The History of Six Sigma

The roots of Six Sigma as a measurement standard can be traced back to Carl Friedrich Gauss (1777-1855) who introduced the concept of the normal curve. Six Sigma as a measurement standard in product variation can be traced back to the 1920’s when Walter Shewhart showed that three sigma from the mean is the point where a process requires correction. Many measurement standards (Cpk, Zero Defects, etc.) later came on the scene but credit for coining the term “Six Sigma” goes to a Motorola engineer named Bill Smith. (Incidentally, “Six Sigma” is a federally registered trademark of Motorola).

In the early and mid-1980s with Chairman Bob Galvin at the helm, Motorola engineers decided that the traditional quality levels — measuring defects in thousands of opportunities – didn’t provide enough granularity. Instead, they wanted to measure the defects per million opportunities. Motorola developed this new standard and created the methodology and needed cultural change associated with it. Six Sigma helped Motorola realize powerful bottom-line results in their organization – in fact, they documented more than $16 Billion in savings as a result of our Six Sigma efforts.

Since then, tens of thousands of companies around the world have adopted Six Sigma as a way of doing business. This is a direct result of many of America’s leaders openly praising the benefits of Six Sigma. Leaders such as Larry Bossidy of Allied Signal (now Honeywell), and Jack Welch of General Electric Company. Rumor has it that Larry and Jack were playing golf one day and Jack bet Larry that he could implement Six Sigma faster and with greater results at GE than Larry did at Allied Signal. The results speak for themselves.

Six Sigma has evolved over time. It’s more than just a quality system like TQM or ISO. It’s a way of doing business. As Geoff Tennant describes in his book Six Sigma: SPC and TQM in Manufacturing and Services: “Six Sigma is many things, and it would perhaps be easier to list all the things that Six Sigma quality is not. Six Sigma can be seen as: a vision; a philosophy; a symbol; a metric; a goal; a methodology.” We couldn’t agree more.

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Finding the Sigma Level of Customer Complaints

In the beginning of a deployment, many companies set a goal of 3.4 defects per million opportunities (DPMO) using Six Sigma quality concepts in production, and later extend this concept to other operational areas. Fewer companies, however, have extended Six Sigma from a manufacturing application to manage customer satisfaction or customer complaints. But it is possible to measure the sigma level of customer complaints, and this information can be valuable when making improvements in that area.

Putting Customer Complaint Data to Use

To determine the sigma level of customer complaints, an organization should use actual customer complaint data recorded by the sales personnel rather than data from customer surveys (Figure I). Six Sigma concepts depend more on fact-based data rather than simply opinion-based data. Further, there is a need to go beyond the calculation of the percentage of customers who are dissatisfied to determine the sigma level of customer complaints. Through the process of determining the sigma level of complaints, practitioners will find the degree of customer satisfaction and customer retention, which help make up business excellence.

Figure 1: Flow of Product and Complaints

Compiling the Necessary Information

For illustration of this concept, consider the case where Company A manufactures various products in the form of rolls of certain a width. The area of each roll is calculated in square meters. The packing pattern of these rolls varies as they are converted into various sizes in the form of sheets, as per market requirements.

Although the converted sheets of the product are packed in boxes and sold, accounting is done in terms of area in square meters. That is, when a box of units is involved in a complaint, the actual area in square meters of material in the box that is involved in the complaint is taken into consideration rather than considering it as a single complaint. This is because the quantum of units involved in complaints per packing pattern varies.

Weekly and monthly reports on customer complaints received either from sales personnel or directly from customers are prepared by the quality assurance department and the reports are sent as product performance feedback to the concerned production department for future improvements. Annual reports are compiled on the overall complaints received in a particular year. These reports include the total number of complaints and the total area of complaints (the sum of the areas in square meters per each complaint).

Usual practice is to compute the percentage of complaints against total sales of the product in the specified period, but this feedback fails to reflect the number of actual complainers and the number of possible complainers. It is simple to compute the sigma level of the complaints for the percentages, but neither percentage nor sigma level of the number of actual complainers to number of possible complainers (opportunities) is possible. It may be noted that the number of possible complainers is nothing but the customers who have the opportunity to raise complaints after the use of the product.

