Lean Mastery Collection Read online

  Develop a mentoring process: This can make sure that the right guidance is done to ensure that all people are trained. In addition, it can help make sure that course corrections are made on a regular basis and that all projects are done on time.

  Always ensure there is some financial validation of the project. There should be a financial leader who will sign off on how much the project will help the business save money. This can be done during the control phase.

  Make sure that when you are using Six Sigma, you never classify it as the quality manager’s job. The quality manager has a distinct role, and they are not going to be in a position where they can manage the process for Six Sigma all on their own. Make sure that the proper team, with the right training, is set up to handle this.

  Create a goal you share in common: Once you have decided that it is time to implement Six Sigma, the next thing that you should do is make sure that all of your qualified team members are on the same page. This common goal can be shown through an executive directive and it needs to be established for all employees. The point of doing this is to reduce the variability to help reduce waste.

  Standardize the methodology that you want to use: To make sure that your Six Sigma project is going to be successful, you need to have it define a standard approach. If you do not do this, then many individuals on the same team are going to spend their time redefining it again. Standardizing the process in order to reach Six Sigma is going to allow the people on your team to focus on reducing the standard deviation in their own projects, rather than trying to figure out what method they should be using. This standardization may take more time in the beginning, but it ensures there is a common approach, which means execution time of projects can be reduced. In addition, it can create a language that is common, allowing for a true culture of teamwork in the business.

  Map the plan: To make sure that the program you are doing is focused and keeps running on time, you need to make sure that the plan is mapped out completely. You also need to make sure that your teams for each project are identified and that the process is scheduled. The organization needs to be aware that process improvement programs are not going to be implemented within a few days. It can take a few months to a few years to do this. During this time, you must make sure that you invest your resources of money and time wisely.

  Set times to present the data: Throughout the implementation of your new program, there should be frequent reviews and audits. This is done to ensure that there is some progress being made through implementation. The data needs to be presented and each team needs to be able to describe their milestones, progress, any roadblocks, and the needs and findings that they have.

  Create some methodologies for optimizing any processes that are non-technical: Some invisible processes, such as those that are done by the departments of finance and purchasing, need to be defined, measured, quantified, and optimized. This is true despite the fact that they are nontangible in nature.

  Pick the right project: When you are working on Six Sigma, you are likely to see that there are several projects that you can work on. However, you do not want to waste your time and resources on a project that is not going to make a big difference. You want to work on one that is going to be able to really improve your current process and earn you money. Make sure that everyone is certified properly and able to handle the Six Sigma methodology before you decide on which project you want to work on. This will ensure that you are picking out the right one that can give you the most bang for your buck.

  Go with a project that meets your company goals. There may be many projects from which to choose. However, if you are going to one that does not align with the goals you have for the organization or seems to go against what the organization values, then it should never be picked, regardless of what the Six Sigma process tells you. Make sure that you really implement a project that works with your business, or it is going to end up failing, no matter how hard you work in the process.

  When you implement Six Sigma properly, you will be able to reduce any inefficiencies that are there and in return, it is going to produce very high yields for your company. Nevertheless, to make sure that you are as successful as possible, an organization needs to invest wisely, have plans in place, and have some long-term goals so they know where to go next.

  Being able to come up with a comprehensive and cohesive strategy when you start implementing the Six Sigma methodology is going to ensure that the company will achieve their business goals.

  Conclusion

  Thank you for making it through to the end of Lean Six Sigma: A Beginner’s Step-By-Step Guide to Implementing Six Sigma Methodology to an Enterprise and Manufacturing Process. Let us hope it was informative and able to provide you with all of the tools you need to achieve your goals.

  The next step is to start implementing Six Sigma in your business strategy. Many businesses end up producing a lot of waste in terms of money, time, and materials. With the help of Six Sigma, you can learn where these problem areas are for your business and come up with a solution to reduce this waste. This often results in more efficiency and less waste compared to other methods. This guidebook took some time to explain Six Sigma and look over the different steps that you should take to get this methodology started for your needs. When you are ready to reduce waste and help increase your profits and efficiency, look through this guidebook, and learn how to get started with Six Sigma in your business.

  Finally, if you found this book useful in any way, a review on Amazon is always appreciated!

