates into ropes to climb into management heaven.]]></description>
			
			<author><![CDATA[Holly Hawkins]]></author>
			
			<category>
			<![CDATA[Change Management]]>
			</category>
			<pubDate>Mon, 31 Aug 2009 23:14:13 -0800</pubDate>
		</item>

		<item>
			<title><![CDATA[Six Sigma Blogs: Will the Real Process Owner Please Stand Up?]]></title>
			<link>http://blogs.isixsigma.com/archive/will_the_real_process_owner_please_stand_up.html</link>
			<description><![CDATA[When I was leading a department, I never thought of myself as a process owner.  It wasn't in my job description, and I never heard anyone used the term.  It's one of those useful concepts that I wish I had known, prior to my Six Sigma and Lean education.
Here's my working definition:  The process owner is that leader who is closest to the process itself, who has responsibility for achieving the expected outcome of the process, both before and after an improvement project.
So now, I try to introduce the term right away and use it frequently so that everyone knows what the role is, in respect to a project (and afterwards).  I also try to spend extra time with the process owner if they are new to the role.  Even then, though, it's hard sometimes to get across the continuing expectations.  A statement that I hear frequently is, "I'm glad that the project is over - now I can quit being the process owner!"
Have any of you faced this challenge, or is it more clearcut in some industries than in others?  Have you had to do extra education or mentoring of someone who was not sure they were a process owner - for either a project or a process?  Do you have a different definition of process owner, that's been helpful for you?
It would be great to hear your thoughts.]]></description>
			
			<author><![CDATA[Sue Kozlowski]]></author>
			
			<category>
			<![CDATA[Change Management&nbsp;,&nbsp;Leadership&nbsp;,&nbsp;Management]]>
			</category>
			<pubDate>Mon, 24 Aug 2009 12:38:33 -0800</pubDate>
		</item>

		<item>
			<title><![CDATA[Six Sigma Blogs: My Favorite Tools]]></title>
			<link>http://blogs.isixsigma.com/archive/my_favorite_tools.html</link>
			<description><![CDATA[Well, maybe I have more than one favorite tool - but there are 2 that are fun to use with a group.
One is sticky-note brainstorming.  It avoids the perils of the regular "everybody call out their ideas" brainstorming, because (a) you get 100% participation; (b) you can get LOTS of ideas in just a few minutes; (c) you don’t need a scribe to try to capture everything as multiple people are speaking quickly; (d) you avoid people being worried about "what will my boss think" about an idea; (e) it’s anonymous so people are braver; (f) you can put duplicates on top of one another and categorize with ease, just by moving them around.  Also (g) you can use colorful sticky-notes and make a cheerful impression rather than a boring one!
Secondly, if I’m using the group’s ideas to capture possible solutions, I really like to use an Impact/Effort Matrix.  You may have heard of this under another name - it’s a 2x2 matrix with Impact along one axis (High, Low) and Effort along the other (Easy, Hard).  I ask the group members to place the sticky notes in the appropriate category - if there’s doubt they can place them on the dividing line.  Then I can facilitate the group to ask, "Does this idea belong here?  Do we all agree that it’s High Impact (or whatever) and Easy to do?"  If not, we have a good discussion and end up with consensus.  It’s amazing how this helps to prioritize the efforts - we will definitely pursue the "High Impact, Easy" ideas; think about a plan for the "High Impact, Hard" ideas; see if we can catch some low hanging fruit with the "Low Impact, Easy" ideas; and forget about the "Low Impact, Hard" ideas.
These ideas can then be turned into action plans or placed in a parking lot as appropriate.  Using the sticky-note brainstorming to get 100% participation, and the Impact/Effort Matrix to prioritize ideas, results in better decision-making and better buy-in to the resulting plans.
What are your favorite change management / process improvement tools?]]></description>
			
			<author><![CDATA[Sue Kozlowski]]></author>
			
			<category>
			<![CDATA[Change Management&nbsp;,&nbsp;Leadership&nbsp;,&nbsp;Management]]>
			</category>
			<pubDate>Tue, 04 Aug 2009 08:33:35 -0800</pubDate>
		</item>

		<item>
			<title><![CDATA[Six Sigma Blogs: The Great Healthcare Debate]]></title>
			<link>http://blogs.isixsigma.com/archive/the_great_healthcare_debate.html</link>
			<description><![CDATA[While the iSixSigma.com site has been down, the rhetoric about "fixing healthcare" in the US has dramatically heated up.  "We need to take the waste out of healthcare!"  "We're paying too much for healthcare!"  "Everyone should get all the healthcare they need regardless of cost!"
Without getting into the political debate, let's just touch on these points from a quality perspective.
There's a balance between cost, speed and quality that's quite a challenge in healthcare.  For example, if I order $5000 worth of tests on day 1, and can tell you your diagnosis on day 2 and start treatment, what's that worth to you and your health (even if it turns out that 5 tests out of the 30 ordered didn't help with the diagnosis)?  How about taking the cost-effective route:  I'll order one test per day, evaluate the results, and then order the next test.  It may take me 21 days to figure it out, while you are waiting all the while, but hey! it did cost less!  So, in which example was there more waste???
Paying too much for healthcare... does that mean we are paying more than the value we receive, or just more than we desire to (or can afford to) pay?  Most of us a) don't know how much our healthcare actually costs; b) can't judge the quality of the medical care we receive; and c) won't haggle over the cost of an IV solution when the care of a loved one is at stake.  There's an emotional element of this debate that is not susceptible to logical reasoning.  We see this in all the stories of people who have gotten poor care or ran out of money or their insurance wouldn't cover a certain procedure.  If we try to "ration" care in the most logical way possible, we immediately run into the emotional (or moral, if you prefer) discussion about denying care to those who need it on a purely financial basis.  The factual and emotional issues are entangled as we debate this topic.  
Should everyone get the healthcare they need regardless of cost?  It's my personal opinion that provision of basic services, including healthcare, should be a function of an organized society.  But, it's not a "commodity" service like garbage collection, is it?  Since we do have to look to our tax-paying citizens and employers to pay for "healthcare for all" - the question of course is, how much should each of us contribute to this worthy cause?  And who decides how that money is to be used?
Having stirred the pot this morning, I will close by saying - it's a complex system!

There are no "specifications" for inputs (patients who need care come in all conditions and with variation in their genetic, mental, physical, experiential, cultural, economic, and social backgrounds); 
Processes are highly complex with many stakeholders and overlapping responsibilities
There is an expert-based culture of physician caregivers (now expanding slightly to other medical professionals);
Outcomes may not meet the patients' goals through no-one's fault (you can mostly blame our biologically-based life processes, I guess) but which may in some cases be due to poor care or non-compliance on the part of the patient (for example, not taking medications in the way they were prescribed).  
So I just caution you to think carefully about all the proposals that will be floated to "fix" the healthcare system, and don't jump to solutions too soon on this one.
Is healthcare in its current form in the US perfect?  NO!  But first I think we have to go back to quality basics and agree on who are the customers, and what is value-added to those customers.  I've seen many more "solutions" floated, than thoughtful consideration of just what it is we want to get to.  I encourage everyone to join this debate from the quality improvement perspective, and to lend your expertise to the discussion!
 
p.s.  It's good to be "back on the air" again!  Kudos to those at iSixSigma.com who have been working to resolve the issues that interrupted service over the past several weeks.]]></description>
			
			<author><![CDATA[Sue Kozlowski]]></author>
			
			<category>
			<![CDATA[Change Management&nbsp;,&nbsp;Lean&nbsp;,&nbsp;Management]]>
			</category>
			<pubDate>Mon, 27 Jul 2009 05:36:37 -0800</pubDate>
		</item>

		<item>
			<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>
		</item>

		<item>
			<title><![CDATA[Six Sigma Blogs: Pitbull or Peacenik - What’s Your Change Management Style?]]></title>
			<link>http://blogs.isixsigma.com/archive/pitbull_or_peacenik_whats_your_change_management_style.html</link>
			<description><![CDATA[My colleagues and I have often discussed which type of change manager gets more results, especially which type gets more results in our particular organization. We have a lot of pitbulls, who adopt a fairly confrontational stance when dealing with those who need to make a change. They sink their teeth into the data, make a bulletproof metric, and then proceed to beat their adversaries over the head until the metric moves. Performance is segmented and presented by person, not process. One group goes so far as to designate one general manager “Top Dog” and one “in the doghouse” (complete with a photo of the manager in a doghouse) on their metrics reporting portal each week. 
Seriously. I’m not making this up.
I’ve worked with people like this before – senior management tends to love having people like this around because they force issues, upset the status quo and make things generally uncomfortable for those who need to change. In other words, they do senior management’s dirty work for them.
Like true pitbulls, they don’t let go once they have their teeth into something. They make things happen, that’s for sure. Whether they are always the right things is another matter. 
On the other hand, you have consensus builders – the peacemakers. Short of bringing the guitar to meetings for a round of Kumbaya, they strive for accord. Never mind the fact that consensus means “what everyone can live with”, usually resulting in lowest common denominator solutions, instead of what’s best for the business or the customer. Peers often feel better in meetings led by these folks. They may not make things happen quickly, or make big things happen, but they tend to build a lot of support for whatever the team decides to do.
These are clearly extremes – most of us in the quality field probably have some of each, and have to exercise one over the other depending on the culture of our organizations, the personalities involved with the changes to be made, and the speed at which the changes are needed. These days, speed is probably more important in your firm than comfort – it is in mine.
At the end of the day, we have to be about results. Absolutely. Leadership should care about the process by which we achieve those results, though it often doesn’t.
So what’s your change management style? Has it changed during the economic downturn? Please post your thoughts in the comments section.]]></description>
			
			<author><![CDATA[James Considine]]></author>
			
			<category>
			<![CDATA[Change Management]]>
			</category>
			<pubDate>Wed, 22 Apr 2009 08:35:47 -0800</pubDate>
		</item>

		<item>
			<title><![CDATA[Six Sigma Blogs: More Than Advice]]></title>
			<link>http://blogs.isixsigma.com/archive/more_than_advice.html</link>
			<description><![CDATA[I've done a lot of informal coaching in my career - you know, the kind where you're in conversation and someone says, "Gee, Sue, can you give me advice on..." and I get to cheerfully dispense my words of wisdom and then wish them good luck with their problem.  Sometimes people seek me out and ask to talk over things with me, to help clarify an issue or opportunity.  That's also fun and from feedback I've received, people usually appreciate having me as a sounding board.
But I've recently been asked to take on a more formal coaching role with project leaders.  I won't be on the project teams, but I will meet with the project leaders to provide guidance.  Some of my leaders are experienced and some are new to the whole thing; some are using Six Sigma and others Lean.  Mostly I try to tell them things I wish I had known when I started in process improvement, and to give them good advice that they can take or leave at their discretion.  If they run into problems I try to help develop an approach with them.
I'm at ease about technical coaching - tools, methods, reports, etc., but this "soft side" is more of a challenge for me.  
As a "Driver" by nature I worry a lot about subconsciously trying to make them fit into the pattern that works for me, rather than letting them find their own way.  Should I "give them enough rope to hang themselves" and then help them pick up the pieces?  (I've been mentored this way myself and found it to be quite uncomfortable at the receiving end.  On the other hand, I did learn a lot!)  Or should I try to guide them on every foreseeable response and give them Plan A, B, and C for every contingency?  (Over-thinking?)  If they have a different personality style than I do, am I trying to make them more like me because that's what I'm comfortable with?  If I think they are going off-track, do I "give it to them straight" or tactfully share some hints on how it might work better the next time, so I don't discourage them too much?
For those of you who are experienced mentors, can you share any general advice on how to balance the "push" of helping the project leaders to get their project deliverables accomplished, and the "pull" of guiding, aiding, and supporting?]]></description>
			
