One of the questions when talking to my clients is: Would you recommend a Six Sigma Project for our company? Quite often, my clients don't really have an idea what Six Sigma actually is other than one of those management buzz words one gets to hear every now and then.
A a Six Sigma Black Belt myself, who studied Pyzdek's Six Sigma Handbook, a book, it seems, bigger than the Bible, I developed a one-sentence summary of what Six Sigma actually is - a detailed project management approach using statistical management tools and analyses for the operation in order to attain a zero error process output. Or, in easier language and yet another buzz word - Total Quality Management!
So, back to the question of my clients whether they needed Six Sigma in their companies. I would normally ask 3 questions back:
- In case you produced non-100% quality and that product hit the market, would that mean a high risk for your company? (Imagine you are Rolls Royce and one of the flight engines broke down during a flight, or you are a pharmaceutical company and wrong ingredients ended up in pills, or any other high risk product really which would be life threatening to humans, hence bear a huge risk for the company)
- Are well working management systems in place? A management system contains, among others, KPIs, operations reports, regular effective and efficient communication on all levels with action plans (planning and review meetings), trained supervision and management, etc.
- Is your management well trained when it comes to using Excel, reading and dealing with graphs and figures?
The more 'no answers' I get, the more I am inclined to say - "Well, let's sort the basics out first and deal with Six Sigma at a later stage. Your company is not yet ready for it." For me, and that's my personal point of view, Six Sigma only makes sense when a company has reached a certain level of "management maturity". If that's not the case implementing Six Sigma would be like killing a fly with a canon ball.
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