Distinction Between ITIL and PRINCE2

1. ITIL

ITIL (formerly an acronym for Information Technology Infrastructure Library) is a set of detailed practices for IT service management (ITSM) that focuses on aligning IT services with the needs of business.

2. Prince2

PRINCE2 (PRojects IN Controlled Environments) is a structured project management method and practitioner certification programme. PRINCE2 emphasises dividing projects into manageable and controllable stages.

Distinction Between ITIL and PRINCE2

ITIL	PRINCE 2
The IT Infrastructure Library (or ‘ITIL’) is an IT-specific service management framework. ITIL pertains to IT service management	PRINCE2 (PRojects IN Controlled Environments) is a process-based method for effective project management.
Service management is maintaining and developing the services that are currently provided.	PRINCE2 is a de facto standard used extensively by the UK Government and is widely recognised and used in the private sector, both in the UK and internationally
ITIL does not sufficiently train Service Managers to bring projects to a satisfactory close, its focus being rather on the provision of long-term services	The method PRINCE2 is in the public domain, offering non-proprietorial best practice guidance on project management.
ITIL assists Project Management by defining the guidelines that each release must adhere to with regard to testing, acceptance scheduling, securing code etc.	A project has by definition, only a temporary lifespan
ITIL is an IT approach to maintenance and supporting certain situation	PRINCE2 does not cover the support and development required of an IT Service Manager after the design and implementation of the initial product
ITIL will take over from PRINCE2 to support and maintain the results	Project Management is focused on the delivery of projects (which may or may not result in a release) within a defined scope, budget and timeframe
ITIL is a Process Management certification.	(PRINCE2) is a project management certification
With the ITIL you set up IT standard	Prince2 is about generic project management, so not specific to IT and is applicable to any industry.
ITIL requires something to guide it; that is, ITIL is the “what” not the “how”.	Prince2 is applied on a IT project, after the project is finished and the result is used by the organisation
ITIL focuses on operations, and mostly ignores development/solutions. ITIL seldom ventures into project management or portfolio management, and it skips a lot of aspects of request management.	With the use of PRINCE2 you can run any project and not necessary an IT project

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Distinction between ITIL and CMMI

1. ITIL

ITIL (formerly an acronym for Information Technology Infrastructure Library) is a set of detailed practices for IT service management (ITSM) that focuses on aligning IT services with the needs of business. ... Organizations that wish to implement ITIL internally do not require this license.

2. CMMI

The Capability Maturity Model Integration (CMMI) is a process and behavioral model that helps organizations streamline process improvement and encourage productive, efficient behaviors that decrease risks in software, product and service development.

Distinction between ITIL and CMMI

ITIL	CMMI
ITIL is a set of comprehensive and coherent codes of best practices, and ITIL scope extend to controlling and managing all aspects of IT related operations.	Capability Maturity Model Integration (CMMI) is aprocess improvement approach whose goal is to help organizations improve their performance. CMMI can be used to guide process improvement across a project. a division, or an entire organization. Currently supported is CMMI Version 1.3
ITIL is a non-proprietary tool that encourages the private sector to develop services and products such as training, consultancy, and tools to support ITIL.	CMMI helps “integrate traditionally separate organizational functions, set process improvement goals and priorities, provide guidance for quality processes, and provide a point of reference for appraising current processes. CMMI currently addresses three areas of interest: Product and service development — CMMI for Development (CMMI-DEV), Service establishment, management, and delivery — CMMI for Services (CMMI-SVC), and Product and service acquisition — CMMI for Acquisition (CMMI-ACQ). CMMI models provide guidance for developing or improving processes that meet the business goals of an organization. A CMMI model may also be used as a framework for appraising the process maturity of the organization.
ITIL® helps us understand and develop all of the areas within our infrastructure	CMMI focuses on software process maturity continuous improvement
ITIL is broader in scope and provides a framework for IT service management and operations including a hardware life cycle. ITIL is the first choice of organizations for standards related to operations and the infrastructure side of IT	CMMI is the de facto quality standard for software development, integration, deployment, and maintenance processes in organizations
ITIL addresses IT operations issues such as security, change and configuration management, capacity planning, troubleshooting, and service desk functions.	CMMI is geared specifically to software development organizations and focuses on continuous improvement
The application of CMMI helps the organization gain competency and expertise in software or product development	ITIL applications help align the entire IT process and resources of the organization to business processes
ITIL uses best practices to create well defined processes for ITSM	CMMI provides a guide for selecting processes that best fit an organization’s needs
The United Kingdom’s Office of Government Commerce (OGC) developed the IT Infrastructure Library (ITIL) in 1986 to provide guidance for service management. These set of guidelines has since then emerged as the international de facto standard framework of best practices for IT service management and infrastructure. ITIL originated as a collection of books, each covering a specific practice within the IT service management.	Carnegie Mellon University (CMU)’s Software Engineering Institute developed the first Capability Maturity Model (CMM) in 1990, and followed it up with the Capability Maturity Model Integration (CMMI) that integrated multiple CMMs.
ITIL is not prescriptive and orders the processes in sets ITIL provides solutions on how to undertake the requirement analysis.	CMMI model is not a process but a description of effective process characteristics. It recommends requirement analysis but does not specify how to do a requirement analysis.

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Distinction Between ITIL and COBIT

1. ITIL

ITIL (formerly an acronym for Information Technology Infrastructure Library) is a set of detailed practices for IT service management (ITSM) that focuses on aligning IT services with the needs of business. ... Organizations that wish to implement ITIL internally do not require this license.

