3 Reasons why your Six Sigma Project will fail

Every since Six Sigma has been adopted by GE by then under its larger than life CEO Jack Welch, this Quality Management Program has won legions of fans. Companies who have embraced the Six Sigma philiosophy have reported substantial impact on its bottomline. A successfully executed Six Sigma project can deliver $100,000 -$200,000 savings per project.

But where others have been successful, others have faltered. Perhaps the fault lies not in the methodolgy in itself but in the assumptions made when one adopted this methodology.

Based on my experience, the following are the top three reasons why your Six Sigma project is doomed to fail.

Alignment

I have seen projects being greelighted simply because the topic is something close to heart of the Project owner or that the project appears easy. But in the grand scheme of things, if the project is not aligned to the overall business strategy it will not get the support of the senior management. When priorities conflict, you can bet that a project not aligned to the company main thrust will be the first one to get shelved. A good tool to use will be Hoshin Kanri or for simple projects the CTQ drilldown tree.

Scope

Never boil the ocean on your first Six Sigma project. I have seen projects getting notoriously delayed because stakeholders want to add a bit of something here and little of something there. This is known as Scope Creep. If at the onset of the project, the boundaries are not established, unnecessary deliverables will soon unwittingly be added on the project. And as is always the case, with limited resources, you can be pretty sure that the milestones will be missed. To avoid this make sure that the Project Charter is agreed upon at the start. And should changes be needed to be reflected, the team has agree on some trade offs on the deliverables, the resource availability or the timeline.

Infrastructure

Six sigma is a lofty goal because to reach in the domain of 3 to 6 sigma it requires good sophistcated tools to capture the data. If you rely in the manual manner of collection or your measurement system is not able to support the level of accuracy it requires then consider your project a disaster. One way to approach this is, to look back at the objective. Does your process require to be really beyond 3 sigma ? Perhaps if the process is not really life threatening one does not need that level of accuracy. But if it is, then one should invest in the appropriate infrastructure to capture the level of accuracy required.

Ideally the situations above could be avoided if your in-house Blackbelt is well versed enough.