In Dirk Dusharme’s First Word in the April 2006 issue of Quality Digest, he sneaks into the back of the “Church of the Six Sigma” and cannily reports the goings on. In this column, I will burst in through the doors dressed in motley and try to pry the scales off of your eyes, chanting, “DMAIC will set you free!” Do I do this for my own ego?
No.
Well, maybe.
As I said in my premier Heretic column, “Dogma and Definition,” I’m interested in examining our assumptions and premises about Six Sigma so we can discard the dross and refine the potential benefits in implementing it.
To that end, I have decided to co-opt an omnipresent element of pop culture. No, not “reality” TV (though a Six Sigma reality show strikes me as very funny—you heard it here first).
And so I humbly present to you the Top Ten Stupid Six Sigma Tricks, beginning with no. 10: Conflating systems, strategies and tools.
This month let’s examine another common mistake that some people (not my loyal, intelligent, heretical and, let’s face it, downright attractive readers) make when they use Six Sigma.
I expect to seriously annoy some practitioners when I say that Six Sigma isn’t a method of continuous improvement—no matter how many times you’ve heard someone say exactly that.
Bold assertion, you say? Remember, Six Sigma heretics don’t accept arguments from authority, so keep an open mind and don’t take me at my word. Let’s take a more detailed look.
So far, we’ve discussed Stupid Six Sigma Tricks #10: Conflating systems, methods and tools and #9: Confusing breakthrough with continuous improvement. This month, I’ll spend some time on a more subtle, and no less costly mistake that, in its extreme form, we’ll call Stupid Six Sigma Trick #8: Optimizing processes that lose money. “Well,” you might say, “Isn’t that what Six Sigma is all about? Taking unprofitable processes and fixing them or making profitable ones more profitable?” And you would be right. For the explanation, we need to dip briefly into the world of accounting. As your dentist says, “Don’t worry, it won’t hurt much and will be over soon."
The Stupid Six Sigma Tricks countdown continues this month with an increasingly common error: “Inadequate Infrastructure.” By infrastructure, I mean those systems and processes that need to be in place in order to support the objectives of Six Sigma.
Regardless of how you define Six Sigma, we expect to see Black Belts working as problem-solving experts attempting to make big improvements. The Black Belts get all the glory but, as is usually the case, the success of the few in the limelight is due to the efforts of many others.
In this installment of my arbitrary and capricious list of the Top Ten Stupid Six Sigma Tricks (SSST), let’s talk about an error that is perhaps less frequently made now than it has been, but is still common. I call this error SSST No.6, constraining your improvement activities to manufacturing processes.
In an oft-repeated quote, Bob Galvin (the former CEO of Motorola) said, “The lack of initial Six Sigma emphasis in the nonmanufacturing areas was a mistake that cost Motorola at least $5 billion over a four-year period.”
These are two areas in which this SSST appears: the nonmanufacturing areas within a manufacturing business and the nonmanufacturing sectors themselves.
Today marks a milestone in our countdown of the Top Ten Stupid Six Sigma Tricks. A subjective and unimportant milestone to be sure, but a milestone nonetheless—we have now reached the halfway point. Forget the New Year, this is cause for celebration.
To commemorate this trivial event, let us turn our laser focus onto more technical mistakes. So far we have been talking about systemic problems. Let’s focus now on some specific tools and how they are misapplied, leading to lost money and increased exasperation. I call this one Stupid Six Sigma Trick #5: Pop stars without clothing.