			<author><![CDATA[Sue Kozlowski]]></author>
			
			<category>
			<![CDATA[Change Management&nbsp;,&nbsp;Leadership&nbsp;,&nbsp;Management]]>
			</category>
			<pubDate>Mon, 06 Apr 2009 09:57:53 -0800</pubDate>
		</item>

		<item>
			<title><![CDATA[Six Sigma Blogs: Is Healthcare the Next Big Thing?]]></title>
			<link>http://blogs.isixsigma.com/archive/is_healthcare_the_next_big_thing.html</link>
			<description><![CDATA[I've had a lot pf people asking me about healthcare lately.  As in, "Now that big corporations and the automotive companies are reeling, with the stimulus coming and promises of healthcare reform, isn't it a great time to move out of the manufacturing sector and into process improvement in healthcare?" 
Well, it's true that there are vast opportunities for improvement in healthcare.  No one has the corner on perfection in care processes (although we're all working madly on it, especially now that there's public posting of healthcare quality - check out "Hospital Compare") or in the support processes like patient accounting and billing.  If I had my way, there'd be an improvement professional as a permanent part of every department's budget.
But, just think a moment.  Who pays for healthcare in the US?  First of all, the federal government, which is desperately trying to shrink the amount it pays for healthcare even as it's talking about access for all.  Many hospitals have 40 - 60% of their revenues coming from Medicare and/or Medicaid.  Frequently the government reduces reimbursements with very little warning.  It's an interesting thing, these days, to try to budget for healthcare when your major source of revenue pays 10% - 15% less every six months or so.
Then, there is the second largest healthcare revenue source, and that would be employers.  Specifically, those same big corporations and automotive companies that are in a bit of trouble these days, along with their suppliers and vendors.  As these companies have massive layoffs, and shrink benefits for the remaining workers, what's the outcome?  People will tend to utilize preventative services less frequently (because of those big copays and deductibles).  And out-of-work employees have usually have a little coverage with COBRA (Consolidated Omnibus Budget Reconciliation Act) benefits, but then may have trouble paying the premiums - thousands of dollars a month.  Therefore, hospitals are bracing for huge increases in emergency care visits which will either be reimbursed at lower rates (Medicare / Medicaid) or not reimbursed at all.  So there will be less revenue there as well.
Now, back to those opportunities.  If you were a hospital executive, knowing that less-costly processes would have a positive impact on your contribution margin, wouldn't you invest heavily in the very people who can do this work for you?  Why wouldn't you want to have a trained group of healthcare Black Belts or Lean Practitioners at your hospital or healthcare company?
Well, because of the decrease in insurance revenue and the hit everyone's pension plan took with the stock market plunge, there just aren't enough dollars to fund everything that needs to be supported.  Hospital executives are having to make hard choices - and believe me, they'll lay almost anyone off before they lose nurses or other direct care staff.
So, while ideally every healthcare company and organization would be heavily into process improvement, the truth is that if you're trying to go from a manufacturing or transactional position into healthcare, it's almost like "out of the frying pan, into the fire."  Admittedly, I'm from Southeastern Michigan where we are really feeling the impact of the uncertainty in the automotive industry.  However, the economic downturn has affected just about everyone in healthcare, whether they were prudent with their pension fund investments or not.
As an optimist by nature, I'm sure we'll pull out of this slump and eventually be able to look on the bright side of life once again.  In the meantime, if you're looking for a healthcare position, do your research and speak with those already involved, so you go in forewarned and forearmed!]]></description>
			
			<author><![CDATA[Sue Kozlowski]]></author>
			
			<category>
			<![CDATA[Change Management&nbsp;,&nbsp;Leadership&nbsp;,&nbsp;Management]]>
			</category>
			<pubDate>Mon, 09 Mar 2009 09:19:35 -0800</pubDate>
		</item>

		<item>
			<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>
		</item>

		<item>
			<title><![CDATA[Six Sigma Blogs: New Year's Resolution]]></title>
			<link>http://blogs.isixsigma.com/archive/new_years_resolution.html</link>
			<description><![CDATA[This year, I'm making a resolution to do a good deed daily.  This is inspired in part by Gianna Clark's latest blog, How W.O.W.?, but also by my own sense of imbalance in the customer feedback that most organizations receive.
I've communicated about problems and complaints many times - but - I realized that I don't give positive feedback very often.  (And don't we Process Improvers always say, that we receive more negative feedback than positive?  It's embarrassing to realize that I'm not walking the talk!)  So this year I'm trying to look for daily opportunities to give kudos and complements - not only for the WOW moments but when people show special care and attentiveness.
Like Gianna, my husband and I had the occasion to process a transaction at our local bank the other day.  We stopped in to cash out a CD (boy, just when you think your child's college expenses are all set, there's always another special need!!).  Anyway, the young man who helped us a) checked our interest amount for our savings account and increased it, based on our average balance over the past few months; b) suggested a better way to transfer funds to avoid fees and delays; c) talked with us about special offers and opportunities related to our credit and debit cards, and didn't pressure us when we declined.  
We didn't have a bell to ring, like GIanna did, but we asked to speak to his manager, and then asked her to put a note in his file for excellent customer service.  They were both surprised and pleased (expecting the negative) and we felt that we had done a good deed.
This is one resolution that will be fun to keep up!]]></description>
			
			<author><![CDATA[Sue Kozlowski]]></author>
			
			<category>
			<![CDATA[Change Management&nbsp;,&nbsp;Leadership&nbsp;,&nbsp;Management]]>
			</category>
			<pubDate>Mon, 05 Jan 2009 08:59:22 -0800</pubDate>
		</item>

		<item>
			<title><![CDATA[Six Sigma Blogs: The Least-Effort Way]]></title>
			<link>http://blogs.isixsigma.com/archive/the_least_effort_way.html</link>
			<description><![CDATA[We've all seen the "resistance curve" where a few people are innovators, some are early adopters, early and late majorities, and a few are laggards, or skeptics, or what-have-you (from the work of Everett Rogers and other researchers). 
One way to get almost everyone to be an early adopter is to offer something of value - money, time off, presents.  Yes, bribes (as well as food) are well-known tools for speeding change acceptance.  Did you ever hear of anyone resisting a bonus check?  (I do know of one instance where a person received an unexpected bonus check for $100, then complained because the check wasn't for an amount that would have yielded $100 after taxes.)
However, there's another inducement to change that I've observed.  When people are introduced to the possibility of a new or different process, they sometimes are eager to embrace change as long as the new process meets one criterion:  It's "less work" for them.
Now, this is a little different discussion than most of us have had about Radio Station WII-FM:  What's In It For Me?  These particular folks don't want to be jollied into accepting more work; they just want to do less work (by their own definition).
Because, let's face it - often, it's "more work" to do something right the first time, in the way it's supposed to be done, than to do it poorly the first time and let someone else do the rework later.  Regardless of the potential benefit and value to the customer, some people who are "in the moment" just care about the work that they do personally.  It's so easy to get caught up in what's value-added for ourselves and to lose track of what's value added for the customer.
I don't want to get diverted into related discussions about the work ethic of our Generation-X and Gen-Y employees (not to mention the Millennials); or Theory X (people try to do the least work) vs Theory Y (people try to do a good job).  I'd just like to know whether anyone else has experienced this, and what they have done to address it.  After all, we won't get far with process improvement if the gold standard is that everyone will do less work than they were doing before!
Or will we?!?!?!?!
 ]]></description>
			
			<author><![CDATA[Sue Kozlowski]]></author>
			
			<category>
			<![CDATA[Change Management&nbsp;,&nbsp;Lean&nbsp;,&nbsp;Management]]>
			</category>
			<pubDate>Wed, 03 Dec 2008 10:22:58 -0800</pubDate>
		</item>

		<item>
			<title><![CDATA[Six Sigma Blogs: Act II]]></title>
			<link>http://blogs.isixsigma.com/archive/act_ii.html</link>
			<description><![CDATA[Six Sigma, which is beginning to acquire some grey around the temples, has now advanced to the stage where the basic requirements for success of the program are fairly well known. That doesn’t stop it from being screwed up in about 95% of installations, but no one can say that’s due to a lack of reference material detailing what’s required to be successful. Implementing Six Sigma has become a matter of excellent execution rather than invention and discovery. Or at least it should be.
The same is true of many other large-scale organization programs and installations. Converting to Oracle or SAP, for example. Building a performance management system. Opening and managing a call center. Developing a strong Innovation or New Product Development process. Outsourcing. The list goes on and on. There are a lot of things under the general “organizational transformation” umbrella that while still very difficult to pull off, require excellent large-scale execution skills rather than a lot of invention.
All of this leads to what I call the “Act II” problem. As you might guess, Act II follows Act I. Act I can be any of the things I described above, including starting a Six Sigma program. It can also be fixing or “re-energizing” previously botched execution, which is actually more common with Six Sigma programs these days. Whatever the case, the defining feature of Act I is that is it usually so pressing and painful that no one is thinking ahead to Act II, especially the person who was hired to produce Act I.
So what is Act II? Simply put, it is making use of what was produced in Act I to achieve some desired end. Wait, you might say, isn’t that the point of Act I? Generally speaking, not really.
Take a Six Sigma deployment, for example. Act I usually consists of hiring or training belts, engaging consultants, conducting training classes, filling a project pipeline, getting initial projects done, delivering results, etc. Many (most?) organizations fail at some point in Act I, which is why Act II doesn’t get much mainstream attention. Act II can only begin when Act I is complete – that is, when the program is already up and running and hitting on all cylinders. The project and talent pipeline is flowing well with little intervention, and results are being regularly delivered. Six Sigma isn’t new or exciting anymore, it just a part of the fabric of the business. Though rare enough, all of that just gets you to the starting line of Act II.
Act II is where you start to think beyond the simple running of the program. Now that you have all the machinery, what are you going to do with it? How does it play with the other processes in your business? How will what you have built evolve over time? If you’ve mastered the basics, what do the advanced levels look like? How can what you’ve got become a competitive advantage in the marketplace? What should be emphasized and what should be dropped in the future? In short, what will you do with what you have built? Act II is all about answering these questions, but only after the initial execution has been completed at a high level. Only after the initial build is done.
The problem is that Act II takes a much different skill set than Act I, so it is rare to find one person who can do both effectively. And many people who have built careers on Act I – particularly those who are called in to fix an ailing Act I – simply have no Act II. When the time comes, they let the results of their excellent execution operate on a performance plateau. They, and the organization, will often feel they’ve earned the right to do so. But unfortunately, in the world of organizational change, standing still means moving backward. If you’re not growing, leaping, expanding, and evolving with whatever you are doing, then you’re marching to the grave. There really is no in between, no time to enjoy the plateau. If you have no Act II waiting to begin, you might as well not even have done Act I. That’s a tough lesson to learn, but non the less true for it.
I think this explains why the business landscape is littered with the carcasses of many once-strong programs. They had a strong Act I, but there was no Act II, so the show ended abruptly. As hard as Act I is, and as rare as it is to see an Act I successfully conclude, Act II is even trickier to plan for and pull off, and consequently more rare and valuable.]]></description>
			
