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  Taking the time to work out the specifics of your training scenario before you get started is sure to make all the difference in the world when it comes to implementing Six Sigma successfully. Remember, there are no one-size-fits-all options in this scenario which means planning out the specifics of your team’s training could literally be the success and failure of the entire project. What’s more, it can also make other issues more apparent when otherwise, they would not have been noticed until training was already underway.

  Consider flagship projects: After the Six Sigma training is out of the way, it is important to have a few important projects waiting in the wings in order to show the team that the system is worth it. Not only will these projects help to get the entire team excited about Six Sigma, but they will also be useful down the line if questions as to whether or not Six Sigma is worth keeping start popping up as well. As a general rule, you will want to start with at least a Green or Black belt project and then do everything in your power in order to ensure they end up being successful.

  While doing so, it is also important to not spread the Black Belts and Green Belts that you have on your team too thin that it makes them struggle to match their deliverables. Instead, it is better to have too many people on a few projects to ensure they are completed to perfection. Remember, if things go according to plan then you will have plenty of time to complete other projects once these go over like gangbusters.

  Furthermore, it is important that these early chapters are more than just fluff projects, they need to be things that are legitimately beneficial to the company as a whole. If your early projects are heavily publicized but do little to produce viable results, then you run the risk of Six Sigma being seen as little more than a fad with lots of flash and little substance. You can ensure that this doesn’t happen by instead choosing projects that have a clear value, regardless of whether the person making the decisions is trained in Six Sigma or not. Remember, public opinion is one of the most important resources to covet at this stage and will continue to be so until Six Sigma has become a habit for the entire team.

  Chapter 5: Implementing Six Sigma

  Give the team a reason to want to try Six Sigma: In order to ensure that Six Sigma is implemented successfully, it is vital that you take the time to motivate your team in the most effective way possible, so they understand why it is so important to adopt the Six Sigma methodology. Depending on the state your startup company is in, the burning platform scenario might be the best choice.

  The burning platform is a type of motivational technique whereby you explain that the situation your company finds itself in is just as perilous as standing on a burning platform and the only way to turn things around for good is by implementing Six Sigma. It is important to have stats that back this idea up, though fudging the numbers for productivities sake might not hurt either. Adapting to Six Sigma can be difficult for team members who are set in their ways and external motivation may be just what the doctor ordered.

  Give team members the tools they need: After the primary round of Six Sigma training has finished, it will be important to ensure that you have a strong mentorship program in place, along with details on the finer points of the process for those who need them. One of the worst things that can happen at this point is for a team member to express an interest in the program only to become disinterested when additional materials are not readily available. A team member who cannot easily find answers to their questions is a team member who will not follow Six Sigma processes when it really counts.

  Prioritize properly: Regardless of the situation, there are always going to be a variety of potential outcomes. While talking and planning for Six Sigma is one thing, taking steps to actively prioritize it is another entirely. When team members see those in leadership roles prioritize Six Sigma outcomes, it makes them more likely to prioritize Six Sigma activities in their own jobs as well. Additionally, it is important to make it clear that quality is critical, as is listening to the customer when it comes to ensuring Six Sigma leads to measurable results so that team members of all level of certification can keep an eye on the overall progress the company is making.

  Make it a group thing: When it comes to tutoring your team about Six Sigma, it is important to ensure that they make personal connections with how it will affect their jobs for the better so that they feel more personally invested in the program’s overall success. This may come about by ensuring the entire team is able to provide buy-in or making different team members responsible for enforcing different aspects of the Six Sigma process as taking the time to ensure that everyone feels connected to seeing Six Sigma succeed will ensure personal retention rates remain as high as possible.

  Track the results: Determining a realistic metric that can determine appropriate levels of success before and after Six Sigma is an important step in the process as it can provide you with the motivating data that is required to ensure that Six Sigma adoption is at an all-time high. On the other hand, if it turns out that the system actually ends up being ineffective, then you will be the first to know as well. Regardless, having a viable metric to properly determine aptitude is sure to come in handy more than once. What’s more, assuming the results are positive then it is sure to be a great motivating factor for the entire team and provide yet another reason why sticking with Six Sigma is so important.

  Reward team players: While offering viable reasons for the team to adopt Six Sigma is one thing, it is still important to provide positive reinforcement during the early days so that everyone is constantly motivated to follow the Six Sigma process until it becomes a habit. The goal here should be to choose a reward that is valuable while at the same time not being so extravagant that eventually removing it won’t completely remove the team’s desire to keep up the good work.

