Dear iSixSigma Blogosphere Readers,

Back in January 2005, I started up a little blog about Six Sigma companies. It caught the eye of iSixSigma’s very own Mike Cyger and he invited me to join his growing team of forward thinking Six Sigma zealots dedicated to providing the best information about Six Sigma to the masses.

As an active user of iSixSigma since 2001, working for the company was like being a roadie for my favorite band. Living and breathing Six Sigma.

I’ve been associated with the Six Sigma industry for nearly a decade and have met some of the world’s finest people in this community. To you, I give my deepest thanks for all you have taught me. My journey to this point has been fantastic.

But alas, it is time for me to move on. I have the chance to follow a dream of mine, and I cannot let the opportunity pass me.

I will remain active with iSixSigma over the next several weeks transitioning my role. I will continue to keep up with the industry and look forward to keeping in touch with you in the future. I can be reached via LinkedIn.

Best,

Michael Marx

I’m going to go out on a limb and open up a discussion on the "Ultimate Organization" here. In my last two posts, I talked a little bit about integrating the 6S culture in an organization (vs keeping it at a specialist level only) and organizational fear. I figured a logical progression of the overall discussion would be to open up a thread to talk about what the ultimate organization would look like.

Take a minute to reflect on your experiences (good and bad) on your involvement in 6S. Then, if you can find the best scenario for success, fast forward a few years to the end game. What does it look like (from president to the front line)?

There are a few motivations behind why I’m asking the question. The main one is that a lot of times we talk about what doesn’t work, or challenges that we face, but in the grand scheme, I have yet to see a discussion around what "utopia" looks like from a 6S standpoint. Based on the varying experiences and industry affiliations of the readership here, I am really looking forward to the diverse possibilities of answers, as well as some great dialog.

Happy daydreaming!

-K

There’s no doubt that fear can prevent an organization to be what it could be, but what can be done about it...how many times have you been in a situation where there were problems to solve, but no one stepped up to the plate to solve them because of fear? Piggy-backing on my previous posting, this could be another inhibitor to making 6S truly mainstream. Take for example the following:

A defect is identified, and there is no clear root cause. Short term fixes are employed. A person is nominated to handle the problem solving, and as analysis is performed, the exercise becomes one of self-protection. Groups that are involved begin to work on proving that they are NOT the root cause. The activity becomes so muddy that no clear root cause is ever found. Whatever band-aid that was put in place becomes the solution, and the cycle starts again...

What is the bottom line here? To me - fear. Fear of being the guy or gal that stands up to say their department owns the root cause...just like fear shuts down dialog, fear can also shut down team problem solving.
So the question is, how do we foster change so that we overcome fear? How do we create a safe environment for problem solving effectively with free expression?

How do you describe a process to a team? There are lots of tools in the toolkit including value stream mapping, functional swim lanes, context diagrams and SIPOC to name a few. But I find they can be “a little cold” for a non-technical or cross-functional team and I want to “bring it to life”.

Take a simple example from the area I work in, general insurance. To describe the customer claims process in any depth takes time. So when you have a cross-functional team covering front, middle and back office it can mean (even with the tightest time keeping and agenda) that the people at the end of the process don’t get a look in as most of the day has been spent at the beginning/middle of the process, where all the customer interaction happens. So you end-up leaving people out.

As the title suggests my recommendation is Business Scenarios. Rather than cover the generic customer claims process, cover it in a series of business scenarios like

• The policy holder’s vehicle collided with a lamppost, no one else was involved, it happened at 11:45pm
• The policy holder’s vehicle was hit by a 3rd party vehicle from behind, both vehicles were drivable, no one appears injured at the scene, 3rd party was insured and traceable
• The policy holder’s vehicle collided was a 3rd party vehicle on a narrow street, liability is unclear, 3rd party injured and vehicle undriveable

If you start with the simplest scenario where nothing goes wrong (sunny-day) then you can rapidly walk the whole process. You can add complexity as you need to. Maybe include failures in the process and known exceptions (rainy-day) e.g. 3rd party had no insurance.