			<author><![CDATA[Andrew Downard]]></author>
			
			<category>
			<![CDATA[Change Management&nbsp;,&nbsp;Leadership]]>
			</category>
			<pubDate>Wed, 26 Nov 2008 22:01:00 -0800</pubDate>
		</item>

		<item>
			<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>
		</item>

		<item>
			<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>
		</item>

		<item>
			<title><![CDATA[Six Sigma Blogs: Team Dynamics for College Seniors]]></title>
			<link>http://blogs.isixsigma.com/archive/team_dynamics_for_college_seniors.html</link>
			<description><![CDATA[I have the privilege this semester of teaching a "Professional Practice" class for college seniors in Clinical Laboratory Science.  These are the folks who will be doing (among other things) any blood tests that you may have drawn in a doctor's office, hospital, or health fair.
Since I had input into the curriculum, I decided to teach a module on personality preferences, so I could link that to effective team management.  I used the DISC (r) model that is widely available.  You may be familiar with it - there are four categories of behavior preferences.  It's a useful shorthand for understanding one's preferred way of behaving.  I use the model to teach self-awareness, as a bridge to awareness of others (or, as we may say in Lean, respect for people!).
I shared the basic information about the four quadrants, and then asked the class of 25 to divide themselves up into the groups as they saw themselves:  Dominance ("Let's just do it and get it over with!" and "No touchy-feely stuff for me!"), Influence ("Let's hear everyone's great stories!" and "Let's have fun with this!"), Steadiness ("Let's understand why we're doing this, first of all!" and "Let's make sure everyone feels comfortable with this."), and Conscientious ("We need to know that we're making the right decision!" and "If only everyone would just do things the RIGHT way!").
Then, I asked each group to come with ideas for employee recognition, in about 10 minutes.
Lo and behold, I couldn't have asked for a better demonstration!
The Dominance group, about 25% of the class, was done first and had one sticky-note with 5 ideas on it, all related to individual rewards, such as a bonus or preferred parking space.
The Steadiness group, about a third of the class, was done next and had 5 sticky-notes with ideas related to personal rewards and also social rewards - mostly activities with groups that could be shared.
The Conscientious group, about 40% of the class, was not finished by the 10 minute mark; they asked for more time.  They had stopped at their first idea, a certificate of recognition, and their sticky-note had a full paragraph about the wording and appearance of the certificate.
(There was only one "Influencer" so I had her join one of the other groups.)
The students had a lot of fun with this exercise.  They all started comparing their friends and acquaintances, and I reminded them that a) this was a situational-sensitive preference, and everyone displays all of the traits at various times, and b) not to stereotype anyone else!
I thought it was a great opportunity to get students, near the beginning of their profession, to understand a little about personal dynamics when working in groups.  I hope it pays big dividends when they get out into the "real world."
How many of you use a personality-type profile or assessment when your teams are in their forming-norming stages?  Please share your best practices!]]></description>
			
			<author><![CDATA[Sue Kozlowski]]></author>
			
			<category>
			<![CDATA[Change Management&nbsp;,&nbsp;Management]]>
			</category>
			<pubDate>Mon, 15 Sep 2008 14:16:17 -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: Lean; Your Proverbial ‘Boot In The Door’]]></title>
			<link>http://blogs.isixsigma.com/archive/lean_your_proverbial_boot_in_the_door.html</link>
			<description><![CDATA[I have recently completed a ‘Five S’ (see isixsigma dictionary) on a materials procurement process, and have had the most buy in this year for process improvement. Why?

Because especially ‘Sort’ is simple for all to understand, it’s basically an organised spring clean
You leave your FIRST meeting with a plan of action that can be executed within days, this often takes longer with DMAIC
Because the results are visual. Always take before and after photos
Once you have this win and have been seen to deliver, you can start putting more intricate process improvement methods in place like Value Stream Mapping, data collection etc without your stakeholders noticing or even better with their consent.
 
I am interested in your experiences and first impressions of deploying Lean ]]></description>
			
			<author><![CDATA[J P Spencer]]></author>
			
			<category>
			<![CDATA[Change Management&nbsp;,&nbsp;General]]>
			</category>
			<pubDate>Tue, 01 Jul 2008 07:14:35 -0800</pubDate>
		</item>

		<item>
			<title><![CDATA[Six Sigma Blogs: Six Sigma - The Real Deal]]></title>
			<link>http://blogs.isixsigma.com/archive/six_sigma_the_real_deal.html</link>
			<description><![CDATA[Deploy - Integrate - Sustain - Institutionalize.  Although each phase has distinct qualities, the lines between them are blurred or almost seamless - as it should be.    I’m often asked what I think "institutionalization" looks like.  My response:  "Unconscious application".  By that, I don’t mean asleep at the wheel.   When addressing an audience I typically use the following example to describe the state of "Unconscious Application."
Let’s say that you are working in an office and need to send some information across town.  How do you do it?  Immediately I get responses like "e-mail" or "fax."    Exactly, I reply.  I then ask the audience "How many of you thought about printing the document, stuffing it in an envelope, adding a stamp and putting it in the US mail?"  People look at me like I’m nuts.  And so the point is made.  No one even thinks in those terms anymore.  Even when a signature is required, we sign, scan and move the document along electronically.   That’s Unconscious Application and that’s what it means to make Six Sigma "the way you work" or have it in "your DNA".  It means that when you have a tough problem to solve, you wouldn’t think of using anything besides Six Sigma to find the answer.  
Getting there is not an overnight journey.   But knowing when you’ve personally made the hyper-leap to "institutionalize" from "sustain" may occur in an instant.  It is when you get a report with bar charts and ask the author to present your data in box-plot charts so that you can better understand the variance.  Once you get there you will never go back  . . . and that’s the "Real Deal!"]]></description>
			
			<author><![CDATA[Gianna Clark]]></author>
			
			<category>
			<![CDATA[Change Management]]>
			</category>
			<pubDate>Mon, 02 Jun 2008 04:24:11 -0800</pubDate>
		</item>

		<item>
			<title><![CDATA[Six Sigma Blogs: Who's Your Jack Welch?]]></title>
			<link>http://blogs.isixsigma.com/archive/whos_your_jack_welch.html</link>
			<description><![CDATA[I was privileged recently to attend the American Society for Quality's World Conference in Houston, TX.  What an energetic gathering of quality-minded people!
One topic that I heard a lot of conversation about was concern for leadership of Lean and Six Sigma.  There were many stories shared of new deployments, attempted deployments, and failed deployments.  One question that I've been asking, when I hear these accounts, is "Who was your Jack Welch?"  In other words, who was the top executive that championed the initiative over all obstacles?
Too many times, I heard that the push for Lean or Six Sigma came from middle management - not a criticism of those individuals, of course, but if top executives don't catch the fever, then the initiative can be treated as a hobby for someone down below.  When the going gets tough, it's easy to fall back on an excuse such as "Six Sigma's not working for us."  As my MBB Todd Sperl used to say, it's the difference between support and commitment.
Therefore, it was not a big surprise to read, in Michael Marx's recent post Project Failure, that the number one reason for failure of Six Sigma projects was... no management support.  I suspect that could read, instead, no top-level executive support.
So now, when I come into an oragnization that says they're "doing" Six Sigma or Lean, I ask:  "Who's your Jack Welch?"  The answer is always illuminating.
 ]]></description>
			
			<author><![CDATA[Sue Kozlowski]]></author>
			
			<category>
			<![CDATA[Change Management&nbsp;,&nbsp;Leadership&nbsp;,&nbsp;Management]]>
			</category>
			<pubDate>Tue, 20 May 2008 07:01:33 -0800</pubDate>
		</item>

		<item>
			<title><![CDATA[Six Sigma Blogs: More Henry Ford]]></title>
			<link>http://blogs.isixsigma.com/archive/more_henry_ford.html</link>
			<description><![CDATA[My Lean Thinking colleagues in Maine State Government have also been looking for quotes in Henry Fords writing that would speak to our movement toward more efficient and productive work as individuals, companies and communities.  The one that was chosen for their monthly news letter speaks to the people side of lean. It speaks of the major cause of resistance and poor function in human beings participating in the transformational change that lean process analysis can bring.  When I read this month news letter there it was staring at me.
 

 
“ I pity the poor fellow who is so soft and flabby that he must always have "an atmosphere of good feeling" around him before he can do his work. There are such men. And in the end, unless they obtain enough mental and moral hardiness to lift them out of their soft reliance on "feeling," they are failures”. [i]  
 
 

Whew. Sounds a little strong for todays human resource function. But when you can get past the fatherly toughness you can see that Henry is absolutely right.  Like most self respecting professional continuous improvement professionals, before I looked at all the “other” flabby people in my work environment (clients and professional colleagues) I took a glance at myself.  Don’t get me wrong, I am not into self destruction, but I was raised with the belief that you should look for the log in your own eye before seeking the splinter in another’s eye.  How flabby am I either physically or emotionally?  Honest self assessment?  That is a very difficult thing for many of us to do.  We get very good at measuring process, cycle time, machine tool tolerances and others performance.  But how good are we at looking at self?  I have discovered when I am able to self assess my own production flaws I am much more able to objectively review others. 

 
So I when I worked out last night I worked extra hard and vowed to move towards strength and away from flabby.  Strengthing body and mind through exercise and related activities is one strategy to improve this function.  

 
Another strategy is to examine the response we have when our feelings arise as we are trying to compete our daily tasks. There is a great list of short sayings called  Constructive Living Maxims [ii] which can help each of us get past our feeling and back to what needs being done.  Keep these handy when you start to feel like not working, they may be the thought that puts you back on task.

 
A third strategy for overcoming the power of feelings is good planning. If you do not have a map or plan, feelings can easily become the driving source of decisions.  Then you are in big trouble. When you do not have a plan, you are planning to fail.  What planning tool to you use? There are some six sigma planning tools that can be used.  I know of another.  I recently began working with some old process friends who have developed a planning tool for students and communities.  We used it almost 10 years ago when I chaired our community’s comprehensive plan committee.  The tool is called Running Start .  I am working with them to adapt this tool for disabled adults participating in the voc rehab process and returning veterans who are integrating back into the community. This personal planning process facilitates the development of a plan, gives quantitative feedback regarding the progress being made and keeps you on track so feelings do not dominate decisions and you work the plan which has been developed. It might be a good process to use to reach the decision that you need a Value Stream Map to identify your prime contraint or waste and other process innefficiencies, although the tool alone will help identify those things as well.
 