  Six Sigma criticism

  Six Sigma is just a fad: While it has only been back in the spotlight for a few years, the fact of the matter is that the origins of Six Sigma can be traced all the way back to the early 1900s when it was used by entrepreneurs like Henry Ford, Edward Deming, and Walter Shewhart. Additionally, it further separates itself from true fad management styles by being more focused on the use of data as a means of ensuring the best decision is made at the moment as possible, specifically those with a focus on the customer as a means of ensuring a viable return on every investment.

  Switching to Six Sigma is resource intensive: While it’s true that training the team in the Six Sigma process is time-consuming, the end goal is for it to save far more time than the training will cost in the long run by ensuring team members do their jobs as effectively as possible moving forward.

  It is important to remember the story of the pair of lumberjacks who worked day after day in the forest. One man worked himself to the point of exhaustion every day while the other man spent the time preparing properly, and at the end of the day, both men had always chopped the same amount of wood. If your team has the opportunity to work smarter instead of harder, why wouldn’t you provide them with the tools they need to make that the new norm.

  Furthermore, the cost of training the team the Six Sigma process can be further mitigated over time by spreading out the training courses as required. While this means the team won’t start seeing the results as quickly as might otherwise be the case, even getting the entire team up to Yellow Belt will produce noticeable results. Furthermore, any funds put towards this type of training can really be seen as an investment in the business as a whole and should be treated accordingly.

  Our team is too small for Six Sigma to be effective: While the effectiveness of Six Sigma is proportionate to the inefficiency of the processes previously in place, that doesn’t mean it doesn’t have something to offer companies that are just getting up and running as well. After all, Six Sigma offers a different way of looking at the types of business interactions that happen day to day in hopes of increasing productivity and, as a result, profits as well, regardless of the size of the team that is utilizing it. What�
��s more, smaller teams will actually be able to take on the Six Sigma mantle more easily than larger companies as the number of resources required to train 10 team members are always going to be far lower than what it would cost to train 50 instead.

  Furthermore, smaller businesses can be hindered more by production bottlenecks which means a Six Sigma system would potentially be able to lead to greater periods of growth as issues that may not otherwise have been addressed for years are taken care of before they become institutional problems. Regardless of the size of the company in question, taking the time to truly streamline relevant processes or improve customer relations is always going to be the right choice.

  Six Sigma doesn’t apply here: While it’s true that Six Sigma isn’t going to apply to every single industry across the board, it has moved beyond its manufacturing sector roots. Furthermore, studies show that industries that provide services are prone to more waste than the manufacturing sector in the first place. This is due to the fact that so much of what is produced is intangible that it makes standardizing any process extremely difficult. This is where Six Sigma comes in as it has plenty of processes in place to track the services that are being provided which can ultimately be used to improve efficiency.

  Six Sigma is difficult to use practically: While it may have a reputation for being all about the numbers, a vast majority of the tools and principles that are used in implementing Six Sigma require less math and more common sense. As an example, consider the mitigation of waste which is one of the most important aspects of Six Sigma, and something that only requires an understanding of the business in question and how it can be done in a more effective fashion. This is indicative of most of Six Sigma which is largely about fostering the mentality that makes it possible for team members to find the root cause of an issue, regardless of how long it might take. While formulas and mathematical equations may be used, they are simply a justification for this fact.

  Lean is plenty for now: When expressing the benefits of Six Sigma, it is important to make it clear that it is a variation of the Lean system, not a replacement for it. In fact, the system is often referred to as Lean Six Sigma. When used in conjunction with one another, Lean will then the throughput and speed of the process and simplifying to ensure that the team is able to do the best with what they have available. Six Sigma then takes these improved processes and makes them of the highest quality possible by reducing defects and, as a result, lowers the deviation. Combining the two can only lead to better results overall.

  Chapter 6: Additional Strategies

  Kaizen

  The word Kaizen translates to “continuous improvement” which is obviously an important goal when it comes to creating the most effective Lean system possible. The goal of the Kaizen strategy is to ensure that all of the talent within the team is always focusing on improving whenever and wherever possible. This strategy is relatively unique for a Lean strategy in that it is more than just a direct plan of action, it is also a general philosophy for the company as a whole. The goal of Kaizen is to create a culture that is supportive of improvement in all of its forms while also creating groups that are focused directly on improving key processes and reaching well-defined goals.