Introducing the Seven-step Method

There is a seven-step method (Table I) that helps make meaningful analyses of the complaints data, which can provide critical information to practitioners. Necessary complaints data, such as number of complaints received, total area of complaints in square meters and total area of sales in square meters, is collected over the course of a year. Then the sigma level of the number of actual complainers to the number of possible complainers in each year is determined using the seven-step procedure.

Table 1: Seven-step Procedure for Finding Sigma Level of Customer Complaints

Step	Procedure	Notation
1	Obtain from records the actual number of complaints. (Note that each complaint has Xi (i = 1, 2, … , N1) square meters of defective area)	N1 (actual complainers)
2	Obtain the area of N1 complaints	A1 = E Xi Sq. m.
3	Find the average area per complaint	A2 = A1 / N1 Sq. m.
4	Obtain from the records the total area of sales in square meters during the year	A3 Sq. m.
5	Find the total number of possible complaints (possible complainers)	N2 = A3 / A2 (opportunities)
6	Find the total of possible number of complaints per million opportunities (CPMO)	N3 = N1 / N2 X 1,000,000
7	Obtain the sigma level against N3	k

One may observe in the seven-step procedure that A1 / A3 is numerically equal to N3 = N1 / N2. This is due to the nature of mathematical development of N3. The interpretation is the purpose of using this method. The objective is to determine the sigma level of the actual number of complaints received and not the sigma level of the number of units involved in the complaint. A Six Sigma organization always considers customer retention, in addition to reducing the number of units involved in the complaints. The organization knows that a single complaint of large quantity is far better than as many complaints (complainers) of same or less quantity. The latter is more dangerous because it is infectious.

Therefore, with the straightforward calculation of A1 / A3, the sigma level is interpreted as sigma level of the area of units received as complaints relative to the area of units sold. Although N3 gives the same sigma level, it is interpreted as the sigma level of the number of actual complaints received relative to the number of possible complaints.

In addition, as the procedure sequentially goes through all steps, it provides useful information regarding the average number of units involved per complainer (Step 3 in Table 1) and the total number of possible complainers or opportunities (Step 5 in Table 1). Such information is essential in a situation where the number of units involved per packing pattern varies from complaint to complaint (see the assumption in Step 1 in Table 1) and the actual size of the population of possible complainers is not known.

As quality improves, the number of complainers will reduce, and hence the number of possible customers will increase (wider customer base) in the marketplace. As a result, the company can experience a higher sigma level and excellent customer retention (Figure 2).

Figure 2: Means of Higher Sigma Level and Customer Retention

Seven-step System in Action

Two examples help illustrate the meaningful analyses of complaints data from a practitioner’s point of view using the seven-step method.

1. Manufacturing Case

Company A obtains the following details for a particular year:

N1 = 929 (actual number of complainers)

A1 =23,090.96 Sq.m.

A2 = A1 / N1 = 23,090.96 / 929 = 24.869 Sq.m.

A3 = 15,446,000 Sq.m.

N2 = 15,446,000 / 24.86 = 621,319 (possible number of complainers or opportunities)

N3 = (929 / 621,319) X 1,000,000 = 1,495 CPMO (complainers per million opportunities)

This corresponds to the sigma level k = 4.47.

It may be noted that, if units are produced where area in square meter conversion is not necessary, the sigma level easily can be calculated by making a simple change in the proposed seven-step procedure. Here, Xi is taken as the number of defective units per each complaint instead of area in square meters per each complaint. The method can be used to determine the sigma quality level, even if the units are packed in bundles of many boxes and complaints are accounted for in the number of bundles per complaint or in any other form, as illustrated in Example 2.

2. Non-manufacturing Case

The proposed method is also suitable for Six Sigma analysis of customer complaints data in non-manufacturing settings. For example, at a restaurant recently, there were two groups being served: my family with three people and another group of five people. Near the exit door inside the restaurant there was a bell with a display saying, “If you are satisfied with our service, please ring the bell.” A group that does not ring the bell means there is at least one complaining customer, depending on the size of the dining group.