This approach really opens up the discussion as you are talking to people in the language they relate to. You get to see the true degree of variation required of the process which allows for more robust solutions.

I have been thinking about various topics regarding Six Sigma recently, and I keep coming back to a question that is hard to answer...if we "do Six Sigma" right, is there even a place for Six Sigma as we know it ten or twenty years down the road?

Consider this.....ten years from now, do you really want to have Black Belts doing project work? Or...do you want Six Sigma tools to be the status quo of how the business is operated by everyone? To me the latter is the end game, but does the "classical" approach to Six Sigma (Black Belts doing projects) fit the end game??...I’m not so sure.

How do we structure Six Sigma in general to better fit the end game of real culture change, instead of creating a bunch of "super problem solvers"?

It’s really interesting for me to look back and think about how many times quality planning has come up as an afterthought. It is staggering for me to think about what could have happened if quality planning was done the proper way.

Here’s an example....one time I was involved with a new product introduction, and one of the major milestones in the quality planning protocol was for gage repeatability to be assessed and acceptable by a certain date. Sounds fine and dandy right? Well, the exercise turned into a frustrating one, as discussions turned into something like "did the gage r&r’s get done today?", without even considering why they were being done in the first place. Moreover, people who didn’t know the first thing about what a grr was were asking the questions.....

I’ve seen this phenomenon across several industries, and it makes me wonder if up-front quality planning generally is really taken seriously at all.....

On Monday June 1, 2009 Continuous Improvement Practitioners (CI-P), from the State of Maine "Bend the Curve” initiative, led by Walter Lowell, conducted a study mission at Lonza in Rockland Maine. To quote from the Lonza web site, “Lonza is one of the world’s leading suppliers to the pharmaceutical, healthcare and life science industries. Its products and services span its customers’ needs from research to final product manufacture.”

Lonza recently began some Six Sigma initiatives including Value Stream mapping and specific Kaizen and Kanban analysis that have reduced waste, lowered required inventory, automated some processes, increased productivity and saved money in most every area reviewed. Jon Kirsh, formerly with MEP Maine has new VSM planned for a number of other areas and is hoping for the same results.

The most impressive changes according to Jon included a 5S review of the research and develop workshop and the incorporation of KANBAN signs in various production areas to alert staff of lowed inventory or need for other resource ordering. Six Sigma tools have made a significant difference in the work that LONZA does. I enjoyed seeing the practical and economical process changes these tools have effected at LONZA.

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 & 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 & 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.

Over the last 5 years I have invested considerable time & energy in trying to become a skilled continuous improvement practitioner. I am a strong believer in continual learning via direct deployment experience.

Over this same period, continuous improvement has become a main-stream product. Any business without an Operational Excellence, Process Improvement, Process Excellence, Continual Improvement (and so on) capability is now way behind the curve. This dramatic growth has brought a large increase in the number of CI professionals.

Here is the point; these days I have conversations with other CI professionals that make me wonder I have learnt the right things, things like:

• The scientific way of experimenting is to change one factor at a time
• The most important factor in sampling is population size
• Reducing overall process time has nothing to do with becoming Lean

Where did I go wrong? Case in point is the ex-GE Master Black Belt. Now I don’t like to generalise and easily the best MBB I have ever met was from GE, but my other experiences have not been so good. Ever had to explain proportion tests and what a chi-square test does to a ex-GE MBB?

How to conclude? Maybe we could agree a single version of the truth and certify against this? Maybe it’s just part of the evolution of CI? I just don’t know. But I feel the CI world changing.

Now more than ever, the development and use of control plans play a critical role in succesfully implementing a new process. In my past, I have seen varying ways that control plans have been implemented, but I still struggle a little when I try to find a really good example of control plan development.

To me, control plans need to be developed upfront in the development process. This is really important so that key product attributes (ctq’s) are constantly aligned with process control parameters. Some may think that developing control plans this early is a waste of time (since processes typically don’t get defined so early), but why not let the process itself be defined by the control plan?

So how do your organizations use control plans... I’d love to know...