How does all this relate to Six Sigma?  Seems flabby is much like muda and causes significant reduction in our physical and emotional efficiency. How big is your log? Mine is shrinking, I hope.
 

Bye the way, Michael thanks for the new BB LSS certification process you mentioned in your recent column on April 4, 2008. I now have a certificate on my wall too!  Just like the strawman in the Wizard of Oz. How transformational!




[i] Ford, Henry – My Life and Work, The Project Gutenberg: Release Date: January, 2005-EBook #7213, Produced by Marvin Hodges, Tom Allen, Eric Eldred, Charles Franks and the DP Team
http://www.gutenberg.org/etext/7213
 

[ii]  Reynolds, David – Constructive Living Maxims – For more about David Reynolds see http://boat.zero.ad.jp/~zbe85163/
. ]]></description>
			
			<author><![CDATA[Stephen C. Crate]]></author>
			
			<category>
			<![CDATA[Change Management&nbsp;,&nbsp;General]]>
			</category>
			<pubDate>Sat, 26 Apr 2008 05:52:57 -0800</pubDate>
		</item>

		<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>
		</item>

		<item>
			<title><![CDATA[Six Sigma Blogs: Banking on Risk]]></title>
			<link>http://blogs.isixsigma.com/archive/banking_on_risk.html</link>
			<description><![CDATA[Reacting to the last several months of turmoil in the capital markets, I want to discuss an area where Lean Six Sigma professionals who work in banking and financial services should focus their attention, acquire new skills, and start having an impact – enterprise risk.
A couple of years ago, one of my former colleagues investigated the contribution of Lean Six Sigma to shareholder value at a small group of well-known banks.  He researched public statements by these companies to quantify their self-attributed savings.  He then developed a crude expected shareholder value multiplier based on price-to-earnings ratio.  Multiplying self-attributed savings, which he assumed flow to the bottom line, by the shareholder value multiplier led my former colleague to conclude that Lean and Six Sigma created at least $4-6 billion in shareholder value for these banks.
Conventional wisdom leads me to believe that recent turmoil in the credit markets wiped out these gains.  The stock prices of many investment banks, asset managers, commercial banks, mortgage finance companies, monolines, and other major participants in structured finance are trading new two-year lows.  While each firm and industry segment has its own unique issues, weak risk management is a common storyline.
Looking ahead to the trends for 2008 and 2009, strengthening risk management practices is an imperative and a mammoth challenge for banking and financial services companies and their executives.  The global interconnectedness, complexity and volatility of capital markets necessitate a holistic, innovative approach.  Conventional practices do not stand up to the challenges in 2008 and beyond.
Exogenous Pressure
Curing the current ills will depend on fortifying balance sheets, and regulatory intervention will increase the pressure on business and operating models.  Banking and financial services firms can look forward to:

Economic uncertainty: Recent economic data and interest rate cuts by the Federal Reserve Bank in the U.S. indicate an economic slowdown has begun.  Its severity and duration cannot be predicted, but banks will feel the effects of a lingering mortgage-market crisis, rising consumer credit defaults, and disruptions affecting commercial lending, structured finance products, and securitization.  Some forecasters predict future shocks, such as a decline in commodity prices or downturn in commercial lending, that further threaten banks. 
Capital boosting and cost cutting: In response to economic pressures, banking and financial services executives will continue to seek capital to fortify their balance sheets, increase their safety and soundness, and weather the economic downturn.  Many banks will pursue cost savings as part of restructuring operations, becoming more efficient, or both.  Cost cutting may be mild or severe, if a bank is facing adverse circumstances like insolvency. 
Increasing regulatory scrutiny: Regulatory are reacting to the turn of events in the capital markets in 2007.  Scrutiny of capital adequacy, liquidity, credit risk, and management practices will pick up.  Supervisory actions and matters requiring board attention will grow in number.  Contingency planning and quality assurance for safety and soundness will receive new attention, as regulators push banks to find and adopt industry best practices that safeguard against future crises. 
Questions about information and systems for risk management: Over the last decade, many firms began initiatives to implement systems that address credit, financial, and operational risk, as well as compliance with laws and regulations.  Broadly speaking, these systems are designed to ensure compliance failures are prevented or detected and managed.  The capability of these systems – looking at risk through an integrative lens – may be called into question.  Banks may be required to rethink their information systems strategies and redesign their applications for managing risk.  Likewise, information asymmetries in the capital markets may receive new attention, leading firms to question what they thought they know about collateral underlying securities, concentration risk, economic and valuation models, and accounting practices. 
Investigations, lawsuits and jawboning in the town square: The effects of mortgage defaults, credit-card delinquencies, public outcries about banking practices, stock-price volatility, and growing losses foretell banks facing a new wave of investigations by state attorneys general, shareholder lawsuits, and pressure from consumer advocates.  Stories in the press bear this out.  The open question is how loud and deafening the trends will be over the next two years.
My own background has convinced me of the need to extend the disciplines of Lean Six Sigma to processes for creating governance structures, compliance monitoring, and managing operational risk.  Perhaps banks will benefit from a higher degree of knowledge integration (e.g., transplanting gauge methods to credit risk management). 
Endogenous Defense Starts with Dialogue and Knowledge
In many respects, the current state of banking and financial services is the product of thousands of decisions about risk taking.  Clearly, reward seeking won out, and we now face a period of living through the consequences of risks not being properly managed.  Lean and Six Sigma are proven tools for optimizing reward by eliminating waste, creating capacity, and reducing variation.  Resilience and reliability are a new frontier for Lean and Six Sigma, and the focus is squarely on transforming how risk is managed.
How Lean and Six Sigma contribute to the field of risk management is a story waiting to be told.  For starters, I encourage Lean Six Sigma professionals to build the relationships, internal networks, and critical mass necessary to transplant their best practices to the risk management and compliance functions at banks and financial services firms.  In conjunction, I recommend seeking new knowledge about relevant aspects of credit, financial and operational risk, as well as regulatory trends that will weigh heavily on operating models and expenses.
Lean and Six Sigma is a knowledge-based profession, and its value comes from connecting best practices to problems, so performance can be improved.  Clearly, for banks and financial services firms, enterprise risk is a huge problem to be solved in 2008.]]></description>
			
			<author><![CDATA[Charles McKinney]]></author>
			
			<category>
			<![CDATA[Buzz/Press&nbsp;,&nbsp;Change Management&nbsp;,&nbsp;Customer Satisfaction&nbsp;,&nbsp;General&nbsp;,&nbsp;History&nbsp;,&nbsp;Innovation&nbsp;,&nbsp;Leadership&nbsp;,&nbsp;Lean&nbsp;,&nbsp;Management&nbsp;,&nbsp;Research]]>
			</category>
			<pubDate>Sun, 17 Feb 2008 10:45:47 -0800</pubDate>
		</item>

		<item>
			<title><![CDATA[Six Sigma Blogs: Execution: The Missing E]]></title>
			<link>http://blogs.isixsigma.com/archive/execution_the_missing_e.html</link>
			<description><![CDATA[Effectiveness = Quality * Acceptance * Execution
 
I originally learned this equation during Green Belt training as Effectiveness (of Solution) = Quality * Acceptance, and it immediately resonated with me. In order to produce the most effective solution to a given problem, the solution had to be of high quality, and it had to be bought in to by the stakeholders. Lean Six Sigma gives all the tools one needs to generate high quality solutions. Change management and team building tools help achieve the acceptance needed. Seems simple enough.
 
Until the solution is correctly and fully implemented, and brought into control, the entire effort can be for naught. The consequences of poor solution execution can range from frustration and resentment on the part of the project team, to actually worsening the problem the project was intended to fix, to spelling demise for an entire Lean Six Sigma deployment.
 
So the new equation is Effectiveness = Quality * Acceptance * Execution. Weakness in any of these aspects will harm the overall effectiveness of the solution. 
 
Knowing this is half the battle. The other half is actually executing properly. Many green belts find themselves leading their first project of any kind, let alone one involving all of the new tools and methods that Lean Six Sigma offers. Coaches, here is where your belts may need your guidance the most.
 
As those of us who have managed projects know, there are many details involved in rolling out a new change, and missteps on any of them can be damaging. Comprehensive roll-out plans are critical to successful execution.
 
Questions I always consider include:
 
- Who needs to be notified that the process is changing?
- Does anyone need training on the new process? 
- What documentation needs to be updated or created?
- Are any of our audit controls affected or changing with the new process?
- What dashboards or other reports are needed to help the process owner manage the new process? 
 
Simple tools like Gantt charts and project plans (complete with detailed tasks, due dates and accountable resources) along with cheerful yet persistent follow-up on the part of the project leader can go along way towards a successful implementation.  
 
So readers, what experiences have you had with executing your teams solutions, especially in transactional environments? Share your stories in the comments section.]]></description>
			
			<author><![CDATA[James Considine]]></author>
			
			<category>
			<![CDATA[Change Management]]>
			</category>
			<pubDate>Mon, 11 Feb 2008 07:36:37 -0800</pubDate>
		</item>

		<item>
			<title><![CDATA[Six Sigma Blogs: Getting There From Here]]></title>
			<link>http://blogs.isixsigma.com/archive/getting_there_from_here.html</link>
			<description><![CDATA[It is the aim of most Continuous Improvement programs to transform the organization. Six Sigma usually attempts to do this in one of two ways:

By taking top-down approach, wherein the end state of transformation is articulated and communicated by organizational leaders, and stages and activities of the transformation are painted only in very broad strokes;
By taking a bottom-up approach, wherein the end state of transformation is either not clearly articulated or not known, but incremental activities within the transformation are planned and managed in great detail.
Of course, neither of these approaches can succeed on its own. But that doesn’t stop most organizations from trying one to the exclusion of the other. The approach chosen is often driven by the personal style of the figurehead for the transformation, which in turn is dictated by the general culture of the organization. While there are exceptions, it is rare to find a senior leader whose personal style diverges significantly from overall the organizational culture. This is for the simple reason that senior leaders typically don’t become senior leaders unless and until they learn how to fit in.
Intellectually, most people leading continuous improvement programs have the mental horsepower to figure out that neither approach works on its own. But realizing that and being able to do something about it are two different things. In my experience, leaders who are capable of giving birth to great and clear vision and rallying others to that vision are seldom equally capable of doing the detailed work necessary to actually get there. These folks can state with great conviction and clarity where we need to be a year from now, but they have no ability to describe what has to happen tomorrow and the next day and the day after that…eventually leading to the goal. They understand the destination, but not the route.
On the other hand, those who revel in the detail and are capable of writing the detailed plan to arrive at the destination are seldom equally capable of conceiving of and articulating a vision that will rally the organization. They understand the route, but not the destination.
The solution to this dilemma is clear: both skill sets are required, both things need to be done. You can’t choose one approach or the other of the two listed above, you need elements of both to succeed. We all know this. But doing it is excruciatingly difficult. It is very tough for a single individual to function equally well on both ends of the spectrum, and even tougher to put together a pairing or small group that does so.
I suspect many of you reading this will disagree with me, perhaps point out that all you need is a well rounded team of individuals with compensating strengths and weaknesses. But I just don’t see that happening very often, if ever, in real life. What I want to know is…why. Given that the solution isn’t hard to comprehend, why is it so difficult to make it happen?]]></description>
			
