SigmaPro is a leading global provider of Lean Six Sigma Training, Lean Six Sigma consulting and business improvement programmes designed to help organisations achieve breakthrough performance improvement.
At Sigma we have studied many organisations that have achieved success, and identified four organisational competences that are required to achieve a sustainable approach to business improvement. These are Strategic Thinking, Operational Excellence, Data Driven Decision Making and Continual & Breakthrough Improvement. Supported by the right kind of culture, values and leadership, an organisation can achieve sustainable improvement.
Lean Six Sigma, Prince2, Agile, Lean are all approaches to organisation improvement. They are all different, but have one thing in common. They are all structured approaches. In other words they are organised, planned in advance and have systematic ways of doing things.
If you are not involved in projects, on the face of it, it would seem easy to achieve a goal: decide what the goal is, acquire the resources needed, plan accordingly and hey presto the objective will be achieved! But a quick review of statistics on the internet indicates that you may have a harder time than you first thought. Here are just a few of the statistics available:
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So far we have looked at the difference between business based and customer based thinking, investigated the true value of a customer and determined that it is not enough to just satisfy the customer. The next question is what we do about this in improvement projects.
At Sigma we use a four step process to collect and analyse customer data. These four steps are:
Imagine you are the General Manager of a DIY store with many employees. You will be out of the country for three months and have asked your staff to e-mail you a weekly report every Monday morning. Take a moment to write down what information and metrics you would like to see in that E mail.
No doubt you will have written downs such items as sales revenue, maybe by product line, costs, overtime, profit. Possibly things such as customer complaints, refunds and stock levels.
...Fundamentally Lean Six Sigma is a system to address strategic gaps, by improving the efficiency and effectiveness of existing processes, and developing new products, processes and services, using defined methodologies and tools. Lean Sigma's impressive results in organisations such as Motorola, GE and Toyota are often quoted as evidence of the benefits that can be achieved by applying the methods and tools to business problems.
However, this is not the end of the story. If we examine the Motorola story, the GE story, the Toyota story or many others that have achieved success using Lean and Six Sigma methods it becomes clear that the methods and tools alone are not the reason for the success of these initiatives. In each case there has been a strong leader, who had an unshakeable belief in the direction the organisation needed to go, and the need for excellence, continuous and never ending improvement has been embedded in the culture of the organisation.
...Introduction
We already know that Lean Six Sigma is about addressing strategic gaps to become more competitive. So, within our organisations, assuming we have a need to improve, there are then two key questions that need answering:
“When a man does not know what harbour he is making for, no wind is the right wind.” Seneca (4BC – AD65). If you are tackling improvement projects, then to not have a clear idea of why the project you are tackling is important, the goals you are striving to achieve, and how you are going to achieve them is a bit like setting sail from a port with no idea of where you are going, how you intend navigating, and indeed why you are even setting sail in the first place!
In our work with organisations and individuals, the second problem to overcome (after selecting the wrong project to start with), is to not have clear understanding and agreement amongst all parties on the Why, What, Where, When, Who, How, How much of the project. These 8 words represent 7 key questions that need to be answered when setting up a project. If this is not done at the start, then there will almost inevitably end up being problems later in the project.
...Every morning a Gazelle wakes up in Africa. It knows it must run faster than the lion or it will be eaten. Every morning a lion wakes up. It knows it must outrun the gazelle or it will starve. It doesn’t matter whether you are a lion or a gazelle, when the sun comes up, you had better be running. Globalisation, more competition, increasing customer demands, whatever the challenges faced the need to improve has never been greater.
