Project Management & Six Sigma

What is the ultimate purpose of a project? Think about it for a minute. Why does some business leader, some organization, want you to work on a project? It’s simple really. Your efforts on any project you are managing should result in some kind of improvement for the business: reduced costs, increased sales, better productivity, less errors, reduced cycle time. The list goes on and on. You and your teams are doing a lot of work so an important aspect of the business gets better. Yet, so often, teams fail to realize improvement is their purpose. They get lost in the minutia and documentation of project management: scope documents, meeting minutes, action item lists, jeopardy logs, and meeting due dates. Or worse, teams often boast of tremendous improvement through such flimsy analysis that they risk losing total credibility with their clients, thus jeopardizing the hard work of the team. People simply miss the big picture: add value. The point is, if you, as a project manager, cannot effectively relate how what your team is doing results in some kind of business improvement, well, you are not doing a complete job as a project manager. More importantly, you could easily be viewed as not adding value to the organization. Is the perception of not adding value a risk you are willing to take in this time of uncertainty?

Let’s face it; project managers have a tough job. They have to manage people who don’t report to them while convincing multiple organizations to do things which are most likely different than what they are currently doing. Translation: resistance. To make matters worse, if things go as planned, well, someone else usually takes the credit. And if things don’t go as planned, you can bet it will be the fault of the project manager. But hey, that’s the nature of the game, right? So, what can a project manager do to more effectively manage projects which result in verifiable improvement? Easy. Incorporate the Six Sigma methodology into every project.

Six Sigma refers to a methodology that provides a powerful means to define and realize strategic objectives. It is a management strategy that incorporates statistical and systems thinking to improve decision-making. The tools of Six Sigma can, and should, be used by project managers. Essentially, the basic concept behind Six Sigma is that managing the process, not the results, will lead to improvement. At the core of Six Sigma is the utilization of the five improvement steps, also known as DMAIC. DMAIC stands for Define, Measure, Analyze, Improve, and Control. These five steps provide an easy-to-understand framework which will help projects move along quickly and successfully.

Evolution of Six Sigma

This is a timeline of the people and events that played critical roles in the evolution of Six Sigma:

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  Frederick W. Taylor in the 1890s and early 1900s;
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  Taylor’s systematic study of the use of time and motion by workers prefigured Walter Shewhart’s application of statistical methods to the control of manufacturing quality in the 1920s;
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  World War II;
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  The application of mathematics to problems of production and quality control helped decrease failure rate and customer standards;
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  Business managers and executives became interested in continuing quality control programs after the war;
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  W.E. Deming and Joseph Juran took quality control to Japan in 1953, and the 1960s saw a surge in the growth of quality in Japan; and
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  In the 1980s, the NBC White Paper “If Japan Can…Why Can’t We?” spurred an increased interest in quality and total quality management.

Six Sigma actually began at Motorola in the mid-1980s. Motorola discovered that products with high first-pass yield (the amount of product that made it through defect free) seldom failed in use. They focused on creating strategies to reduce defects in all of their products. By adopting and applying the Malcolm Baldrige criteria, Motorola won this prestigious national quality award in 1988. Motorola joined forces with companies such as IBM, ABB (Asea, Brown, Boveri), Texas Instruments, AlliedSignal and Kodak to found “Six Sigma Research Institute.”
In the late 1990s, GE Capital CEO Jack Welch successfully led the application of Six Sigma techniques to a non-manufacturing environment. The methodology remains popular partly due to the publicity regarding Jack Welch’s commitment to, and success with, achieving Six Sigma capability.

Six Sigma

Every year many people make resolutions to change themselves in some way they perceive would be for the better. For example, I’ve resolved to reduce the amount of coffee I drink from a full pot to a single cup per day because I believe drinking a lot of coffee is probably bad for me. Likewise, we’ve all heard friends, relatives or others talk about wanting to quit smoking, or wanting to go on a diet or go back to school — all with the common denominator of intent to improve some situation or aspect of their personal lives. In spite of the best intentions and fervent plans to change habits, change is difficult for most of us to manage. When it comes to executing change, it often takes much more effort and motivation than we anticipated, and the pain of working at change becomes a major hurdle — often at the expense of the desired goal. But when we stick to our plan and execute the change, we often embrace the results of our labor and with exuberant pride: “I did it!”

Most people tend not to think about plans for change in terms of managing a process, but those plans will get derailed when they don’t take a process approach. For instance, they often relate problems to the people involved, or they tend to look at isolated events and not at the “big picture” or context of those events. They often fail to recognize how all steps of a process work together, or they neglect to review the processes before and after.

Six Sigma is a disciplined, problem-solving methodology that uses statistical analysis in conjunction with the skill sets to understand the big picture and to break down that big picture into smaller chunks. Sigma is a performance indicator that describes the capability of a product, service, process and/or input of consistently meeting current and future defined requirements or expectations.