			<author><![CDATA[Andrew Downard]]></author>
			
			<category>
			<![CDATA[Change Management&nbsp;,&nbsp;General&nbsp;,&nbsp;Leadership]]>
			</category>
			<pubDate>Sat, 26 Jan 2008 22:01:00 -0800</pubDate>
		</item>

		<item>
			<title><![CDATA[Six Sigma Blogs: Don't Want to Get Your Hands Dirty Collecting Data?]]></title>
			<link>http://blogs.isixsigma.com/archive/dont_want_to_get_your_hands_dirty_collecting_data.html</link>
			<description><![CDATA[Lost Tools # 2 Data
In this quick fire working environment using a ‘Sore Thumb Approach’ strategy (something hurts so you go fix it quick), we don’t always have time to collect the data. I’ve just taught the Measure phase to a wave of Green Belts and other than a SIPOC IT’S ALL ABOUT COLLECTING DATA. It’s easy and sometimes beneficial to just use the core tools:

Run Charts
Process Flowcharting
Fishbone and 5 Whys
Tally Charts
Histograms
Scatter Plots
But real Y=f(x) data collection; looking at all the up and down stream data collection points is invaluable. 
I’m actually downing tools for a fortnight and just going out and getting that data. 
If that means trailing through paper work with my tally chart or standing at the side of a railway line or station clicking my ‘data counter’ then so be it. I got to a stage last year where I thought I was too good to go out and get my hands dirty collecting data for a week or so, but sometimes that’s the best thing you can do.
Any thoughts?]]></description>
			
			<author><![CDATA[J P Spencer]]></author>
			
			<category>
			<![CDATA[Change Management&nbsp;,&nbsp;General]]>
			</category>
			<pubDate>Mon, 21 Jan 2008 04:06:05 -0800</pubDate>
		</item>

		<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>
		</item>

		<item>
			<title><![CDATA[Six Sigma Blogs: A quality bubble?]]></title>
			<link>http://blogs.isixsigma.com/archive/a_quality_bubble.html</link>
			<description><![CDATA[Gianna Clark notes that several hundred companies began their Six Sigma journeys about seven years ago. 
Is Six Sigma the quality equivalent of a stock market bubble? Are we cheerleaders of an irrational exuberance where performance economics do not match the hype we create? Is Six Sigma on the verge of becoming the next TQM - run over by advances in technology and easier approaches to improving performance? ]]></description>
			
			<author><![CDATA[Charles McKinney]]></author>
			
			<category>
			<![CDATA[Buzz/Press&nbsp;,&nbsp;Change Management&nbsp;,&nbsp;Conferences&nbsp;,&nbsp;Customer Satisfaction&nbsp;,&nbsp;General&nbsp;,&nbsp;Government&nbsp;,&nbsp;Guest Blog&nbsp;,&nbsp;History&nbsp;,&nbsp;Innovation&nbsp;,&nbsp;Leadership&nbsp;,&nbsp;Lean&nbsp;,&nbsp;Management&nbsp;,&nbsp;Methodology&nbsp;,&nbsp;Podcasts&nbsp;,&nbsp;Research]]>
			</category>
			<pubDate>Sat, 12 Jan 2008 12:32:57 -0800</pubDate>
		</item>

		<item>
			<title><![CDATA[Six Sigma Blogs: Suggest Improvements then Take a Day Off Work]]></title>
			<link>http://www.sixsigmacompanies.com/archive/suggest_improvements_then_take_a_day_off_work.html</link>
			<description><![CDATA[The U.S. Army Garrison Fort Leavenworth Army post in Kansas is striving to make Lean Six Sigma part of their culture.  Part of their project selection process is taking employee suggestions.  Suggestions for improvement have been hard to come by since Lean Six Sigma joined the Army.  Employees feared improvement would mean downsizing.  
But thanks to a new suggestion incentive program (and a commitment to no downsizing) suggestions for improvements are up:






The Garrison’s Lean Six Sigma Tiger Team formulated a reward system for civilian, military and contract employees. The reward corresponds with the success of the idea. For example, a civilian who suggests an idea that saves $2,600 could get an 8-hour time-off reward.

Employees who make suggestions can then track the fruits of their brilliant ideas via a tracking system.  This kind of reward system can go a long way.  
Jennifer Stefano, management analyst, says it best, "Everybody knows what to do to improve their job; making it relevant was the key."  A free day off work is more than relevant, it’s awesome.  Who in their right mind wouldn’t be making suggestions like crazy?  
So what does your company do to reward employees for making process improvement suggestions?  A day off, a gift certificate, or a pat on the back? ]]></description>
			
			<author><![CDATA[Michael Marx]]></author>
			
			<category>
			<![CDATA[Change Management&nbsp;,&nbsp;Government]]>
			</category>
			<pubDate>Fri, 07 Dec 2007 15:59:45 -0800</pubDate>
		</item>

		<item>
			<title><![CDATA[Six Sigma Blogs: Soft Skills &amp; Six Sigma]]></title>
			<link>http://blogs.isixsigma.com/archive/soft_skills_amp_six_sigma.html</link>
			<description><![CDATA[DMAIC, DMAVD, DFSS or any other Six Sigma framework is a disciplined data driven structured methodology that if implemented as required will yield breakthrough levels of improvement in organizations.
Having applied Six Sigma and other process methodologies across multiple SBU’s at our organization one aspect that is not given much attention in many formal Six Sigma training courses is the role that a belt’s soft skills play in the success or failure of a project.
Whether we know it or not most of us spend a good deal of our working lives interacting with others i.e. formally through meetings, calls, presentations, emails etc or informally though conversations, discussions even the odd chat down the corridor.
Thus how effectively we interact with our peers could dictate how successful we are in convincing them to accept our point of view. I have found this tends to be the norm, be it Six Sigma project or be it asking for a favor from a close friend. 
A limitation that I find in many Six Sigma training courses is the lack of emphasis and attention to developing a belt’s soft skills. In fact to be a successful process expert requires you be an effective communicator, negotiator, project manager, team leader, mentor and coach all in one. Developing these skills can significantly help a black belt successfully implement Six Sigma or any process methodology across the company hierarchy. 
In nurturing prospective green belts and black belts, I use a “10 point soft skills matrix” to evaluate the soft skills competency of a belt prior to engaging in a Six Sigma project.
A rating scale is used with scores ranging from 1-4, depending on the varying strengths in a particular competency. The soft skills competency of any prospective process expert can be evaluated using this matrix and necessary levels of training could be customized as required.

The 10 points along with the relevant rating criteria is shown in Figure (1).
The total score for all ten categories and the score for an individual set of skills are computed. As per the reported scores, appropriate training is provided to the required individuals in conjunction with Six Sigma Black Belt and Green Belt training.]]></description>
			
			<author><![CDATA[Zakir Ahamed]]></author>
			
			<category>
			<![CDATA[Change Management]]>
			</category>
			<pubDate>Sun, 02 Dec 2007 07:34:52 -0800</pubDate>
		</item>

