Martin Brenig-Jones - Lean Six Sigma For Dummies

Being driven by curiosity, and looking at things from different angles

Focusing on the people and their needs

Accepting complexity in the systems our work exists in

Visualizing and showing to aid understanding

Experimenting and iterating in order to learn, solve problems, and improve

Seeking to grow and expand capabilities

Developing an awareness of the process

Collaborating across departments and organizations

Reflecting on thinking, activities, and attitudes because they shape actions and assumptions

Project Management is about getting things done and getting them done in a structured way. Tools and techniques for Project Management can help Lean Six Sigma practitioners to do the following:

Establish a project timeline.

Plan the work by breaking it down into tasks, including task owners, required resources, due dates, and so on.

Work effectively with a team (remembering the acronym Together Everyone Achieves More).

Monitor progress against the plan.

Manage the scope of the work to avoid the dreaded scope creep (the tendency of a project to grow into something bigger and more difficult to manage).

Report the benefits achieved.

Apply governance to the project, such as, for example, in identifying and managing risks and holding tollgate reviews.

Identifying and sharing lessons learned.

As you get to know more about Lean Six Sigma, you’ll notice there are a few overlaps between Project Management and Lean Six Sigma. The tools and methods of Project Management can certainly help when it comes to managing Lean Six Sigma improvements, and indeed some of them are included in the Lean Six Sigma / DMAIC toolkit (such as planning, managing stakeholders, and establishing a project sponsor).

Just as “too many cooks spoil the broth,” too many tools might spoil the improvement effort. Trying to use every single aspect of these approaches as well as all the tools in the book is likely to slow you down and overcomplicate things. And it might leave stakeholders with a bad taste in their mouths. Rather than incorporate everything, use only the ingredients that you know will enrich the desired result. As you become more experienced, it gets easier to recognize what could help your situation.

Chapter 2

IN THIS CHAPTER

Merging Lean and Six Sigma to make Lean Six Sigma

Undertaking DMAIC to make things better

Reviewing what you do in order to do it better

In this chapter we look at the synergy produced by combining the approaches of Lean and Six Sigma to form Lean Six Sigma — along with the best of the approaches outlined in Chapter 1. The merged approach provides a comprehensive set of principles, and supporting tools and techniques, to enable genuine improvements in both efficiency and effectiveness for organizations.

Lean Six Sigma takes the features of Lean and of Six Sigma and integrates them to form a magnificent seven set of principles. The principles of each approach aren’t dissimilar (check out Chapter 1to read more about the individual components), and the merged set produces no surprises. The seven principles of Lean Six Sigma are described in the following sections.

The elements of your service or offering that customers consider most important are known as CTQs (Critical to Quality requirements) in Lean Six Sigma. (See Chapter 4for more on CTQs.) Written in a way that ensures they’re measurable, the CTQs provide the basis for determining the measures you need to help you understand how well you perform against these critical requirements. As you improve your performance in meeting the CTQs, you’re also likely to win and retain further business and increase your market share.

The value stream describes all of the steps in your process — for example, from receipt of a customer order to the issue of a product or the delivery of a service, through to payment. By drawing a map of the value stream, you can highlight the non-value-added steps and areas of waste and ensure the process focuses on meeting the CTQs and adding value. To undertake this process properly, you must “go to the Gemba.” The Japanese word Gemba means the place where the work gets done — where the action is — which is where management begins. You could try Process Stapling (outlined in Chapter 5), which involves spending time in the workplace to see how the work really gets done, not how you think it gets done. This helps you to understand the problems that you want to tackle and determine a more effective solution for your day-to-day activities.

Among the things to look out for when carrying out a Process Stapling exercise (or going to the Gemba) are clues that highlight bottlenecks or interruptions to the flow of work through the process. Are there delays at certain points? Are there high levels of work in progress? We’ll look more closely into bottlenecks in Chapter 11.

Processing work in batches doesn’t help items flow smoothly through the process. If possible, use single piece flow (processing one item at a time), moving away from batches, or at least reducing batch size. The concept of pull, not push (see Chapter 1), links to your understanding the process and improving flow. And it can be an essential element in avoiding bottlenecks. Overproduction or pushing things through too early is a waste.

Focusing on the customer and the concept of value-add is important because typically, still only 10 to 15 percent of the cycle time (or lead time) of a process is spent on value-adding activities. This may be surprising but should grab your attention and help you realize the potential waste at play in your own organization. The concept of value-added process steps is covered in Chapter 10, along with information on the eight types of waste to be on the lookout for.

Managing by fact, using accurate data, helps you avoid jumping to conclusions and solutions. You need the facts! And that means measuring the right things in the right way. Data collection is a process and needs to be managed accordingly. In Chapter 1, we looked at the significance of variation. Quality guru W. Edwards Deming stated that “uncontrolled variation is the enemy of quality.” In other words, it’s in everyone’s best interest to achieve a consistent, reliable, and predictable level of performance. This can be achieved by understanding and addressing the amount of variation, the type of variation, and the sources of variation. Using control charts ( Chapter 8has more on these) enables you to interpret the data correctly and understand the process variation. You then know when to take action and when not to.