  Lean Startup

  The Complete Step-by-Step

  Lean Six Sigma Startup Guide

  Introduction

  Congratulations on getting a copy of Lean Startup: The Complete Step-by-Step Lean Six Sigma Startup Guide and thank you for doing so. There are two questions that any company can ask to both reduce unnecessary failure while at the same time ensuring that the company focuses only on ideas that have promising potential. They are:

  Should we build this new service or product?

  How can we improve our odds of success with this new thing?

  The Lean method is equally useful for startup companies as it is for Fortune 500 companies. It may have its roots in the technology sector but it is already being used in virtually every industry across the board. While there is lots of confusion around it, the Lean Startup system can help companies of all sizes in a lot of different ways.

  While the term “startup” generally has very specific connotations in the business world, in this instance, “startup” simply means any team that is planning to create a new product or service whose future isn’t 100 percent certain yet. Generally speaking, it makes far more sense to classify startups as enterprises taking on the challenge amidst uncertainty, than by categories like market sector, size or even age of the company.

  With this definition in mind, you will find that there are a few main areas in which a startup faces the greatest amount of uncertainty, otherwise known as risk. Technical or product risk can be summed up by the question “Can it be built?” As an example, doctors who are currently working towards a cure for cancer can be thought of as a startup institution because there is a very large technical risk and this area of study has been going on for quite some time with no hint of success. However, if they do discover a cure, there is absolutely no market risk because its target market would definitely buy it.

  Market risk, also known as customer risk, is simply the risk when the product or service reaches the market and no one is actually going to want to buy it. A cautionary example of this type of risk is a company named Webvan that spent millions and millions of dollars creating an automated means of buying groceries online. The only problem is that they tried to get this system up and running in the early 2000s. This is a time when many people were still getting comfortable with the concept of the internet in general but the comfort in buying everyday products online did not follow until nearly a decade.

  The business mo
del risk is the risk associated with taking a good idea and building a functioning business plan around it. Even if you already have a good idea, the right business model could very well not be visible until the service is up and running. As an example, when Google started its original business plan of selling advertisements based on previous searches, the plan wasn’t clear because no one had done that sort of thing before.

  While every company will need to deal with these risks to varying degrees, the biggest risk that most new products or services struggle with is customer risk. It can be difficult to determine the value of something new for customers who haven’t experienced it yet. The tricky part here is that in most instances, it will actually appear that the product risk is the most urgent risk. After all, most new ideas don’t make it this far without an assumption that someone, somewhere is going to want the product or service at hand. This assumption, then, can lead to a much costlier course of action wherein you do the work to create the product or service before offering it to anyone.

  This is where the Lean Startup system comes into play. This technology potentially stops you from being one of the millions of companies out there that has a good idea and a cool product but had crashed and burned because they inherently relied on assumptions about consumer behavior that simply turned out not be true. It is important to think in terms of risk as opposed to company history because in doing so, you will find that many large companies have startup organizations within them. As an example, consider the Gillette razor company who felt that there was little risk in adding the fifth blade to their flagship line of razors because they knew the business model, the market, and the product ins and outs. However, the company that owns Gillette, Proctor and Gamble, operates a startup in the form of its research and development division that focuses specifically on hair removal. With each new idea, this division seems like a startup because they have no known variable which means everything they are working on is extremely risky.

  Currently, one of the well-known companies that using the Lean Startup system is General Electric, which is also one of the largest companies in the world. The company has trained more than 10,000 managers around the world to use Lean Startup principles and has used the system to successfully improve the end result on all of their products including refrigerators and diesel engines.

  To follow in their footsteps, the following chapters will discuss how to operate a Lean Startup successfully, starting with an overview of the Lean Startup methodology. Next, you will learn how to create a trial startup system that is not only useful but also designed to provide you with as much viable information as possible. You will then learn how to take a successful startup and grow it until it reaches its full potential. From there you will learn about adding Six Sigma and other Lean tools to your startup for maximum efficacy.

  There are plenty of books on this subject on the market, thanks again for choosing this one! Every effort was made to ensure it is full of as much useful information as possible, please enjoy!

  Chapter 1: Lean Startup Options

  While the idea of the Lean Startup has been around since 2011, many companies are still coming to grips with everything the system has to offer. This is despite the fact that most of the ideas presented in this system were hardly new. This is largely due to the fact that the system actually offers more value to established organizations than it does to startups. However, startups can still be able to build a Lean system from the ground up if they choose to.

