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A fellow Black Belt and I were talking about project management skills. She made a very perceptive comment, which I will paraphrase: “Some people are really good at setting up a project – the ability to identify needed tasks, sources of benchmarking information, delegating, putting everything into a timeframe. And others are really good about […]

Now I like to think I am quite an objective & freethinking person and don’t always follow the herd when I think something is wrong. I’m not a complete contrarian but am willing to “go it alone” when I feel something is important. So it is a great disappointment to me to say I have […]

All too often we hear the accolades of Six Sigma being utilized in a large (and often publicly traded) companies. In recent years the DMAIC methodology has been spread into smaller healthcare organizations, government, and even some school districts. However it seems there is a vast under-representation of Six Sigma in small companies and private […]

As big as the Army is, the opportunities for improvement abound. However, the tolerance for improvement projects (particularly long drawn out ones) is very low. Anything that takes more than 90 days to complete is considered a waste of time. Or worse you get called an “oxygen thief.” What I have found is that one […]

I have been working with my colleague, Dave Baker, here at Aviva and we have been researching the long-term behaviour of our processes. Now I am not going to go down the path of process capability analysis, Cp, Cpk, Zshift and the like. Take a look at this simple time series plot to see why. […]

(Note: Bonus Cox-Box this week! Gary Cox received an email from a reader in India named Deepan. Deepan shared a funny Six Sigma story with Gary and then Gary drew up the cartoon above. If you have any Six Sigma moments you’d like to see immortalized in The Cox-Box, share your story with Gary. He […]

In every company, people in organizations make decisions and implement changes every day. Many of these changes are not typically the type of things that warrant a Six Sigma project. That being said, it should be recognized that the application of some Six Sigma tools in these everyday activities can provide a significant positive impact […]

If you subscribe to iSixSigma Magazine, please read the feature about how we used LSS to improve our Supply Requisition Process. The article is on page 22. Enjoy.  

Things that make you feel good in right away aren’t always beneficial in the long run. Some things, like candy, are actually harmful in the long term. While others, like getting the high score on Space Invaders, just don’t end up mattering very much. You feel good as they are happening, but beyond that they […]

I was driving to pick up my daughter from school yesterday when a story on National Public Radio (NPR) caught my attention. I only heard the end of the segment on the radio, but from what I could tell Medicare was forcing hospitals to change the way they do business by not paying for certain […]

I have recently been transferred back to a professional service position as a Rehabilitation Counselor in the Division of Vocational Rehabilitation Services. This is a long standing federal program that helps individuals with severe disabilities train for, maintain and obtain gainful employment within their functional capacities. The program was initially started for injured military personnel […]

For those of you who talk Six Sigma at dinner parties, here’s something for your next soiree – Six Sigma wine. I hear it goes well with a fishbone diagram and doesn’t leave that statistical aftertaste like those lower sigma level wines…. I’m not a wine drinker so I can’t comment on taste, but I can […]

A good project gets you the facts, the data. Talk objectively with those facts and you have a water tight case for any ‘rhetoric’! In my Blog Man v. Machine I talked about PBL; ’Performance Based Leadership’, basically Behavioral Science that at Bechtel they use hand in hand with DMAICT. They have an acronym called […]

Being in the business of customer satisfaction keeps us focused on making sure that our customers get the best value and service possible. When a customer tells us we did a great job, it is the ultimate measure of success. Try changing hats for a minute and think about how you rate as a customer? […]

Conformance is how well a process performs within its CTQs and specification limits. Variation is the opposite of it- the difference in the process output over time. Variation is often caused by elements which are part of the process itself (common cause), or elements which are external to the process (special cause). Common Cause variation […]

Changed processes, changed skill sets, changed thinking and changed performance. Six Sigma is all about change. Passion, defined as “boundless enthusiasm,” is the seed of change. With it, Six Sigma flourishes. Without it, project implementation is a constant struggle. Does your organization have the passion for change that allows processes to bloom to their full […]

