Each of our hundred of processes required a common format/look for consistency in the creation of our cookbook.

We sit down with our Knowledge Management team to discuss what our users should know about a process and we came up with this list:

Procedure Name--The identifying name of the procedure that makes a distinction between itself and other procedures

Difficulty Level--The amount of difficulty assigned to a process or procedure that is derived from the collection, calculation, and analysis of difficulty factors withint a process or procedure [We’re using: Number of steps within the process with connecting processes counting once; number of possible conflicts; and number of vocabulary words]

Author--The person or persons to whom the creation of a document is credited

Creation Date--The date in which a process was initially created

Update Date--The last date in which changes were made to a process

Updated By--The person or persons to whom the most recent updating is credited

Audience--The person, persons, or groups to which a process is intended

Stakeholders--The group of organizations, departments, and/or people that a specific process deals with in order to obtain the end result of said process

Core Processes--The main process area a process belongs to

Connecting Processes--The separate processes within a procedure

Vocabulary--All key words relevant to a process or procedure that are likely to be misunderstood or not understood by all

Knowledge Experts--The person or persons whom problems may be escalated to, if the need arises

Forms--Any forms related to a specific policy or procedure

Description--A statement or an account describing a process or procedure that serves as a brief overview of a process or procedure

Needed to Complete--The concrete objects that are required in order to successfully complete a process or procedure

Policies--Any policies--written or not, that govern a specific process or procedure

Steps--The steps in the flowchart

Business Rules--Rules describing the requirements of a process or procedure

Employee Knowledge Required--The knowledge that is required by an employee in order to complete the procedure or process

Customer Knowledge Required--The knowledge required by a customer in order for a given process or procedure to take place

Knowledge Created--The knowledge that is created through the completion of a process or procedure that did not exist before

Possible Conflicts--The possible conflicts that can occur in the process or procedure

FAQ--Those for an employee, customer or stakeholder

Orientation Materials--Any staff orientation materials connected

Exit Materials--Any staff exit materials connected

Our help desk decided this semester to start a project where we would create a cookbook of our processes and procedures. This cookbook would be in the form of a manual that would be in print and electronic formats and would serve as a basis for choosing Six Sigma projects and for training our staff and as a reference document.

First we categorized our help desk into seven major categories that we support: systems, operating systems, networking, security, IT services, help desk, and internal processes. Each of these categories contains from two to eight other items for a manual with 28 chapters. Second we began collecting data from those who work closest with these processes. The data includes everything from the process in a flowchart to who are the process owners. This is still in the works. Now we’re also working on what format to put this work in. We’ve decided that our flowcharts will be put into Visio. Our cookbook will be written in LaTeX and put in PDF format for the web and printed as a paper copy too.

As the academic year begins our Six Sigma team has met, created a new team charter, and began accumulating a list of projects that we would like to try this year. Our team named "Gravy" (gravy, or Six Sigma, being the goal of the team) fits in our planning objective: "More Six Sigma projects to measure the quality of customer service."

The team champion, myself, and master black belt will have three returning members and one new member. They bring areas of expertise with them ranging from quality assurance experience to a jack of all trades to an organizational guru. Our first project will be to measure the types, numbers and time-to-completion of our help desk tickets during our new student days (days on campus before classes begin) and our first week of classes. These are two times when our support numbers are extremely high and they are good gauges of our internal training of staff and our marketing efforts to inform students of changes and how to connect to the residential network at our University.

It is very important to understand how to create a good key performance indicator or KPI for Six Sigma. This is also true when you add Six Sigma to your strategic plan, as I have.

The KPIs that you develop must first be a goal(s) of your organization, department, etc. These should be agreed upon. Remember, these will indicate the target performance levels and the guiding light for your work, so get consensus.

As a leader the KPIs will help you make decisions, guide you to where you need to collect data (baselines) so you can create targets and give you an indication of what improvement(s) have been gained/lost and how you should use that data. Keep in mind that these should be flexible too.

Do not keep your organization set to such stringent KPIs that they are constantly failing. After your first year, if you fail to reach your targets look at why, don't just press to do better next year, keeping with the same goals set at the beginning of your strategic plan.

Remember that in our changing world, we need to be able to change too.

Since my staff in my department is entirely composed of students I have many advantages and disadvantages when creating teams and working on projects. The advantages of a student staff include the high turnover rates and those who see their time with us as just another job to kill time and get a paycheck.

Some of the advantages are that, as a collective whole, are like a coat of many colors. They are from different majors (i.e., business, computer science, mathematics, etc.) and are at various educational levels from freshman to graduate student. This coupled with a desire to learn real-world skills and to do something that looks good on their resume gives them an advantage that other teams may not possess.

Another aspect of our team was the size. Since we have a mere seven to ten people on average that left me to wear many hats…from champion to master black belt. This also left me with the ability to have a green belt, since I couldn’t devote anyone entirely to Six Sigma in our department.

The choice of green belt came about in two ways. First was to ask who had interest in that position. This cut the number of choices by more than half. Then I had to look at who had the best background and classes in statistical training, computers and project management. That helped narrow the number down again to my best choice, a junior business major with an emphasis in economics and computer science.

The remainder of the staff would be training in what Six Sigma was, why we were doing this in our department, what it looked like, and how it was linked to compensation for them. Their training would be less intense than in our pilot semester but they would begin to actually see a project in action so many things would become clearer to them.

At this point this new team structure went into place but how would it become a thread in our department, especially in our hiring of replacement employees? The first thing I did was placed Six Sigma, as it looked at that time, in our new strategic plan. This way I could plan for it and monitor progress easier. The second thing I did was develop a small community of practice where knowledge could be shared and captured so that what we were learning wasn’t lost the next year.

Six Sigma started in our department slowly. There were many factors that played into this, but mostly staffing issues:

1. I only have a staff of student employees (from 8-16 per year).
2. This staff is in a constant state of change.
3. Students come with various skills, many with no math or business or technical background.
4. Knowledge transfer/capture had to be a major component of our setup.

At the onset I was lucky to be the only upper level individual who had to champion this idea and support it. With that out of the way, I was on a quest to find a couple of student employees who not only possessed skills to help support our effort, but also a drive to do this since it went well beyond what any of them were hired to do.

At the time I had a strong set of level two techs who fit the bill so I enlisted their help. They were both curious and anxious to work on this. I had communicated what I wanted to do, why it was necessary, and what the benefits would be and they agreed.

The first step was to train everyone. This training would get them up to speed but would also become a test on how to train others that would follow.

Our university has a Blackboard system and I saw it as a perfect place for this training to occur. Blackboard is a web-based teaching/learning system which supports online documents, bulletin boards, tests, etc. They could learn whenever it was good for them...it was perfect! I developed the initial online site and began publishing documents/bulletin boards/quizzes and they jumped in and started learning. As we moved along their feedback was invaluable to me on what worked and concepts that should be broken down more.

Once we had a good basic training program developed we began looking at these employees skills and I realized that I had a vast knowledgebase at my finger tips and that the iron was hot to start training others. Until people could grasp some basic understanding about what we were about to accomplish how could they back this and help?

The remainder of my student employees began this online course and all finished by the end of the school year.

Great. I had 8 people who had taken this basic training. Two would not return the next year and I had three new people to train that next fall.

The business of higher education today is just that—a business. It focuses more today on the bottom line and it is important to stay on the competitive edge for all of its customers—from the students and their parents to the faculty, staff, and donors, as well.