In this case, if both the groups register a complaint, then the number of complaints is only two, but the possible number of complaints is 3 + 5 = 8. On request, the restaurant provided complaints data for a particular year, for which the sigma level is obtained as follows using the seven-step procedure:

Total number of complaints: N1 = 32 groups

Number of customers involved in the complaints: A1 = 250 persons

Average number of customers per complaint: A2 = A1 / N1 = 250 / 32 = 7.81 persons

Total number of customers visited in the year: A3 = 135,000 persons

Total number of possible complaints: N2 = 135,000 / 7.81 = 17,285 groups (Opportunities)

Possible number of complaints per million customers: N3 = (32 / 17,285) X 1,000,000 = 1,851 CPMO

This corresponds to the sigma level k = 4.40.

Both examples show that quality practitioners would miss critical information from complaints data if they simply went by percentages. Particularly, the total number of possible complainers throws light on the status of the customer base, retention and the sigma quality level of CPMO.

Reveal the Degree of Customer Satisfaction

Customer satisfaction, wider customer base and customer retention are key aspects of business excellence. Although customer survey data is often used to determine the degree of customer satisfaction, it is worthwhile to consider the actual complaints data to calculate the number of actual complainers and the number of possible complainers. The minimum number of complainers relative to the customer base reveals the degree of customer satisfaction and customer retention.

Six Sigma practitioners always prefer to know the outcomes of their project implementations and overall organizational performance in terms of sigma quality level. Using the seven-step method, practitioners can determine the sigma quality level of customer complaints and fine-tune improvement activities.

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How to Avoid Deep-sixing a New Six Sigma Program

As he pushed out from Fairfield, Conn., USA, the king of CEOs left us all holding the Six Sigma bag. In it, a host of tools, techniques, potential and promise clank against one another. It is a nice collection, and we are pretty sure it works, but it is the old proverb that bothers us: “Be careful what you ask for; you just might get it.”

What we asked for was a better way to do quality, customer focus, measurement and change than had been provided by the old warhorse Total Quality Management (TQM). What we got was a methodology suffused with just as much hope and aspiration as the loftiest of TQM programs. With greater numbers of companies putting their hats into the Six Sigma ring, for the cynical, the currency of data-driven change is suffering from inflated expectations.

But before filing Six Sigma away in the category of failed hopes and dreams and scanning the menu for another flavor, consider the following caveats. They fall into the category of been there, done that, and constitute a few wise saws that even the most defect-prone management can benefit from.

Key Issues to Avoid

Six Sigma is nearly identical to TQM, but with more resources and concentration. More than anything else, Six Sigma is a total business strategy, not just a program du jour hiding out in manufacturing. The following are three key issues that may have been a problem during past TQM deployments, and should be resolved when starting Six Sigma.

Key Issue 1: You Can Pick Your Friends, But You Can’t Pick Only Friendly Projects

In selecting Six Sigma opportunities, practitioners often turn to pet projects that have been sitting on the shelf for a long time. Maybe teams from the past have taken passes at them, or maybe they have been Band-Aided and victory declared a number of times. They are the old favorites that no one has succeeded in solving and that have pestered management for longer than anyone cares to remember. But putting new resources into old jugs instead of focusing on today’s critical problems may do a disservice. There are common reasons for leaving such projects on the shelf:

1. The project may be too big and beyond a Six Sigma team’s abilities to handle.
2. The reason this problem has not been solved is political and not subject to the bright light of human reason.
3. It is strategic, not tactical, and thus beyond the purview of a Six Sigma team. For example, asking, “Are we in the right business or market?” is out of scope for a team.
4. The voice of the customer, either internal or external, was not taken into account.
5. There is little or no data associated with the project and the Six Sigma team will have to spend months just collecting it.

Recommendations

Choosing good Six Sigma projects is not easy. It is more art than science and depends on discernment and judgment. Here are a few tips that may help a Six Sigma effort get a good start:

◈ Set a time limit on the project (probably less than four months). This forces modest projects and provides the team with a moderate, obtainable objective.

◈ Make sure the Champion or sponsor has power and commitment to the solution.

◈ Ensure the sponsor has responsibility for the success of the project, not the team leader or members.

◈ Look at past successes before selecting projects. Ask, “What are we good at around here and how did we do it?”

◈ Use cross-functional Six Sigma teams for what they are best at – interpreting and evaluating data and making creative suggestions, not grinding through old, lost or suspect data.
Get the data first, and then have the team apply creative problem-solving techniques.

◈ If the customer says something, take it seriously. Too many customer surveys unearth information that is not acted on.