For those of you practising Lean Six Sigma in the Austral Oceania region of the world, IQPC will be hosting a Lean Six Sigma Forum from November 27-29 at the Prince Hotel in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. Confirmed speakers include: Quality Director- Reuters Senior Manager Business Enterprise- Motorola Quality/Operational Excellence Leader-GE Plastics Director, Six Sigma- Ingram […]

It didn’t take long for Robert (Bob) Nardelli to land on his feet… You’ve all probably heard by now, Bob Nardelli has been picked to run Chrysler. For those of you that may have forgotten or were not aware of all the details: Bob Nardelli came from GE, where he started in 1971. In 1995 […]

  Benchmarking and Six Sigma go together like peanut butter and jelly. Both are really good on their own but put them together and it is three times better. Here’s why. Benchmarking helps you understand how your performance rates against others. If your performance is not in the top quartile, you may want to commission […]

In the martial arts, you may know that once a person obtains a black belt there are usually levels of progression upwards. Each of these levels is called a “dan” and there can be 3 or more progressive levels, sometimes designated with astripe ortape around the end of the black belt. We’ve taken that concept […]

Understanding the VOC: Six Sigma Belt Satisfaction Often Six Sigma focuses on the voice of the customer in terms of a public consumer or end business user/department. Yet how many times does leadership consider Six Sigma Black and Green Belts as a customer within the Six Sigma organization? In order to successfully train and retain […]

I have a secret weapon, let me explain. At the start of a 6-week project, I put together a detailed data collection plan to pull data from one of our legacy systems. Worked with IT and received the schedule next day, 2-weeks analysis, 2-weeks build & 2-weeks test. Not good news! The project was planned […]

If you do any sort of training, you’ve probably struggled to come up with good examples to drive a concept home. Nothing crystallizes difficult material like the perfect example to make it all real. Every train-the-trainer workshop you’ve ever been to has doubtless spent time worrying about this. And if you’ve ever been through the […]

CTQs, short for Critical-To-Quality, are key quantifiable requirements of a service or product which are critical to meet customer expectations and often defined by customer expectations. It’s what the customer expects of our product or service. Customer expectations and comments which are gathered from surveys or comment forms for a particular area of service are […]

Second quarter financial results have been hitting the wires the past few weeks and companies have been publicizing the benefits of Lean and Six Sigma. Quotes from a few of the recent releases: Ducommun Incorporated “We continue to benefit from healthy aerospace markets and the success of our Lean and Six Sigma initiatives. As a […]

While reading Gianna Clark’s blog below,”Green Belt Sonic Boom,” my first reaction was: Great minds think alike! We are in the starting phase of a boom of training, and all of Gianna’s caveats are valuable. Last year in October,our healthcare system started our internal training of Green Belts with a class of 40. We planned […]

This week’s iSixSigma Blogosphere Newsletter features SEMOE as the Guest Blog. SEMOE stands for Search Engine Marketing Operational Excellence and is written by Matt LeVeque,a search Marketing Manager with Commerce360. Matt knows his search engine marketing as well as his Six Sigma. He has a strong background in online marketing and was formerly the Sales […]

Recently, I had the fortunate or unfortunate pleasure of pulling my head out of the sand, and becoming more versed in another one of our internal surveys. It comes in the form of a link, appended to an automated case response sent to end users when a service request case (think CRM) is resolved or […]

As my title would suggest, the concepts of business intelligence and Six Sigma seem to be revolve around each other according to most practioners, rather than intersect, like I believe. Gone are the days (or should be) where the applications and business processes are distinct, individual units operating outside the realm of process improvement projects. […]

Recently I had the opportunity to attend the IQPC Australasia Six Sigma summit. For me, the highlight of the event was a presentation given by GE. The presentation focused around how the company was taking the voice of the customer to the next level by aligning NPS (Net Promoter Score) methodology with Six Sigma. NPS […]

