Notes from the Deployment Front

Sorry for the long delay in posting here. I’ve been working on taking a failed deployment and turning it around. It’s tedious work with a lot of sleepless nights trying to get a very successful company to understand how to become even better.

The good news is that it’s going in a very good direction. If you think you are good and want a good challenge, this is the place to be.

I will not talk about my company any more – way too many sensitive issues to be discussed in public. Instead, I’m going to start drawing on my past experiences to talk about things I think are important that are outside of what we teach Green Belts, Black Belts, and Master Black Belts.

My first topic will be how to identify a deployment that is going to fail.

Signs of a deployment that will fail – My top ten list:

1) Leadership clearly articulates all of the other things that are more important.

2) Leadership claims we are doing this only because negative data has been presented so many times.

3) Leadership believes that all process decisions must be okay with business guys who wouldn’t know a process if it bit them in the butt.

4) Leadership wants to object to calling this Six Sigma because they are “Lean”. This is while their material flow is abysmal.

5) No infrastructure is put in place around selecting and supporting project work.

6) Training takes place with no immediate tie to project work requiring tool usage.

7) People are sent to training without projects.

8) There is discussion around metrics that clearly do not reflect the health of our critical processes justifying them because the negative result is out of our immediate control.

9) There is no authority to assure data integrity.

10) RTY only includes tests where we collect data.