  Kaizen is a great strategy to implement while you are standardizing your work process as the two complement one another well. Standard practices lead to current best practices which Kaizen can then improve upon. The Kaizen strategy can be useful when it comes to improving any strategy that your team uses with any real degree of regularity as long as you are fully aware of the end goal for the updated process. From there, you will need to review the current state of things before adding any improvements. From there it is just a matter of following up properly in order to ensure any proffered improvements work as expected.

  Training the team in Kaizen actually serves double duty as it teaches them to apply the philosophy and the plan of action at the same time. This type of thinking is often habitually formed by those who are constantly looking for ways to improve their most commonly used processes while also allowing other team members to approach common tasks in new and innovative ways as required. This mindset should naturally be nurtured whenever possible as it is the only way to ensure more fruitful results in the long run.

  While constantly improving existing practices is a great place to start, it is important that the Kaizen your team is practicing does not only occur after the fact. When new processes are created, it is best for everyone that they are held to the same examination process as any other. Hindsight is useful, foresight gets results.

  Kaizen steps

  The first thing you will need to do is to standardize your process, not just the process that you are looking to put through the Kaizen process but all the processes to ensure that any eventual improvements are as beneficial as possible.

  Next, you will need to compare the processes at play in order to determine where steps that are being used in some processes can be used successfully elsewhere as well. When taking this step, it is vital that you look at true KPIs as opposed to anecdotal information for this step as, otherwise, it can be easy to get off on wrong track without even realizing it.

  After you have determined where real change should occur, the next step is to consider what you currently have available to make completing the process as easy as possible. During this period, you will want to consider the start of the project as well as its conclusion and then brainstorm all the possible ways to reach point B from point A. While no idea should be off the table at first, it is important that you ensure you only move forward with ideas that are truly useful as well as innovative as innovation for innovation’s sake is only going to create waste.

  The final step is going to be to repeat as needed so that new innovations become standard operating procedures so that you can then begin the entire process anew. When it comes to Kaizen, the only bad idea is to rest on your laurels.

  Creating a Kaizen mindset: Getting the entire team together for a Kaizen event where everyone brainstorms ways to streamline a specific process is relatively straightforward. However, training your team to always work from a Kaizen mindset can be a far more difficult task. Difficult does not mean impossible, however, and the best way to start to train them to this improved way of thinking is to focus on creating a corporate culture where elimination of waste is everyone’s top priority. If you can keep this idea in the team’s mindset, during every meeting, every performance review, every informal conversation, day in and day out, then eventually team members will start noticing waste without even having to consciously think about it. Once this occurs they will be well on their way to finding ways to work around it instead.

  With this done, you will also want to start to set aside a specific time each day to allow team members to look at the processes they use every single day and do nothing else but really think hard about them. It is important to always remember that the human mind loves repetition almost as much as it loves patterns which is why it is so easy to follow the steps for a process you have done a hundred times without even thinking about it. While this can make the process go faster if the steps involved are optimized, it can also make it easy to complete the process with blinders on and not notice points of inefficiency while you are in the midst of them. As such, providing the team with the time they need to think about their processes separate from actually doing them will let them look at the entire project from a different angle.

  If you take this exercise a step further, you will then provide the team with an opportunity to talk to the rest of the team about their processes as well. This cross-pollination of ideas will give each process an entirely fresh set of eyes which will provide insight into even more blind spots. This is especially useful for particularly complex processes, just make sure that everyone takes detailed notes, so nothing gets lost in the shuffle. Additionally, it is important to emphasize that there are no wrong answers during this stage, a free and open dialogue can provide solutions to problems that you
previously weren’t even aware you were facing.

  Poka-Yoke

  The Lean system strategy known as Poka-Yoke is most accurately translated as actively guarding against mistakes. Essentially, Poka-Yoke can be thought of as a variety of failsafe procedures that are naturally built into any processes specifically for the purpose of catching common errors. Poka-yoke is best used on tasks that are especially repetitive, require precise repetition across numerous steps, or require an extreme period of focus to use correctly. This tool is an especially beneficial type of Muda that works to ensure the overall value while not necessarily creating any of its own.

  When Poka-Yoke is at its most effective, it relies on a thorough understanding of the steps in every process as well as additional ways of mitigating potential pain points as effectively and cheaply as possible, while also taking care not to create any new bottlenecks as a result.

  Control Poka-Yoke: Control Poka-Yoke does not allow the next step of the process to move forward until a found error has been corrected. As an example, the way a USB dongle is designed so that you cannot plug it in unless it is facing the right way is a Control Poka-Yoke as it ensures you cannot plug in the device in such a way that it will not work once you do so.