Newcomers to Six Sigma often struggle to pre-emptively recognize improvement projects that are ill-formed and bound to languish. This ability to spot problem projects develops with time and experience. But after seeing and reviewing thousands of projects, I have found that there are some key indicators—some telltale clues—that allow even inexperienced reviewers to know it’s time to stop and take a closer look at a project’s viability.

• The project scope crosses organizational boundaries. When the work in a project or the changes required by the project extend outside of the project leader’s department, organizational problems can quickly arise. The “soft” skills of managing change and implementing devised improvements are usually more difficult than the technical tasks of discovering the root cause or synthesizing a solution. So when a project has the added burden of managing change outside the sphere of the project team’s or leader’s influence, it just makes things that much harder. To insure consistent, rapid success, look for projects that are wholly contained within a single department.
• The project scope spans multiple parts or multiple equipment. Even though they may appear to be identical, each piece of manufacturing equipment performs differently. And different parts, even though they may seem very similar, have unique nuances. The critical input factors that affect the key output may actually be different from one instance of the same equipment to another. And even if the critical input factors are the same, the input setting values needed to hit the same key output target may be different. The quickest, most direct route to breakthrough improvement and cost savings is to scope a project within a single piece of manufacturing equipment or within a single product.
• The measurement system that quantifies the key output metric is suspect. Being able to accurately measure the key output metric for a project is so critical to success that if there is any doubt in the validity of key output measurements, every aspect of a project becomes difficult. What is the capability of the current process? Not sure. What is the capability of alternative process configurations? Again, not sure. In this mode, every decision point becomes muddy—which is the opposite of what you need for rapid, consistent breakthrough. Make sure you trust the measurements for your key output metric.

As you review new projects, always look for these clues to know if a project is on track for success—or whether it is going to pose difficulties.

This entry was posted on Thursday, August 20th, 2009 at 10:11 am and is filed under Tools & Methods. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.