  Lean Startup methodology

  Build, measure, and learn: Perhaps more than anything else in recent history, the application of the scientific method to demolish uncertainty, where innovation is concerned, has transformed the way breakthroughs happen. Broken down, this includes the process of defining a hypothesis, creating a prototype to test the hypothesis, testing the prototype (and thus the hypothesis) and then adjusting as needed. While this may seem simple, it has the potential to generate massive results by enabling companies to take risks on smaller ideas without breaking the bank in the process.

  The build, measure, and learn approach can be used for virtually everything, not just entirely new ideas. It can be used to test things like customer service ideas, the process of managerial review, or even a new feature for an existing product or service. As long as you can perform a test that clearly validates or disproves the initial hypothesis, then you will be good to go because you must be able to gather enough data to justify approving or vetoing the idea.

  The goal, then, is to do everything possible in order to ensure that build, measure, and learn process proceeds from start to finish as quickly as possible. This will make it feasible to run the process multiple times if needed, while also making it clear when such additional runs are needed. As such, it is important to have a very specific idea for each test because as more variables are added, the more difficult it will be to determine results with any real degree of accuracy. When it comes to products and services, this means determining if they are either wanted or needed by the target audience.

  Minimal viable product: Generally speaking, most product development involves an extreme amount of work up front. The process involves working through the full specifications of the product, as well as a significant initial investment when it comes to capital in order to build and test multiple iterations of the product. The Lean Startup process thus encourages building only enough of the product in question to make it through a single round of the build, measure, and learn process at a time. This is what is known as the minimal variable product.

  The minimal variation of the product is what enables a full cycle of the build, measure, and learn loop to be completed with the least amount of required time and effort on the part of the team. This may not be something as simple as writing a new line of code, it could be an elaborate process that outlines the customer journey, or a complete set of mockups made out of a cheaper substitute. As long as it is enough to test the hypothesis, then it is good to go.

  Validated Learning: An important part of the Lean Startup process is ensuring that you are testing your hypothesis with an eye towards the right metrics. Failing to do so can make it easy to focus on vanity metrics instead. Focusing on vanity metrics may make you feel as though you are making progress while not actually telling you all that much about the value of the product. For example, for Facebook, the vanity metrics are the things like the total number of “Likes” that have been received or the number of total accounts created. The real meat and potatoes are in metrics such as the amount of time the average user spends on the service per week. Early on, the metric that validated the company’s initial hypothesis was the fact that more than half its user base came back to the service every single day.

  Innovation accounting: Innovation accounting is what makes it possible for startups of all sizes to prove, in an objective way, that they are creating a sustainable business. The process includes three steps, starting with determining the baseline. This involves taking the minimum viable product and doing what you can to determine relevant datapoints that can be referred back to the fact. This could involve things like a pure marketing test to determine if there is actually interest from customers. This, in turn, will make it possible for you to determine a baseline with which to compare the initial cycle of the build, measure, and learn process, too. While better numbers are always desired, poor numbers at this stage aren’t terribly important, it only means that the team will have more work to do in the build, measure, and learn cycle.

  After the baseline has been determined, the next step is going to be to make the first change to determine what can actually be improved upon. While this certainly makes the entire process take longer than it usually does, making too many changes at once makes it difficult to determine which one of the changes led to the biggest improvement. However, if you have a lot of potential changes to test, you can then test them in groups so when something pops, you will only have to retest a specific range in order to see what caused the inspiratio
n to strike.

  Once several build, measure, and learn cycles have been completed, the product should be well on its way from moving from the initial starting point to the final, ideal phase. At some point, however, if things don’t seem to be proceeding according to plan, then the question becomes whether it is better to pivot to something new or to stick with the current baseline a while longer to see what improves. The choice between the two should be relatively obvious at this point based on the data provided up to this point.

  If the decision is ultimately made to pivot at this point, then it can be quite demoralizing for the team because this means going back to square one, albeit with additional data to draw on in the future. Nevertheless, issues such as vanity metrics or a flawed hypothesis can lead teams down a path that is ultimately not viable. This scenario leaves them no choice but to tear it all down and start again with an alternate hypothesis and a clean slate. It is important to try and reframe the idea of a pivot from a failure to a success because it saved the startup from potentially taking a flawed product to market and paying in a big way further down the line.