Project Management Articles

Information Technology (IT) has certainly transformed the way businesses undertake, manage and measure their processes and work output. However, when it comes to aligning IT systems to suit the project requirements of Lean Six Sigma implementations, most businesses fail to achieve the desired results.

Six Sigma as a quality improvement technique has managed to stand the test of time simply because it has helped many organizations to achieve near-perfect business processes. Its success is also because of the fact that it is quite compatible; it can be implemented in any organization, be it a manufacturing unit or a service provider.

Charles Darwin, the renowned naturalist propounded that all living beings continuously keep evolving so as to increase their chances of survival. Now, Lean Six Sigma may not come close to being a living organism, but that has not hindered it's evolution or it's ability to adapt to new business processes and concepts.

The use of the ITIL (Information Technology Infrastructure Library) has become quite commonplace in the IT sector, simply because it provides the necessary framework for achieving operational excellence.

Contact centers the world over have tried a variety of quality initiatives in the past few years, but sadly most of them have failed to deliver the desired results. The only exception was Six Sigma -it proved to be successful once again by helping contact centers to streamline their operations, reduce costs and increase customer satisfaction.

Six Sigma professionals such as Black Belts and employees with Six Sigma project implementation experience will tell you that some of the most important factors that can affect a project's success include the existing work culture and the type of people on board the implementation team.

In the world of business, no successful company can ever say with conviction that it will continue to be as efficient and profitable as it is now. This is because the productivity of a business can be easily affected by a number of external as well as internal factors.

Six Sigma was originally devised as a quality improvement technique for use in manufacturing industries, but it has proven so effective and compatible that it is now readily being employed even in the most technologically advanced areas, such as web marketing.

Six Sigma methodologies entrust business units with techniques and tools that can reduce defect levels in all processes and projects. However the successful deployment of tools and techniques require an equally good team of experts who will implement the methodology in a way that will best cover all the problems of the organization while improving the capacity levels of all existing resources.

Six Sigma has many methodologies and designs through which it achieves its target of lowering defect levels and increasing perfection of processes and consumer satisfaction. There are many variants of DFSS, or designs for Six Sigma, and out of them one is known as the IDOV variant - Identify, Design, Optimize, and Verify.

Six Sigma has always been touted as a champion defect reducer and quality enhancer. Therefore, Six Sigma training has also received considerable attention. The success of hotshot corporations likes Motorola and General Electric has generated a lot of interest in certification.

Have you recently implemented Six Sigma in your organization? If yes, then you must also find out a way to assess its success. Assessing a Six Sigma technology is not the last process post-implementation.

Maintaining operational excellence not only ensures the success of Six Sigma implementation projects but also generates confidence among the team members as most of the planned goals and objectives are achieved with ease.

Process ownership is vital for the success of all DMAIC (Define, Measure, Analyze, Improve, Control) and DFSS (Design For Six Sigma) projects because it helps in segregating the implementations into two different tasks. The first deals with identifying problem areas and making improvement suggestions and the second deals with implementing and managing the proposed improvements suggestions.

It is a generally accepted theory that people are resistant to change, be it a change in their behavior or a change in their immediate environment. And since Lean Six Sigma aims to achieve both these changes, it is not surprising to find the employees up in arms against the new concepts and methodologies being suggested as part of the ongoing Lean Six Sigma implementation process.