◈ Segment the customer sample to adequately reflect the customer base. Practitioners should be talking to the right people about the right things.

◈ If management wants to do something – enter a new market, bring out a new product – this task should not be assigned to the Six Sigma team, unless the team is specifically chartered to build a new product or process.

Key Issue 2: Senior Management on Parade

There has been enough said to last a lifetime about the importance of senior manager involvement in quality. And, for the most part, those engaged in Six Sigma have gotten the message. The challenge of senior manager involvement has morphed from getting them out of their offices to something quite new and strange: getting them off the teams’ backs. In many companies engaged in Six Sigma, senior management has done such a good job of conveying their seriousness and the importance of the program that teams are sometimes quaking in their boots, fearful of negotiating overzealous charters, pushing back for resources, or demanding help gathering far-flung data and measures.

Recommendations

When a Six Sigma guru served as vice president of quality at one of the GE Capital companies, all efforts to get senior management to “get it” were in vain until the senior team was tasked to develop, research and present their own projects. Some were frivolous, but many represented sincere efforts to understand the principles of Six Sigma and make things better. Six Sigma is complicated – and there is no substitute for personal experience. Managers must learn to treat it like any other powerful business initiative. Put the right resources and expectations in place, set goals of moderate difficulty, coach and manage performance. Six Sigma will fail if it is treated as some magic wand by which management responsibility can be delegated away. Here are a few actions management can take:

◈ Get involved in training. Not the one- or two-day version. They should take the full two- or three-week DMAIC or DMADV program, select a project, and see it through to completion.

◈ Spend time developing and verifying the business case and problem statement part of the team charter. Know it cold. Next, tease out a four-month project that is doable, and set it up for success by picking the right team and team leader.

◈ Give the team leader or Black Belt the right of first refusal on project selection. Most will go ahead, but they know it is by choice not constraint.

◈ It is OK to select projects based on payback, but big payback usually involves a big investment of time and resources. Build talent and experience first with moderate, small-scope projects, and then apply that experience to the big-ticket items.

◈ One way to properly scope a project is to use a multigenerational project plan. This allows all concerned to view the project, even a big one as a progressive rollout rather than a one-shot deal. Although usually used in a DMADV project, the plan can be part of a DMAIC project and specify each phase, making the project more manageable and facilitating handoffs to other teams.

◈ In any project, large or small, the proper role of the upper manager, sponsor or Champion is one of involvement and coaching. It takes skill and experience to coach and that experience can only come from having personally led projects and from having taken responsibility for getting things done. The responsibility for implementation should not be left to the Black Belt alone, but owned by the Champion as well. If team members are expected to spend upward of 100 percent of their time on the project, the Champion must follow suit. The table below is a thumbnail guide of time commitments for all relevant parties. Note: these times equate to hours. Thus, 20 percent would mean a full day per week.

Time Commitment Required for Members of Six Sigma Team During DMAIC Project Phases

Project Phase	Team Leader (Black Belt)	Team Member	Master Black Belt	Champion/Process Owner
Define	100 percent	50 – 75 percent	50 percent	75 percent
Measure	100 percent	100 percent	25 percent	10 percent
Analyze	100 percent	100 percent	75 percent	15 percent
Improve	100 percent	100 percent	10 percent	15 percent
Control	100 percent	50 percent	10 percent	25 percent

Key Issue 3: The Vigor of the Rigor

One of the strengths of Six Sigma over TQM, particularly in administrative settings, is that while TQM talked about data analysis, Six Sigma actually does it. Sometimes, however, it can over do it. Statistics are only necessary when taking samples from a population. With statistical analysis, it is possible to infer things about the population from a sample as small as a few percentage points. That is a blessing in big systems with thousands or millions of events. When teams work on big scope sigma projects, statistics can be a blessing because they can only gather a small amount of data during their investigations.

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How to Calculate Process Sigma

How to Calculate Process Sigma

Consider a power company for illustration purposes: A power company measures their performance in uptime of available power to their grid. Here is the five-step process to calculate your process sigma.

