Last week I had the opportunity to present a webinar at the Project Management Viewblog. I spoke on how Six Sigma-powered problem statements can actually improve innovation in a project. Interestingly, that’s contrary to what many product managers believe. (You can review a full audio-video playback of the webinar presentation by clicking here.) (more…)
When companies consider the merits of Six Sigma or consider embarking on a Lean Six Sigma effort, concerns and questions always arise. Many companies have heard of Six Sigma, but most have no idea what it actually is or how it works. Here’s a helpful list of the basic questions companies get wrong most frequently.
Q: Lean Six Sigma only fits large companies, right?
A: Not at all. Companies as large as GE have saved billions using Six Sigma. But small companies have actually proven to achieve similar results more quickly than larger companies. Lean Six Sigma is a key component of improvement for any size business.
iSixSigma performs an annual global survey of those working in the field of Six Sigma. The data is always interesting and always relevant. To review a webcast presentation of this year’s survey, follow this link.
For me it is always interesting to explore the differences (and sometimes similarities) between industries, global regions, Six Sigma role/function, and education background.
Proportions pop up everywhere in life — “Four out of five dentists recommend…”, “Obama leads Clinton by ten percentage points among likely voters in Wisconsin…”, “Last month’s manufacturing yields are up from a year ago…”, and so on. Anytime you calculate the fraction, portion, or percentage something takes up from the whole, that’s a proportion. And Six Sigma provides a method for you to discover if one proportion is truly different from another. (more…)
Michael Marx has published some great research in the latest edition of iSixSigma Magazine. It shows that soft skills (like verbal communication, team skills, leadership, etc.) are considered more important to success in Six Sigma than technical/analytical skills.
The news comes as no surprise to me. For many years I’ve cautioned managers and students that “soft” issues are the toughest part of almost all improvement efforts—much more often than technical issues. If you review your own experiences, you’ll likely find the same: when a project or effort has fallen short, was it due purely to a technical issue? Probably not. Instead, it usually was an organizational, interpersonal, or team issue that brought the project to its knees.
In my experience, those armed with only technical skills, even superior technical skills, don’t achieve nearly as much improvement as those who have developed good soft skills, even if their technical capabilites are below average.
My recommendation is to make soft skill training a foundation of your toolset. And resharpen your skills regularly. What’s the best way I’ve found: reading and rereading (and rereading again) Stephen Covey’s classic, The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People. It is my favorite resource for improving my capabilities of successfully interacting with others.
What other soft skill resources have you found helpful?
How do you know if you know? In other words, how do you know when you have sufficient knowledge to reliably improve or manage a process? More than a century ago, Lord Kelvin suggested a simple touchstone to answer this crucial question: (more…)
Six Sigma stands at a crossroads. It’s the same crossroads that many other industries have navigated. Do you remember when computers entered the mainstream of business?
Only twenty-or-so years ago, all business computing capability resided in the hands of programming and IT specialists. If you needed any computational or data power to perform your business function, you were referred to the computer department. They queued your request and later dispensed the results—a report, an analysis, a data query. The methods and tools of their craft remained mysterious to most. Yet their expertise in the arcane enabled the critical functions of business. (more…)