		<item>
			<title><![CDATA[Six Sigma Blogs: Elevating strategic relevance: Understand and inform strategy implementation]]></title>
			<link>http://blogs.isixsigma.com/archive/elevating_strategic_relevance_understand_and_inform_strategy_implementation.html</link>
			<description><![CDATA[My last blog discussed elevating the strategic relevance of Lean, Six Sigma and process excellence.  My view is that mature Process Excellence Organizations enjoy or achieve credibility and success by executing a flexible performance-improvement process—attacking the top priorities, employing the best tools, selecting the right projects and leveraging organizational momentum.  The first thing mature Process Excellence Organizations do well is informing strategy setting and implementation (beginning with their own understanding of their enterprise’s strategy).
The most successful process improvement professionals are proactive rather than reactive about understanding and discussing strategy.  Executive level process excellence leaders share in common an understanding of the competitive position of their companies, options to shape competitiveness, and critical factors for success.  Further, these individuals understand the mechanics of a strategic management process and dynamics of organizational behavior that affect managerial commitment to change, execution against a plan, and responsiveness to opportunities and threats.
Positioning of the Process Excellence Organization determines its access to inform strategy setting and implementation.  Commitment from the COO to deploy best practices, for example, is more likely to result in Lean and Six Sigma becoming strategic levers, embedded in an organization’s culture and practice, than localized, bottom-up advocacy by a business unit executive, shared services leader or plant manager.  Yet unless market pressure, a crisis or some other impetus motivates a senior executive team to broadly rely on Lean and Six Sigma, Process Excellence Organizations must demonstrate credibility through their recommendations to improve performance and their track record of delivering returns to their companies.
Lean and Six Sigma professionals may ask how they are to shape strategy setting and implementation, if they lack access to regularly advise and influence senior leaders at their companies—the CEO, COO, CFO and especially the senior vice presidents in charge of business units, operations and technology.  Starting from their current base of deployment, Process Excellence Organizations should position themselves to identify and focus on strategically aligned opportunities for Lean and Six Sigma.
My assertion may not be fruitful in bureaucratic organizations—such as government institutions where the pace of change is slow, and status quo prevails.  At other companies the Process Excellence Organization can influence strategy. There is the annual planning cycle, where Lean and Six Sigma can inform the definition of change initiatives and funding of these projects, as well as progressive reduction of sales, general and administrative expenses.  Second, Process Excellence Organizations can bring a unique perspective to dialogue about longer-term strategies and programs.
Process Excellence Organizations can influence strategy because the strategic decision-making is ambiguous, dynamic and often chaotic.  Academics frame strategic planning as a formal process of answering three questions: (1) What does the business do?  (2) Form whom does it do these things?  (3) How does the business excel?  And the process has stages: evaluating the current situation, defining goals, mapping a route to achieve these goals, and monitoring implementation.  In a formal sense, the stages of strategic planning are not unlike the Deming lifecycle of planning, doing, studying and acting.  In practice, though, strategic planning is a communicative process, and strategies emerge from the habits and behaviors of organizations and their managers.  Executive dialogue, shareholder concerns, customer interactions, supplier dynamics, labor relations, information technologies, managerial fads all interact to form the content of strategy and direction of execution.
As an aside, I encourage anyone interested in sociological and behavioral approaches to strategy to look into research focusing on strategy as practice.  Over the last three decades, strategy research has tended to focus increasingly on organizational strategies as opposed to the activities of people in organizations as they define, elaborate, and implement strategies.  In contrast, strategy as practice is concerned with issues of practice within organizational contexts.  Lancaster University’s Management School is a good source of information about strategy as practice.
Start with the basics
Much is written about Lean and Six Sigma as tools for cost reduction.  More recently, the exploits of Starwood, Procter and Gamble, Capital One, and others highlight their relevance to innovation.  In terms of basic strategies, companies have three options, according to Michael Porter and others: low-cost production, differentiation, or some combination of the two.
Low cost production is a familiar paradigm among Lean and Six Sigma professionals in manufacturing, consumer products, healthcare, retail and service, and financial services industries.  Every industry has its favorite measures of efficiency: funding costs as a percentage of portfolio size for a mutual fund, percent of seats sold per airline flight, gross margin for product categories, etc.  Lean and Six Sigma professionals are familiar with the notion that reducing defects or eliminating cycle time can improve operating metrics, and these metrics contribute to the enablers of low cost production (e.g., economies of scale).
Differentiation is less familiar, especially for those of us who have focused on reducing variance of a distribution instead of shifting a mean.  Innovation is one way to differentiate.  Apple Computer is the most interesting, popular case study of innovation in the business literature today.  Another example is Proctor and Gamble’s shared services business unit.  After four years of successful cost cutting, Proctor and Gamble is now focused on managing its shared services as a business—figuring that exploiting core competencies in brand management and aligning delivery with marketing strategies can create sources of differentiation.  Whereas efficient production and processes are appropriable, strategies of differentiation are hard to craft and implement.
Corporate strategies are never as simple as low cost production or differentiation.  Rather, they emerge from the structures, habits and power in industries and at companies.  A few companies do well at managing strategy.  Most other are stuck in the middle—including companies with a significant investment in Lean and Six Sigma training and deployment.
A process excellence paradox highlights why understanding strategy is important—starting with the basics to develop a perspective on an enterprise’s current competitive position and future outlook.  The paradox goes something like this: Lean and Six Sigma have potential to raise any company to industry leader status, but too often returns on investing in process excellence are measured in six and seven figures instead of payback multiples greater than 20:1.  Pulling process excellence out of a rut and companies ahead in their industry has to be an exercise in strategic execution.
Institute disciplines to understand strategy
Efforts to understand strategy need to be disciplined, more than informal or one-off conversations.  Depending on the potential of the process excellence organization, many tools are available to understand strategies and their implementation at companies.  If formalizing disciplines to understand strategy is new, my advice is to start with a brown-bag discussion of your company within the process excellence organization or among its professionals and key business partners.  Things to cover include the economics of your firm’s industry, the external environment in which your company operates, and the internal capabilities of your firm.
The discussion should focus on understanding current state and future direction of the company at three levels of strategy: enterprise, business units and functions.  Leverage of Lean and Six Sigma tools is most often part of functional strategies, such as a multiyear plan to transform the operations and technology of a company or expand plant infrastructure in an overseas location.  Finding opportunities to have strategic impact depends on plans for the company and its business units.
These discussions do not need to produce a specific deliverable, but should factor into deployment planning and performance measurement for process excellence.  A number of frameworks can assist strategy discussions and create segues to efforts to evangelize, measure and govern process excellence.  One of my favorites is McKinsey’s “Star” or “7S” framework because it offers a holistic context in which to examine strategy implementation.
Accumulate knowledge from staff and line functions
By signaling its interest in understanding strategy, process excellence organizations may accumulate sufficient knowledge of strategy from their own professionals, colleagues in business areas and executive sponsors.  In my experience, Lean and Six Sigma advocates are willing to share knowledge and generous with information.  Though it never hurts to cast a wide net for knowledge and reach out to unlikely sources.
 Here are a few places to look:

Strategic planning: Many large companies have a strategic planning function, and a Chief Strategy Officer is becoming fashionable.  Often staffed by ex-management consultants, strategic planning departments provide analysis and advice to senior management about competitive positioning of the company.  While these departments may guard their work, they can facilitate building mind share with senior executives.
Corporate development: If your company relies on mergers and acquisitions to grow and compete, the team in charge of corporate development may provide a forward-looking perspective on the company, and assist tactical positioning of the process excellence organization.  Post-acquisition integration is a driver of strategic risk, and this is an area where Lean and Six Sigma can add value.
Corporate planning, budgeting and finance: These functions manage the multiyear and annual process of budgeting for programs, initiatives and operations.  Corporate planning functions can provide information about the efficiency of the company and performance of internal firm capabilities (e.g., operating metrics and ratios).  Information from the corporate planning department can be instrumental and is often necessary to sell a deployment strategy and benefits tracking process to senior management.
Financial engineering and modeling: Not all companies employ financial engineers or utilize financial modeling outside the strategic planning department.  At banks, insurance companies and firms with complex balance sheets, financial engineering disciplines can provide knowledge about the esoteric aspects of corporate finance that impact financial health and shareholder value.  Expertise in corporate finance is a weakness for most process excellence organizations that plan to market Lean and Six Sigma to finance departments.
Market research: Market research departments review secondary data, conduct original studies, and use qualitative methods to understand market and customer requirements.  Their work is a sophisticated voice of customer process, so market research managers can provide unique information about how markets and customers perceive a company.  Obtaining input from the market research department can assist with framing your understanding of market-facing strategies and opportunities to improve customer-facing processes.
Information technology: In companies that rely on information (most organizations today), the information technology architecture, program management office and database administration functions can provide useful information about problems with technology that limit internal firm capabilities.  In my experience with Six Sigma, data quality is an overlooked area that holds real potential for having strategic impact on cost and customer satisfaction.
Internal audit: Internal audit departments have a deep understanding of internal capabilities gained from rotational audits of all parts of a company.  Reaching out to an internal audit director requires sensitivity to matters of professional independence.  An internal auditor’s perspective on planning and control systems can provide useful information about governance, risk and compliance constraints that will impact opportunity identification and project selection.
Human resources: Many human resources departments cover organizational development and performance management.  Human resources managers who specialize in these areas can provide useful information about how raising employee satisfaction, reducing turnover and generally improving human capital will boost company performance.
These are a few areas where conversations about strategy may yield unexpected insight.  When reaching out, it’s important to frame discussions with these areas.  Asking focused questions, gathering perspectives, and testing impressions of a company’s strategy are the right level for these discussions.  If opportunities for Lean and Six Sigma come up, capture them in a pipeline of future projects and carry forward the discussion to deployment when the time is right.
Inform strategy through ideas for process excellence
The most successful process excellence organizations guide themselves with a deployment plan and through a governance process.  Some companies charter a management committee to decide where to apply Lean and Six Sigma and monitor realization of benefits.  In addition to promoting rigorous project selection, formal governance offers a forum in which to discuss strategies and influence big decisions.  Process excellence organizations with a bottom-up or less formal structure may want to pitch senior executives on possibilities for the company – pilot projects that may lead to strategic initiatives or higher impact participation of Lean and Six Sigma in ongoing initiatives.
To prepare for these discussions, the process excellence organization needs to synthesize its understanding of the company’s strategy.  One approach is to prepare an aide memoir that documents the following:

Industry and company facts
Key financial and operating metrics
Industry facts and analysis
Assessment of internal firm capabilities
Overviews of key company strategies and initiatives
Opportunities for process excellence
Key success factors for deployment
An aide memoir can take on many forms, and it should guide marketing and governance of Lean and Six Sigma deployment within a company.  To prepare an aide memoir, opportunities for process excellence need to be defined and mapped to company strategies and initiatives.  In this respect, one purpose of an aide memoir is to serve as the foundation of a marketing plan.
Ideation of opportunities is perhaps the most critical and actionable part of understanding and informing strategy.  In my experience, the most successful process excellence organizations use tacit or explicit methods to define opportunities to further implementation of strategy through Lean, Six Sigma and other best practices.  One approach is to set aside time for brainstorming at key points after conversations about strategy with business partners in a company.  The purpose of these sessions is to creatively tackle problems facing the company where Lean and Six Sigma can add value.  Another is to use nominal group techniques to structure similar discussions and to conduct a concurrent review of project opportunities in the pipeline.
Informing strategy depends on ideas from the process excellence organization.  In fact, informing strategy is continuous, subconscious and played out through the marketing, selling, execution and measurement of Lean and Six Sigma projects.  Bringing opportunities to the project selection process that are informed by an understanding of corporate strategy will help the process excellence organization create mindshare with senior management and build credibility through its focus on solving the most relevant problems through Lean and Six Sigma.
The deployment plan is a cornerstone of execution by the process excellence organization.  My next blog will cover deployment, starting with the early activities of marketing and selling process excellence.]]></description>
			
			<author><![CDATA[Charles McKinney]]></author>
			
			<category>
			<![CDATA[Change Management&nbsp;,&nbsp;Customer Satisfaction&nbsp;,&nbsp;General&nbsp;,&nbsp;Government&nbsp;,&nbsp;Innovation&nbsp;,&nbsp;Leadership&nbsp;,&nbsp;Lean&nbsp;,&nbsp;Management&nbsp;,&nbsp;Methodology]]>
			</category>
			<pubDate>Sun, 25 Nov 2007 18:18:21 -0800</pubDate>
		</item>

		<item>
			<title><![CDATA[Six Sigma Blogs: When Variation is Your Friend]]></title>
			<link>http://blogs.isixsigma.com/archive/when_variation_is_your_friend.html</link>
			<description><![CDATA[
Isn’t it ironic that what might actually be needed to address variation in your process is variation in your team?
Picking the right team members is almost as important as picking the right project.  In addition to an expert, a customer and representatives from other key stakeholder groups, you should think about how you can "mix it up a bit" by selecting some team members that can bring a fresh look to things.  Sometimes a newer employee or someone not directly involved with the process can fill this role.   Their view and perspective may keep the team from developing a "group think" mentality by asking "why" to the "always done that way" aspects of a process.  Their lack of emotional attachment to the existing process and their distance from inner-group politics sometimes provide them with the courage to bring up the unspeakable, approach the untouchable and refuse to pay homage to the sacred cows.  And yes, these differences may create some disagreements and team challenges.  An experienced team leader will be needed to help the team capitalize on these differences in a way that brings positive energy to the team.   
Different people with different backgrounds and different viewpoints may be just the thing you need to find a different solution to an age old problem.  ]]></description>
			
			<author><![CDATA[Gianna Clark]]></author>
			
			<category>
			<![CDATA[Change Management&nbsp;,&nbsp;Innovation]]>
			</category>
			<pubDate>Fri, 23 Nov 2007 03:00:00 -0800</pubDate>
		</item>