Step 1: Define Your Opportunities

An opportunity is the lowest defect noticeable by a customer. This definition, of course, is debatable within the Six Sigma community. Here’s a useful snippet from the forum discussing this point:

“Typically, most products (and services) have more than one opportunity of going wrong. For example, it is estimated than in electronics assembly a diode could have the following opportunities for error: 1) wrong diode and 2) wrong polarity (inserted backwards), so for each assembly shipped, at least two defect opportunities could be assigned for each diode. Apparently, some manufacturers of large complex equipment with many components prefer to [count two opportunities in this case]. My point is that this approach dilutes Six Sigma metrics.” -Anonymous

Many Six Sigma professionals support the counter point. I always like to think back to the pioneer of Six Sigma, Motorola. They built pagers that did not require testing prior to shipment to the customer. Their process sigma was around six, meaning that only approximately 3.4 pagers out of a million shipped did not function properly when the customer received it. The customer does not care if the diode is backwards or is missing, just that the pager works.

Returning to our power company example, an opportunity was defined as a minute of uptime. That was the lowest (shortest) time period that was noticeable by a customer.

Step 2: Define Your Defects

Defining what a defect is to your customer is not easy either. You need to first communicate with your customer through focus groups, surveys, or other voice of the customer tools. To Motorola pager customers, a defect was defined as a pager that did not function properly.

Returning to our power company example, a defect is defined by the customer as one minute of no power. An additional defect would be noticed for every minute that elapsed where the customer didn’t have power available.

Step 3: Measure Your Opportunities and Defects

Now that you have clear definitions of what an opportunity and defect are, you can measure them. The power company example is relatively straight forward, but sometimes you may need to set up a formal data collection plan and organize the process of data collection.

Returning to our power company example, here is the data we collected:
Opportunities (last year): 525,600 minutes
Defects (last year): 500 minutes

Step 4: Calculate Your Yield

The process yield is calculated by subtracting the total number of defects from the total number of opportunities, dividing by the total number of opportunities, and finally multiplying the result by 100.

Returning to our power company example, the yield would be calculated as:((525,600 – 500) / 525,600) * 100 = 99.90%

Alternatively, the yield can be calculated for you by using the iSixSigma Process Sigma Calculator – just input your process opportunities and defects.

Step 5: Look Up Process Sigma

The final step (if not using the iSixSigma Process Sigma Calculator) is to look up your sigma on a sigma conversion table, using your process yield calculated in Step 4.

Assumptions

No analysis would be complete without properly noting the assumptions that you have made. In the above analysis, we have assumed that the standard sigma shift of 1.5 is appropriate (the calculator allows you to specify another value), the data is normally distributed, and the process is stable. In addition, the calculations are made with using one-tail values of the normal distribution.

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Six Sigma Organizational Architecture

Six Sigma is a quality methodology that can produce significant benefit to businesses and organizations. Not much text, however, has been written about the structure needed to successfully implement Six Sigma quality within your business or organization. This article will focus on roles and responsibilities, as well as required rewards and recognition for a successful Six Sigma quality program.

Roles and Responsibilities

Quality Leader/Manager (QL/QM) – The quality leader’s responsibility is to represent the needs of the customer and to improve the operational effectiveness of the organization. The Quality function is typically separated from the manufacturing or transactional processing functions in order to maintain impartiality. The quality manager sits on the CEO/President’s staff, and has equal authority to all other direct reports.

Master Black Belt (MBB) – Master Black Belts are typically assigned to a specific area or function of a business or organization. It may be a functional area such as human resources or legal, or process specific area such as billing or tube rolling. MBBs work with the owners of the process to ensure that quality objectives and targets are set, plans are determined, progress is tracked, and education is provided. In the best Six Sigma organizations, process owners and MBBs work very closely and share information daily.

Process Owner (PO) – Process owners are exactly as the name sounds – they are the responsible individuals for a specific process. For instance, in the legal department there is usually one person in charge – maybe the VP of Legal – that’s the process owner. There may be a chief marketing officer for your business – that’s the process owner for marketing. Depending on the size of your business and core activities, you may have process owners at lower levels of your organizational structure. If you are a credit card company with processes around billing, accounts receivable, audit, billing fraud, etc., you wouldn’t just have the process owner be the chief financial officer, you would want to go much deeper into the organization where the work is being accomplished and you can make a big difference.

