I spent the afternoon with the North West Quality Forum (NWQF). Today’s meeting took place on the Microsoft campus in Redmond, Washington, just North East of Seattle. It was my first time to Redmond, besides my house-hunting trip to the Seattle area a couple of years ago.
The NWQF is a group of Seattle-based deployment leaders that get together every other month to discuss their Six Sigma and Lean initiatives. Today’s session was focused on project selection. Boeing, Washington Mutual, InfoSpace and iSixSigma presented their project selection processes. (iSixSigma presented the IDX process from the March/April 2005 issue of iSixSigma Magazine.)
Although the project selection processes varied in scope and detail, most of the presentations included the following key points:
- Start with and understand your business strategy
- Determine areas of the business that drive the strategy (the big Ys)
- Scope potential projects in written form, quantifying the opportunity
- Prioritize the list of approved projects