		<item>
			<title><![CDATA[Six Sigma Blogs: Elevating the Strategic Relevance of Process Excellence]]></title>
			<link>http://blogs.isixsigma.com/archive/elevating_the_strategic_relevance_of_process_excellence.html</link>
			<description><![CDATA[Like many companies in the Fortune 1000, we are planning 2008. At leadership meetings, around conference room tables and in hallway conversations, we are asking big questions: What will our industry look like? How will external trends affect us? How should our business model change? What capabilities do we need? Do we have them? What level of cost savings will boost our stock price?
These conversations can create organizational angst: senior executives worrying about tenure, middle managers fearing loss of their jobs or attrition of star performers, and analysts feeling the effects of declining morale. Alternatively, they can create optimism: drive to succeed at all levels, commitment to company success and drive for big bonuses. Reality is often somewhere in between—a mix of pessimism, optimism and indifference. We fall into the “somewhere in between” crowd.
Deploying Lean or Six Sigma in an organization with strategic ambiguity is no easy task, especially if the Process Excellence Organization has not cemented leadership advocacy (a key success factor for adoption), demonstrated value, and achieved the cultural stickiness that Lean and Six Sigma enjoy at mature, self-optimizing companies. Self-defeating Six Sigma organizations wait for the next round of strategic priorities to be dictated, so they can update their deployment plans and complete new waves of projects. Self-directing Process Excellence Organizations inform strategic debate and shape their utilization—positioning their sponsors (or executives who will become their sponsors) and companies to achieve payback multiples (benefits of Lean and Six Sigma divided by the costs of deployment) greater than 10:1.
Having worked on transformation initiatives and in a champion role, my views of what differentiates effective from run-of-the-mill Process Excellence Organizations are evolving. Analytical rigor, methodological purity and quantitative exactness differentiate process improvement professionals, but critical thinking about strategy, marketing prowess inside a company and a pipeline to talent will set up Process Excellence Organizations to succeed. 
With strategic planning in full force, here is the first part of a series to help Process Excellence Organizations think about improving their value and odds of success.  Excellence is a process.  Executives might think Lean and Six Sigma professionals manage their own activities as a process-centric enterprise within an enterprise. My own experience suggests that we spend so much time improving company processes that management of our own process—deploying Lean and Six Sigma to improve performance (i.e., quality, efficiency, service innovation, customer satisfaction, shareholder value)—does not achieve the right level of maturity. And so a vicious cycle emerges: we work on the wrong projects; deployment does not produce big bangs; executives lose patience; we redeploy, reorient or disappear; companies embark on new quality journeys after forgetting pains of the past.
The hallmark of mature Process Excellence Organizations is their flexibility. A few years ago, a colleague at a well-known consultancy highlighted how Six Sigma can be inflexible. A client engaged his firm to recommend cost reductions. The engagement team identified redundant computer software. Wanting to achieve a quick win, a procurement executive announced retirement of the software in 45 days, unless business lines could justify the cost of redundant licenses and products. A few users complained, but the executive canceled the licenses. My colleague overheard a skeptical Black Belt comment that the executive made a quick decision and should have completed a DMAIC project to understand the true benefits and ensure canceling the licenses would not disrupt business processes. DMAIC projects at the client took 3-6 months. The analysis to identify the redundant software took 2-3 days. The procurement executive determined in a meeting that canceling the software would not have significant effects (besides whining by people who would have to begin using another, comparable product). The savings from the decision were over $1 million per year. The Black Belt showed a lack of flexibility. 
If my comments about flexibility seem insensitive to the rigor of Lean and Six Sigma, ask a personal question: Would you rather save enough money to retire over 10 years or 30?  CEOs are motivated by returns, and organizations that can grow the top line, shrink expenses and improve the bottom line the fastest enjoy the most credibility.  
Methodological and analytical rigor is a prerequisite for any Lean or Six Sigma effort to succeed. Taking a broader perspective, mature Process Excellence Organizations enjoy or achieve credibility and success by executing a flexible performance-improvement process—attacking the top priorities, employing the best tools, selecting the right projects and leveraging organizational momentum.  
Mature process excellence organizations address five things.  Over the next several weeks, I will discuss characteristics of mature Process Excellence organizations. They are:
1. Understand and inform strategy setting and implementation2. Create relationships and governance through sales and marketing3. Facilitate identification of the right mix of quick wins and big bangs4. Pull people into process excellence and push knowledge to the business5. Manage the process excellence organization like a consulting business
The five-part series will draw on research, case studies, personal experience and opinions to communicate ideas that Lean and Six Sigma practitioners can evaluate, adopt, reject or deride as whimsy. After a long-term absence from iSixSigma, my goal is to encourage the blog community to raise the strategic relevance of Lean and Six Sigma at their companies.]]></description>
			
			<author><![CDATA[Charles McKinney]]></author>
			
			<category>
			<![CDATA[Change Management&nbsp;,&nbsp;Customer Satisfaction&nbsp;,&nbsp;General&nbsp;,&nbsp;Government&nbsp;,&nbsp;History&nbsp;,&nbsp;Innovation]]>
			</category>
			<pubDate>Fri, 19 Oct 2007 14:00:00 -0800</pubDate>
		</item>

		<item>
			<title><![CDATA[Six Sigma Blogs: The Amoeba Theory]]></title>
			<link>http://blogs.isixsigma.com/archive/the_amoeba_theory.html</link>
			<description><![CDATA[
Many companies look to Six Sigma to help them transform.  They constantly talk of "weaving Six Sigma into the fabric of the company", "having Six Sigma become part of their DNA" and "fundamentally changing the way they work".   These are all nice wugga words but without a real vision of what they want to transform into, these companies may find themselves "just changing".  I call this the "Amoeba Theory" because much like the way an amoeba changes shape, they may look different but in the end, they are still an amoeba.  
When a company’s vision is properly executed, it translates in the marketplace as a brand.  For example, Wal-mart is known for low prices, Nordstrom for customer service and Lexus for fine quality.   When Six Sigma facilitates a learning environment that provides the opportunity to learn and apply new tools, methods and skills that are focused on achieving a specific vision, then Six Sigma can serve as the perfect catalyst for transformation.    If the deployment strategy is too broad, meaning Six Sigma is supposed to improve "the way we work", facilitating the shaping of a particular culture becomes more abstract and more difficult.
It might be time to ask yourself what type of cultural changes are happening in your company as a result of Six Sigma and if those changes are in sync with your vision or brand.   If so, you should see noticeable improvement in those areas that differentiate your company in the marketplace.  If not, you might find yourself the next victim of the Amoeba Theory.]]></description>
			
			<author><![CDATA[Gianna Clark]]></author>
			
			<category>
			<![CDATA[Change Management]]>
			</category>
			<pubDate>Sun, 07 Oct 2007 19:56:17 -0800</pubDate>
		</item>

		<item>
			<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>
		</item>

		<item>
			<title><![CDATA[Six Sigma Blogs: We're Not in Kansas Anymore!]]></title>
			<link>http://blogs.isixsigma.com/archive/were_not_in_kansas_anymore.html</link>
			<description><![CDATA["We’re not in Kansas anymore".  Recognize this line?  Made famous by the movie "The Wizard of Oz", it fittingly describes the feeling you get when you suddenly realize that things have changed.  How can change happen so fast that we get caught off guard?  Even Dorothy saw the twister coming.  
I recently had a "Kansas moment" that made me start thinking about why we sometimes hang on to products or processes that are soooo yesterday.
Years ago when my kids were young, we got hooked on Disney movies - the classics like "Jungle Book" and "Cinderella".  We bought them all.  We now have dozens of Disney VHS tapes.   Yes, VHS tapes - The once marvelous invention that beat out ’beta’ tapes to become the world’s "movie on demand" at our fingertips.  The kids have grown and we haven’t watched the tapes for years.  We don’t even have a VHS tape player hooked up anymore.  But, I still have two cabinets full of Disney VHS tapes.  Why?  I’m not sure.  Maybe because it took a long time to collect them or at the time, it was a really cool thing to have.   But their format and quality are outdated relative to today’s standard and we have sort of out-grown them too.  Why haven’t I thrown them out or given them away?  Could I have actually become emotionally attached to our collection of VHS tapes?
Obviously this situation didn’t happen overnight.  But just recently it was called to my attention by a series of events.  First, while I was doing my spring cleaning (I know that it’s the fall - I’m a little behind) I opened the cabinets packed with VHS tapes and sighed for lack of storage room for anything else but quickly shut the door and moved to the next task.  Later that day, we were at the video store and I noticed they don’t even carry VHS tapes.  And so, I had a "Kansas" moment - one of realizing that things have really changed.  Technology has changed and our needs have changed. 
This sort of thing doesn’t just happen at home.  It is common in the workplace.  Processes that were once topnotch have become outdated but somehow they are still around and many of us cling to them like they are our very own VHS tapes.  I’m not sure why this happens especially since we have Six Sigma to help us make our processes better.  Maybe we can’t get past the old successes because they make us feel good.  Maybe we’ve become emotionally attached to our old ways.  Or maybe we just haven’t realized that our customers have changed. 
The marketplace is constantly changing and customers want if faster, cheaper and better.  Case in point - If you have processes (or products) that have not been improved, reshaped or redesigned in the past five years, you may be falling behind.  Periodically revisiting your CT tree and using VOC may keep you from an unnecessary trip to Kansas. 
As for me, I think I’ll pack up those VHS tapes and put them in the attic, garage or closet - oh my!  ]]></description>
			
			<author><![CDATA[Gianna Clark]]></author>
			
			<category>
			<![CDATA[Change Management]]>
			</category>
			<pubDate>Sat, 08 Sep 2007 10:09:20 -0800</pubDate>
		</item>

		<item>
			<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>
		</item>

		<item>
			<title><![CDATA[Six Sigma Blogs: Does Size Matter?]]></title>
			<link>http://blogs.isixsigma.com/archive/does_size_matter.html</link>
			<description><![CDATA[All too often we hear the accolades of Six Sigma being utilized in a large (and often publicly traded) companies. In recent years the DMAIC methodology has been spread into smaller health care organizations, government, and even some school districts. However it seems there is a vast under-representation of Six Sigma in small companies and private firms, when compared to larger counterparts. When is the last time you heard of a private equity firm or a small business celebrating Six Sigma success?
When you’re a billion dollar company there is almost a sexiness to the sound of telling shareholders how many tens of millions of dollars Six Sigma projects have added to the bottom line. Having formal in house trainers and support in the form of Master Black Belts, statistical software packages, and completely committed Black Belts also doesn’t hurt.
My advice is that a smaller company should not believe a Six Sigma infrastructure is an unattainable goal. Rather, the structure and elements of deployment may need to be altered a bit from traditional big business models.
Examples of alteration can include assigning multiple roles to a position (ex. Quality Manager can be also considered Master Black Belt) and utilizing existing resources, such as the analysis and equation solver tool packs in Microsoft Excel (as opposed to buying additional software). Metrics to measure success can be tailored as well. By measuring Six Sigma value in terms of a percentage of revenue, profitability, new business opportunities, etc. the success will be more understandable and meaningful than just stating how much money was saved. 
So does size matter when it comes to having a successful Six Sigma culture? In my opinion the answer is no; you just have to be a bit more creative.]]></description>
			
			<author><![CDATA[Holly Hawkins]]></author>
			
			<category>
			<![CDATA[Change Management]]>
			</category>
			<pubDate>Fri, 31 Aug 2007 23:59:44 -0800</pubDate>
		</item>

		<item>
			<title><![CDATA[Six Sigma Blogs: Leveraging BB Projects to drive momentum]]></title>
			<link>http://blogs.isixsigma.com/archive/leveraging_bb_projects_to_drive_momentum.html</link>
			<description><![CDATA[As big as the Army is, the opportunities for improvement abound. However, the tolerance for improvement projects (particularly long drawn out ones) is very low. Any thing that takes more than 90 days to complete is considered a waste of time. Or worse you get called an "oxygen thief." 
What I have found is that one of the best ways to overcome this is to leverage projects completed and replicate them as Rapid Improvement Events. People get excited if they know a problem can be fixed in a few days. I feel that it is largely psychological as the real work is in controlling the process not fixing it. 
To date, over 1000 BB and GB projects have been completed. This is a huge platform to link problems to solutions and drive towards critical mass. 
 