Black Belt (BB) – Black Belts are the heart and soul of the Six Sigma quality initiative. Their main purpose is to lead quality projects and work full time until they are complete. Black Belts can typically complete four to six projects per year with savings of approximately $230,000 per project. Black Belts also coach Green Belts on their projects, and while coaching may seem innocuous, it can require a significant amount of time and energy.

Green Belt (GB) – Green Belts are employees trained in Six Sigma who spend a portion of their time completing projects, but maintain their regular work role and responsibilities. Depending on their workload, they can spend anywhere from 10 percent to 50 percent of their time on their project(s). As your Six Sigma quality program evolves, employees will begin to include the Six Sigma methodology in their daily activities and it will no longer become a percentage of their time – it will be the way their work is accomplished 100% of the time.

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Six Sigma Green Belt Curriculum and Body of Knowledge

Education is a key component of your Six Sigma initiative. Below is a recommendation of what should be included in your training, whether conducted in-house or by a third-party consultant. If you feel that some relevant topic is missing from the curriculum or body of knowledge of any of the areas listed below, please send an email to iSixSigma. We appreciate your input.

Six Sigma Green Belt Curriculum and Body of Knowledge

Overview

◈ Overview of Six Sigma
◈ DMAIC Methodology Overview
◈ Financial Benefits of Six Sigma
◈ The Impact of Six Sigma to The Organization
◈ The Six Sigma Language

Define

◈ Project Definition
◈ Project Charter
◈ Developing a Business Case
◈ Chartering a Team
◈ Defining Roles and Responsibilities
◈ Gathering Voice of the Customer, Support for Project
◈ Translating Customer Needs into Specific Requirements (CTQs)
◈ SIPOC Diagram
◈ Define Phase Review

Measure

◈ Process Mapping (As-Is Process)
◈ Data Attributes (Continuous Versus Discrete)
◈ Measurement System Analysis
◈ Data Collection Techniques
◈ Data Collection Plan
◈ Understanding Variation
◈ Measuring Process Capability
◈ Calculating Process Sigma Level
◈ Visually Displaying Baseline Performance
◈ Measurement Phase Review

Analyze

◈ Visually Displaying Data (Histogram, Run Chart, Pareto Chart, Scatter Diagram)
◈ Detailed (Lower Level) Process Mapping of Critical Areas
◈ Value-Added Analysis
◈ Cause and Effect Analysis (a.k.a. Fishbone, Ishikawa)
◈ Affinity Diagram
◈ Data Segmentation and Stratification
◈ Verification of Root Causes
◈ Determining Opportunity (Defects and Financial) for Improvement
◈ Analyze Phase Review

Improve

◈ Brainstorming
◈ Multi-Voting
◈ Quality Function Deployment (House of Quality)
◈ Selecting a Solution
◈ Failure Modes and Effects Analysis (FMEA)
◈ Poka Yoke (Mistake Proofing Your New Process)
◈ Piloting Your Solution
◈ Implementation Planning
◈ Improve Phase Review

Control

◈ Assessing The Results of Process Improvement
◈ Statistical Process Control (SPC) Overview
◈ Developing a Process Control Plan
◈ Documenting the Process
◈ Control Phase Review

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Six Sigma Roles and Responsibilities

Six Sigma has a martial arts convention for naming many of its professional roles. The chart below describes how these roles are typically defined.

Leaders and Champions usually receive high-level training on the technical aspects of Six Sigma and specific training on how to lead an initiative. At the “Belt” level, each candidate is assigned an initial “training project” that he/she will work on during the formal training period. Candidates attend classroom training for a week, work on their projects for three weeks, return to class for another week, and so on until they have acquired all the skills appropriate to their role.

Six Sigma Roles and Responsibilities

Sponsor	Senior executive who sponsors the overall Six Sigma initiative.
Leader	Senior-level executive who is responsible for implementing Six Sigma within the business.
Champion	Middle- or senior-level executive who sponsors a specific Six Sigma project, ensuring that resources are available and cross-functional issues are resolved.
Black Belt	Full-time professional who acts as a team leader on Six Sigma projects. Typically has four to five weeks of classroom training in methods, statistical tools and sometimes team skills.
Master Black Belt	Highly experienced and successful Black Belt who has managed several projects and is an expert in Six Sigma methods/tools. Responsible for coaching/mentoring/training Black Belts and for helping the Six Sigma leader and Champions keep the initiative on track.
Green Belt	Part-time professional who participates on a Black Belt project team or leads smaller projects. Typically has two weeks of classroom training in methods and basic statistical tools.
Team Member	Professional who has general awareness of Six Sigma (through no formal training) and who brings relevant experience or expertise to a particular project.
Process Owner	Professional responsible for the business process that is the target of a Six Sigma project.

