“Six Sigma – Where Do I Start?”

A very common question that companies ask themselves, when they are starting or looking to start on the journey of Six Sigma improvement is – “How and where do I start?”

Hopefully, before this question gets asked, normally by a Senior Manager or Executive, the company has already done the following:

• Committed itself to a culture of continuous improvement
• Selected Six Sigma as it’s preferred methodology for delivering process improvement
• Identified and put in place a “Six Sigma Champion”, at Senior Management level, who will be responsible for managing the Six Sigma program.

Getting these three things done is the easy part. Is that “Job Done” by the Senior Management Team?, No, not by a long chalk.

Successful and sustainable six sigma initiatives start at the Senior Executive / Management level, with a full commitment to investment in time and resource to ensure that Six Sigma is a success across the organisation. The most successful roll-outs of Six Sigma have happened when an initial diagnostic review of the companies strategy and it’s current state against that strategy, has taken place. This, in most cases is done by the Senior Management Team, facilitated and coached by a Six Sigma Champion, Master Black Belt or Black Belt. This review is carried out in four stages:

Stage One
 
A detailed review of the company’s strategy and business plan, – “Where do we want to be?”

The most important part of any Six Sigma initiative is to understand the short, medium and long term goals, objectives and strategies of the organisation. If these are clearly documented and articulated then we can understand what the business is looking to achieve. This provides us with our “Objectives Marker” and will form the basis of any project selection and prioritisation that is conducted later on.

It is absolutely vital that the whole of the Senior Management Team are engaged in this process, ensuring that the key objectives of the business are accurately articulated.

Stage Two

A detailed diagnostic analysis of the “Current As-Is” state of the business, – “Where are we now?”

Again, this stage requires the active involvement of the Senior Management Team, in a frank and honest assessment of the business in its current state. This “Current State” assessment should identify areas of the business it is good at, and therefore, less in need of immediate process improvement, as well as areas that require improvement. There are a number of different comparison points that can be used to assess the “Current State” including:

• Assessment of the organisation against it’s current year business objectives
• Assessment of the organisation against a “Best Practice” model such as the European Foundation for Quality Model (EFQM), which gives an assessment benchmark against “Excellence” organisations
• Assessment against known competitor benchmark data.

The focus for the Six Sigma Team at this stage should be around maintaining the Senior Executive’s Team within the “Current State”, without jumping to solutions.

Stage Three

Gap analysis – how do I get from “Where are we now?” to “Where do we want to be?”

This part of the process doesn’t generally involve the Senior Management Team as it is simply a case of comparing the output of Stage One to the Output of Stage Two and identifying the gaps between the two stages. In general, a Gap Analysis Report is generated, for review by the Senior Management Team, which identifies what needs to be done to bridge the gap between how the organisation is currently performing and what it wants to achieve in the future.

Stage Four

Identification, selection and prioritisation of projects, to close the gap.

This is a natural follow-on from Stage Three and should now involve both the Six Sigma and Senior Management teams, in identifying suitable projects to help close the gap and deliver the business strategy.

It is invaluable at this stage to utilise a scoring matrix to help score and prioritise the projects into some kind of logical order, against some key criteria. This is working on the basis that there aren’t an unlimited number of project resources to implement all of the projects and therefore, some kind of prioritisation has to take place.

The scoring matrix should include the following as a minimum:

1. A rating of the projects contribution to delivery of a specific business objective or strategy
2. The likelihood of completion of a successful project in that area

The scoring matrix can then be used as an important tool in reviewing progress of projects on an on-going basis, and to assign resource to projects as they move within the priority list.

In summary, a successful implementation of Six Sigma is heavily reliant on one thing – Management Commitment.

Time spent at the beginning of any Six Sigma program on assessing the requirements and current state of the business, will reap it’s rewards later on when the right projects are selected, and when these projects start to deliver real, tangible benefits to the business.

For further information contact the author of this article, Paul Martin, via Aster Training