 
 ]]></description>
			
			<author><![CDATA[Capt. Harris]]></author>
			
			<category>
			<![CDATA[Change Management&nbsp;,&nbsp;Military]]>
			</category>
			<pubDate>Thu, 30 Aug 2007 11:29:40 -0800</pubDate>
		</item>

		<item>
			<title><![CDATA[Six Sigma Blogs: Nail Down Your Project with PBL]]></title>
			<link>http://blogs.isixsigma.com/archive/nail_down_your_project_with_pbl.html</link>
			<description><![CDATA[A good project gets you the facts, the data. Talk objectively with those facts and you have a water tight case for any ‘rhetoric’! 
In my Blog Man v. Machine I talked about PBL; ’Performance Based Leadership’, basically Behavioral Science that at Bechtel they use hand in hand with DMAICT. They have an acronym called NORMS that I use when stating a case or giving difficult feedback. This has dug me out of many tricky confrontations. When giving feedback ensure it’s:

Not an Interpretation – an unbiased statement about an event or behaviour
Observable – Based on specific behaviours or events that are actually seen or heard
Reliable – 2 or more people can independently agree on events that are seen or heard
Measurable – a number can be used to describe behaviour
Specific – who, what, where, when, context, sequence
I find it especially useful for Black Belts who often have the facts and the data and it’s especially useful in providing feedback to colleagues / individuals. 
Do you have any other methods of delivering effective feedback?]]></description>
			
			<author><![CDATA[J P Spencer]]></author>
			
			<category>
			<![CDATA[Change Management&nbsp;,&nbsp;General&nbsp;,&nbsp;Leadership&nbsp;,&nbsp;Methodology]]>
			</category>
			<pubDate>Mon, 20 Aug 2007 09:25:55 -0800</pubDate>
		</item>

		<item>
			<title><![CDATA[Six Sigma Blogs: Passion is the Seed of Change]]></title>
			<link>http://blogs.isixsigma.com/archive/passion_is_the_seed_of_change.html</link>
			<description><![CDATA[Changed processes, changed skill sets, changed thinking and changed performance.  Six Sigma is all about change.  
Passion, defined as "boundless enthusiasm", is the seed of change.  With it, Six Sigma flourishes.  Without it, project implementation is a constant struggle.  Does your organization have the passion for change that allows processes to bloom to their full potential?  Or do you need to constantly re-plant your seeds to harvest enough enthusiasm to move forward?
Change, even on a good day, is difficult.  Resistance to change is natural.  That is why Belts of all colors should be well versed in change management tools and techniques.  A well thought out change plan can go a long way in building a cadre of passionate supporters for your proposed change.  The change plan should address methods to create sponsorship, engage all stakeholders early in the process and effectively communicate to all parties involved.  
There are numerous change models, websites and books available that describe change management approaches, tools and methods.   Both G.E. CAP (Change Acceleration Process) and Prosci’s ADKAR (Awareness - Desire - Knowledge - Ability - Reinforce) are methodologies that nicely complement Six Sigma project work.
If you haven’t integrated change management techniques with your Six Sigma project execution strategy you may want to give it a try.  It may be the perfect way to "seed the need" for passion in your organization.]]></description>
			
			<author><![CDATA[Gianna Clark]]></author>
			
			<category>
			<![CDATA[Change Management]]>
			</category>
			<pubDate>Sat, 11 Aug 2007 19:18:02 -0800</pubDate>
		</item>

		<item>
			<title><![CDATA[Six Sigma Blogs: Black Belt Ranks]]></title>
			<link>http://blogs.isixsigma.com/archive/black_belt_ranks.html</link>
			<description><![CDATA[In the martial arts, you may know that once a person obtains a black belt there are usually levels of progression upwards.  Each of these levels is called a "dan" and there can be 3 or more progressive levels, sometimes designated with a stripe or tape around the end of the black belt.
We've taken that concept as a beginning for a career development plan for Black Belts.  We ask for a 2 - 3 year commitment as part of our hiring process, and hire new Black Belts at a "novice" level if they have not previously been certified as a Black Belt elsewhere.  After training and internal certification, and meeting other organizational requirements, they are promoted to "practitioner" level.
At this point, we start discussing possible future paths:  Continued learning in project management and expanding the focus of the projects; or possibly going back into operations and a Green Belt level of participation; or possibly upwards to incorporate more teaching and mentoring.  In the last case, the level is called "sensei" and can be obtained through a number of ways, demonstrating effectiveness in project management, teaching of our Operational Excellence courses, and formal mentoring programs.
Each of these levels has a salary band within the Black Belt wage range, and the promotion process includes preparation of a portfolio to be presented to a group of executives who will consider the appropriateness of the promotion.
We've put this structure together in the last several months, and will be setting up the first portfolio reviews this fall.
I'm working whether there are any other Black Belt level concepts, like this one, being used "out there?"  If so, please share!
 
 ]]></description>
			
			<author><![CDATA[Sue Kozlowski]]></author>
			
			<category>
			<![CDATA[Change Management&nbsp;,&nbsp;Leadership&nbsp;,&nbsp;Management]]>
			</category>
			<pubDate>Mon, 06 Aug 2007 07:44:32 -0800</pubDate>
		</item>

		<item>
			<title><![CDATA[Six Sigma Blogs: Green Around the Gills]]></title>
			<link>http://blogs.isixsigma.com/archive/green_around_the_gills.html</link>
			<description><![CDATA[While reading Gianna Clark's blog below, "Green Belt Sonic Boom," my first reaction was:  Great minds think alike!  We are in the starting phase of a boom of training, and all of Gianna's caveats are valuable.
Last year in October, our healthcare system started our internal training of Green Belts with a class of 40.  We planned to start courses in the fall, winter, and summer of each year.  The course includes 8 days of training, usually scheduled as 2 days each month, followed by a training project which is a requirement for certification.
The first and second classes went well.  Then the flywheel started to catch, and we were asked to start an additional class in April of this year.  By the end of this class, we had 100 Green Belts who had completed the training!  But, only 3 had become certified so far.  We had a discussion about what we would do if the number of Green Belts exceeded our ability to place them in training projects.  Our support structure includes an Executive Sponsor at each of our hospital sites and a few other Operating Units; 13 Six Sigma Black Belts deployed around the system, and our Master Black Belt who coordinates the deployment.  We have developed a schedule for projects using a Value Stream approach, and each Operating unit is active in 1 - 3 Value Streams at this time.
This June, our CEO announced that it would be an expectation for all leaders in the organization to become Green Belts.  The summer and fall classes quickly filled up.  One of our site Presidents asked for 2 additional sessions, in the summer and fall, so that all of her leaders could complete this requirement by December 2007.
Then another site Manager asked to have a session at her site in the fall.  At this rate, as of December 2007, we will have "graduated" 250 Green Belts, of whom 3 (so far) have completed certification.  (We also have about 50 Green Belts who completed DMAIC projects during the time that GE was providing our deployment training.)
So what can we do with all of these Green Belts, if we don't have enough projects for them after they complete the training? 
As of this summer, we have broadened our training, and renamed the course as Lean Management.  In addition to learning the DMAIC tools and structure, plus lean tools and approach, we are teaching about how to use these concepts to become Lean Six Sigma Managers as well as facilitators of improvement projects.  We give assignments during the course, to ensure that they use the basic tools, and there is a final (open book) exam at the end that we use as an educational capstone to the coursework.  We think that the move to Lean Six Sigma management of daily processes is something that will keep them engaged, whether or not they are involved in projects.
In parallel with these developments, we are working with our WorkLife Services department (human resources) to add language to our leadership performance expectations about using the tools and concepts in their daily operations, and about expectations for facilitation of improvement projects.  There is also some discussion about whether Green Belt certification should be a factor (or requirement) for internal promotions.
So:  Should we continue to offer Green Belt classes, until we have trained all of our 1000 leaders?  Should we call a halt until more of the Green Belts obtain their formal certification?  If all leaders are using Lean Six Sigma tools and concepts in their daily operations, is that more important - or less important - or equally important - when compared to formal certification and assignment to facilitate projects?
We're talking about all of those issues at our organization.  Thanks Gianna for your very pertinent comments on this topic!
How about the rest of you?  How have you dealt with the growth in your Green Belt ranks?]]></description>
			
			<author><![CDATA[Sue Kozlowski]]></author>
			
			<category>
			<![CDATA[Change Management&nbsp;,&nbsp;Leadership&nbsp;,&nbsp;Management]]>
			</category>
			<pubDate>Wed, 01 Aug 2007 08:44:09 -0800</pubDate>
		</item>

		<item>
			<title><![CDATA[Six Sigma Blogs: Resistance is Futile]]></title>
			<link>http://blogs.isixsigma.com/archive/resistance_is_futile.html</link>
			<description><![CDATA[    "Resistance is futile". That is the warning statement from the Borg Collective, an arch enemy of the Federation of Planets in the Star Trek television series. Any trekkies out there? The first time I heard that phrase I thought; boy are they over-confident, they have not dealt with Captain Jean Luc Picard yet. And of course after moments of near destruction the Enterprise destroys the enemy and the crew sighs with relief that they have not been assimilated. 
     During my early learning about the lean transformation paradigm the concept of staff resistance to the process was paramount. Being a creative soul this statement came to mind.  I thought of Captain Picard and his eventual triumph over the Borg. Resistance is futile became a mantra of sorts as I worked the new process into the daily routine of the operation I manage. 
    Now… two years later the word lean is almost never mentioned except in the past tense as the Management Initiative that started a few years ago. But, my observations are clear. Many staff are sustaining 5S work spaces, we are in a pull focus completing the tasks way ahead of schedule and ready for new work from our referral base. The plan is working because people are working the plan. Certainly some personal work style transformation has occurred. That is a good sign of the long term benefits of this organizational development tool. It takes time for staff to use the knowledge and work it into their daily work habits, but I remain convinced that there has been some behavior change which is good for the individual employee and the organization. ]]></description>
			
			<author><![CDATA[Stephen C. Crate]]></author>
			
			<category>
			<![CDATA[Change Management&nbsp;,&nbsp;Lean]]>
			</category>
			<pubDate>Fri, 09 Mar 2007 10:31:50 -0800</pubDate>
		</item>

	</channel>
</rss>