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Fitting the Right Belts for Design for Lean Six Sigma

Every Lean Six Sigma deployment leader must eventually confront the critical decision of how the various Belt roles should be allocated and deployed throughout the organization. Lean Six Sigma has existed for more than 10 years now in a variety of manufacturing, service and distribution environments, and through trial and error fairly standard niches have been carved out for the Black Belt, Green Belt and Yellow Belt roles. Obviously there are differences in these roles from organization to organization, but in general deployments tend to use the roles in the following manner.

Black Belts: This is a dedicated, full-time position focused on process improvement through the use of a variety of problem-solving tools applied in the DMAIC or DMADV project cycles. Black Belts tend to be highly skilled in the use of Lean Six Sigma tools. The reporting structure varies, but in many cases this position reports directly through a separate function that is responsible for deploying Lean Six Sigma with a dotted-line responsibility to process owners or Champions. Occasionally, the reporting structure to process owners or Champions is direct with a dotted-line responsibility to the deployment team (which may include Master Black Belts). Black Belt projects tend to be fairly broad in scope and may rely on the assistance of Green Belts or Yellow Belts. The Black Belt position often requires them to mentor and support Green Belts or Yellow Belts, and it is often an important element of a career development plan for high-potential employees.

Green Belts: This is more of a level of internal certification in the use of Lean Six Sigma methods and tools as opposed to a unique job description. Green Belts maintain functional responsibility and exist within the standard reporting structure as they work Six Sigma projects in areas related to their functional role. These projects tend to be more narrowly focused than Black Belt projects, and they typically fall within the normal scope of the Green Belt’s functional role and scope of influence. Black Belts often assume a role similar to Green Belts when they are repatriated into the functional organization. Green Belts may also bear the responsibility of supporting and developing Yellow Belts in their functional areas.

Yellow Belts: This (or some other color of the Belt spectrum) is typically the name applied to the role of team members participating on Black Belt or Green Belt projects. Yellow Belts are familiar with the methods, tools and language of Six Sigma, and they are expected to be effective participants on Six Sigma project teams. Yellow Belts may also be directly involved in efforts to establish a process management infrastructure by documenting and measuring business processes that relate to their functional roles and scope of responsibility or influence. Like Green Belts, the Yellow Belt term is more a description of a level of certification rather than a specific job title.

The use of these roles over the last decade or so has developed into a robust and consistent deployment scheme in most organizational functions like Sales, Marketing, Operations, Distribution, Human Resources, Finance, IT (mostly) and other support functions. Where the intuitive and standard application of these roles tends to differ is in areas that are project management intensive like Research & Development, certain parts of IT and other functions (like opening new facilities or implementing large projects on the customer site). While the application of Lean Six Sigma or Design for Lean Six Sigma methods to standard project-management approaches is well established, the application of the various Belt roles is still maturing in project management environments.

Lean Six Sigma Fits Project Management Like a Glove

All environments where project management is the defining process experience the same basic sequence of events: they initiate, plan, execute, control and close (IPECC) each project. Whether this process is strictly defined or not, every effort to create something goes through these steps. When DFLSS (Design for Lean Six Sigma) is applied to this process, then DMADV (define, measure, analyze, design, verify) or IDOV (indentify, design, optimize, verify) becomes the tool set that enhances the basic IPECC design process. The various processes tend to integrate with each other as shown in the following figure.

How Processes Integrate

The natural consequence of this relationship is that DFLSS or IDOV becomes a set of methods and tools that facilitates the project management process. This is true regardless of the scope of the project or the nature of the project: construction, hardware development, software development, systems implementation or anything else that requires managed project resources.

