Charles McKinney

Reacting to the last several months of turmoil in the capital markets, I want to discuss an area where Lean Six Sigma professionals who work in banking and financial services should focus their attention, acquire new skills, and start having an impact –?? enterprise risk. A couple of years ago, one of my former colleagues […]

Gianna Clark notes that several hundred companies began their Six Sigma journeys about seven years ago. Is Six Sigma the quality equivalent of a stock market bubble? Are we cheerleaders of an irrational exuberance where performance economics do not match the hype we create? Is Six Sigma on the verge of becoming the next TQM […]

In a recent blog at Harvard Business School Press Online, Tom Davenport challenges the applicability of Six Sigma. You can read his post at http://discussionleader.hbsp.com/davenport/. Coming from anyone else, a statement that Six Sigma “should only be used in product manufacturing, where the idea of reducing defects to one in six standard deviations really makes […]

In his Rough Type blog, Nicholas Carr — contrarian author of the book, Does IT Matter? — comments on Microsoft’s plans to build a data center in Siberia and upcoming completion of the world’s largest data center in Chicago. Construction of these facilities costs hundreds of millions of dollars, and each will hold tends of […]

My last blog discussed elevating the strategic relevance of Lean, Six Sigma and process excellence. My view is that mature Process Excellence Organizations enjoy or achieve credibility and success by executing a flexible performance-improvement process attacking the top priorities, employing the best tools, selecting the right projects and leveraging organizational momentum. The first thing mature […]

Like many companies in the Fortune 1000, we are planning 2008. At leadership meetings, around conference room tables and in hallway conversations, we are asking big questions: What will our industry look like? How will external trends affect us? How should our business model change? What capabilities do we need? Do we have them? What […]

The Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) released recently a study of Lean adoption at nine manufactured housing plants. HUD’s Office of Policy Development and Research and the Manufactured Housing Research Alliance were sponsors of the study. The study highlights the benefits of Lean to making production of manufacturing housing more efficient and improving […]

Please pardon me for ignoring iSixSigma for the last two months. Life took over, and I did not have time to blog. This is a short post consisting of three questions. Would anyone comment on the range of cycle times for DMAIC black belt and green belt projects? At your companies, is mastery of a […]

In two previous blogs, I wrote about intersections between Six Sigma, internal control and data quality. By way of background information, my department performs compliance functions, where we monitor information delivered by third parties and created through internal operations. For example, we receive property-address information and derive new information like geospatial position through “geocoding” processes. […]

KPMG, the public accounting firm, recently published a survey of outsourcing. Nearly three out of four companies in the survey do not measure the value of their outsourcing arrangements. Yet paradoxically, KPMG concludes outsourcing is working because 89% of their survey participants plan to maintain or increase their use of outsourcing. The survey leads me […]

A few comments on organizational design and Six Sigma…. Organizational structure is one consideration. The decision to centralize or functionally embed black belts has to consider an organization’s business model, culture and past experience with process improvement. Likewise, compensation, career track, professional development and human capital management practices are important. In some organizations, Six Sigma […]

After spending considerable time over the last few weeks on designing a compliance process to measure the quality of information, I want to share a few observations.Feedback about how companies are addressing data quality through Six Sigma would be most helpful. Companies are approaching an inflection point: exploiting information is their next lever to innovate […]

For my first blog at iSixSigma, I would like to contemplate disciplines that are slow to embrace Six Sigma but need it most: internal control and enterprise risk management. Passage of the Sarbanes Oxley Act of 2002 thrust these domains into the limelight. The Committee of Sponsoring Organizations (COSO) defines enterprise risk management as follows: […]