“We need to train as many Green Belts as fast as we can!” At first this sounds like the type of fast-track deployment that will get things moving. But training too many Green Belts too fast may fuel unnecessary resistance if not deployed properly. Listed below are a few things you may want to consider […]

I have struggled for sometime to appreciate the relationships between Lean Six Sigma and Innovation. Part of this is because I have never really given it much thought and also a couple of things worry me. I think I need to cover what this baggage is before talking about how I think they the two […]

Yesterday, Covance, a $1.3 billion in revenue drug development service company, announced their second quarter results. The results were good, earning up, revenues up, etc…Included was a plug for their Six Sigma program: Our relentless focus on operational and service excellence continues to deliver substantial benefits. Six Sigma, which is being utilized across more than […]

At the iSixSigma Blogosphere you can subscribe to feeds that will deliver updates whenever one or all of our bloggers writes something new. These feeds use the RSS format which you can pick up with an RSS news reader. RSS stands for Really Simple Syndication. It is an XML-based format for content distribution that is […]

A couple of days ago, during a particularly boring meeting I started to doodle. But it wasn’t one of those doodles where you draw a box, then put a cross in it, then shade it, add a couple of surrounding circles, give it legs etc…. it was a doodle with purpose, I started doodling Lean […]

A couple of weeks ago I ordered a pair of red stiletto shoes on the web. I received them the next day (free delivery of course). They didn’t fit quite right so I decided to send them back. The return instructions were in the box. I got online, printed a pre-paid return label & dropped […]

iSixSigma just announced a new marketplace called iSixSigma Publications (https://www.isixsigma.com/pubs/). The marketplace sells Six Sigmaresearch articles and project examplesas well as training materials and templates. Not only does iSixSigma Publications sell their own publications, they also have a partner programwhere independent authors can distribute their own works. If you write it, develop it, or build […]

Big news for the Six Sigma consulting community. Accenture has agreed to acquire George Group. The news hit the PR wires yesterday: The acquisition will expand and enhance Accenture’s ability to help clients become high-performance businesses through the addition of George Group’s specialized expertise in process improvement techniques including Lean Six Sigma, which combines process […]

Last week I was alerted to a fairly new blog in the Six Sigma Blogosphere. It is written by Michael Jordan, Sr. VP Management Consultant at Jones Lang LaSalle. After perusing his blog for just a few minutes I could quickly see that his writing is as good as his name. He’s the Michael Jordan […]

Over the past two weeks we talked about how Six Sigma can help organizations accomplish “What’s Needed” and the significance of being “On Time.” But none of this matters much if it is not done “With Value.” Value – wartosc – der Wert – valor . . . Whether said in English, Polish, German or […]

The Lean government paradigm promotes the analysis and implementation of efficient administrative and customer service process in order to reduce the cost of government while maintaining quality customer citizen service. Some have characterized this with the phrase “do more with less.” While this reflects a public policy that would shrink the size of government just […]

I read this story a long time ago about a hotel chain that learned that customers were happier if they experienced a problem and it was fixed than if they had a defect free stay. I must have told this story a few dozen times without remembering where I read it. I finally found the […]

Tools and methodology will only get a person so far. Experience gained from the practical implementation of Six Sigma solutions is priceless. A list of tips, tools and suggestions for Six Sigma practitioners can help avoid many pitfalls of project management. Some fundamental points for project success are: Planning project work well. Determining the exact […]

Last week we talked about how Six Sigma can help organizations accomplish “What’s Needed.” Without this element, nothing else really matters because being “On Time” with the wrong thing won’t “wow” anyone. This week we are exploring the significance of being “On Time.” Whether it is the delivery of a product or service or keeping […]

MoreSteam.com is at it again. First with their April Fool’s Day press releaseand now with their Independence Day press release… We Hold The Data To Be Self-Evident: that all men and women are not created equally as instructors; that some are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable teaching abilities, and that others are not; […]