Where Lean Six Sigma is integrated effectively with project management, the DFLSS philosophy (but not every DFLSS tool) is a core element of every project. Too often organizations make the mistake of distinguishing between DFLSS projects and “other” projects, thereby perpetuating the notion that DFLSS is a selective project-based approach. Since the goal of DFLSS is to deliver better results faster with fewer resources, then the issue is not which project is a DFLSS project but rather which DFLSS tools are most appropriate for any given project. Regardless of how the projects are executed – from a highly iterative agile approach to a stage-gated waterfall approach – DFLSS is a method that is integral to the project management process.

Organizations that try to differentiate types of projects tend to waste time and energy in the classification without accounting for the waste of failing to standardize an approach by fully integrating the tools and methods in their project management processes.

But One Size Does Not Fit All

Once the integration of DFLSS or IDOV with IPECC is defined, the allocation of the Belt resources becomes a challenge. Many organizations continue to struggle with this because they attempt to apply the resources in project management environments according to what is familiar: the mature application of Belt resources in a more operational process environment as described above. While the roles above align fairly well to project management environments, there are a few important, but different, features.

Black Belts: In the project management arena, projects tend to become more outwardly focused. This is because all projects, especially in systems implementation and hardware and software development, are solutions to problems or opportunities in the customer’s (internal or external) environment. The output of any given project (on time with all required features fully functional) has a direct impact on an organization’s value stream. Consequently, improving the project management process means that improving the ability to deliver all requirements, fully functional and on time, becomes a priority.

This tends to force Black Belts to focus on efforts to improve the processes of gathering and defining requirements through better understanding of the customer’s context. This effort improves on-time delivery by minimizing defects found downstream due to defects in the requirements engineering process, and it improves functionality, thereby ensuring that the right requirements are delivered with the right level of capability.

Of course, this is not to suggest that Black Belts never address improvement opportunities through the reduction of waste that creates excessive consumption of resources within the project management process, especially since that waste often delays project completion. Better understanding of the customer environment is a priority, not an obsession to the exclusion of other opportunities.

Companies that deploy Six Sigma successfully in their project management processes recognize that project management resource consumption is only a fraction of the cost of projects delivered late or with reduced functionality, especially when those failures affect the value stream. As noted above, the Black Belt role is best structured as a dedicated, full-time position focused on process improvement, with Black Belts retaining the role of supporting and mentoring Green Belts and Yellow Belts.

Green Belts: This role takes on less of an improvement project orientation and more of a project management orientation by using the understanding of the DFLSS tools to drive integration with the project management system. Project managers make excellent Green Belts, as do other managers (like architecture or systems specialists) who are exposed to a broad view of the project management process. This enables the Green Belts to practice and encourage use of the DFLSS methods and tools across a wide scope of the project management process.

Technicians, developers or engineers often do not make good Green Belt candidates because their view of the project management process tends to be limited to their focused area of responsibility, which will make many (but certainly not all) of the DFLSS tools seem irrelevant. Green Belts in the project management environment do tend to work on improvement projects, especially those that reduce waste in the project management process or align to Black Belt projects. Since most Green Belts will naturally have some management responsibility, their role will include mentoring and supporting Yellow Belts.

Yellow Belts: This is the more appropriate role for technicians, developers or engineers – especially those that have a limited view of the project management process. While Yellow Belts should be introduced to the methods and tools of the DFLSS process, the practice of those tools will typically be limited to their specific areas of expertise.

For example, requirements engineers may use VOC and language processing methods; design technicians may find themselves frequently using concept selection, robust design and tolerance analysis techniques; software developers may practice agile programming tools; and test engineers may apply DOE or combinatorial test methods. Few of these roles, however, will regularly practice the full range of DFLSS methods and tools, so in-depth understanding of all the techniques is typically not appropriate. Yellow Belts should participate on both Black Belt and Green Belt teams, and their process management responsibility should be to document and measure work processes in their areas of expertise.

All over the world, various organizations have successfully deployed Lean Six Sigma techniques to parts of their organizations that are driven by intensive project management methods. The synergy between traditional project management (IPECC) and DFLSS or IDOV is well documented, and while the general methods seem to integrate well, the traditional Six Sigma roles are not as easily leveraged to project management environments. Organizations that successfully deploy Lean Six Sigma in project management environments like R&D, IT project management and construction recognize that DFLSS is an integral part of the project management process and that the roles of Black, Green and Yellow Belts must be carefully tailored to the project management environment.

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