2. COBIT

COBIT stands for Control Objectives for Information and Related Technology. It is a framework created by the ISACA (Information Systems Audit and Control Association) for IT governance and management.

Distinction Between ITIL and COBIT

ITIL	COBIT
ITIL is the most widely adopted approach for IT Service Management in the world. It provides a practical, no-nonsense framework for identifying, planning, delivering and supporting IT services to the business.	Its mission is “to research, develop, publish and promote an authoritative, up-to-date international set of generally accepted information technology control objectives for day-to-day use by business managers, IT professionals and assurance professionals
ITIL advocates that IT services must be aligned to the needs of the business and underpin the core business processes. It provides guidance guidance to organizations on how to use IT as a tool to facilitate business change , transformation and growth	COBIT are the control objectives which you can use to see if the processes are followed.
The IT Infrastructure Library (or ‘ITIL’) is an IT-specific service management framework. ITIL pertains to IT service management	COBIT is a framework created by ISACA for information technology (IT) management and IT Governance. It is a supporting toolset that allows managers to bridge the gap between control requirements, technical issues and business risks. The framework provides good practices across a domain and process framework
ITIL assists Project Management by defining the guidelines that each release must adhere to with regard to testing, acceptance scheduling, securing code etc.	The business orientation of COBIT consists of linking business goals to IT goals, providing metrics and maturity models to measure their achievement and identifying the associated responsibilities of business and IT process owners.
ITIL is an IT approach to maintenance and supporting certain situation. ITIL is the IT Infrastructure Library based on IT ITIL was designed as a service management framework to help you understand how you support processes, how you deliver services	COBIT pertains to security , COBIT was designed as an IT governance model, particularly and initially with audit in mind to give you control objectives and control practices on how that process should behave
ITIL is a Process Management certification.	COBIT is cited as the most widely used framework for IT governance and controls and is referenced by a variety of standards and regulations
ITIL is focused on Service Delivery and Service Level Management.	COBIT provides alignment between business goals/financial goals/objectives and planning of policy, procedure and process for over all IT infrastructure
ITIL requires something to guide it; that is, ITIL is the “what” not the “how”.	COBIT (Control Objectives for Information and related Technology) is the method to measure ITIL.
ITIL tells you how you should be doing it.	COBIT tells you what you should be doing
ITIL focuses on operations, and mostly ignores development/solutions. ITIL seldom ventures into project management or portfolio management, and it skips a lot of aspects of request management.	COBIT is a list of critical success factors that provides succinct, non-technical best practices for each IT process and Maturity models to assist in benchmarking and decision-making for capability improvements.
The primary focus of ITIL is to provide best practice definitions and criteria for operations management. More specifically, ITIL primarily focuses on defining the functional, operational and organizational attributes that need to be in place for operations management to be fully optimized in two key categories.	The process focus of COBIT is illustrated by a process model that subdivides IT into four domains (Plan and Organize, Acquire and Implement, Deliver and Support and Monitor and Evaluate) and 34 processes in line with the responsibility areas of plan, build, run and monitor
If the objective is to continuously improve IT operations efficiency and IT customer service quality, ITIL would probably be be the better bet.	COBIT focuses on the definition, implementation, auditing, measurement and improvement of controls for specific processes that span the entire IT implementation life cycle. As such, it is an excellent reference model for IT governance across the entire implementation life cycle.

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What Makes Six Sigma Work?

Some consultants are earning seven figure salaries, CEOs of large companies are claiming billions of dollars saved, conferences, books, and seminars are popping up everywhere, and yet one can argue that there isn’t much new about Six Sigma that we didn’t have with TQM. Is Six Sigma just the latest management buzzword or is Six Sigma a Quality Management program that really works?

Six Sigma does have a few new twists. These new twists make Six Sigma different enough to exist on its own and are what makes Six Sigma work much better than any other quality methodology of the past.

Six Sigma only appears to be a little different than TQM in terms of Quality tools, techniques, and principles, but from a global perspective it’s a whole new animal for the following reasons (in order of importance):

Global Perspective Of What Makes Six Sigma Work

1. A New Type of Top Level Support

Past GE CEO Jack Welch is quoted for telling employees that if they wanted to get promoted, they’d better be Black Belts. Universal cost oriented metrics and the new level of competition that Six Sigma provides easily acquires top level support. Some argue that the only new addition that Six Sigma provides is the way top management is treating it. What’s really important is that CEOs are seriously supporting large improvement projects run by highly trained business super stars.

2. Problem Solving and Team Leading Super Stars

Executive Champion, Deployment Champions, Project Champions, Master Black Belts, Black Belts, and Green Belts (see structure below).

3. Training Like Never Before

The training is heavily statistical, project management, and problem solving oriented. Training costs of approximately $15,000-$25,000 per Black Belt are well justified by the savings per project.

4. New Metrics

Use of metrics unlike anything ever used before. These metrics not only tie in customer Critical to Quality (CTQ) needs with what is measured by the company, but they also allow processes within the company to be compared with each other using a single scale called DPMO (Defects Per Million Opportunities).

5. Much Better Use of Teams 

Very efficient use of highly trained, cross-functional, and empowered teams to locate and make improvements. Black Belts are also trained team efficiency experts.

6. A New Level of Process Comparison 

The use of opportunity divisible defect metrics (DPMO) allows comparisons from division to division, department to department, process to process, etc. within the company.

7. A New Corporate Attitude / Culture 

Implementation of Six Sigma creates a new environment that naturally promotes the creation of continuous improvement efforts.

8. A Closer Look at Old Metrics

PDCA becomes a more detail oriented DMAIC and all those Quality tools that never get used are thrown out. If we don’t need them, why spend time learning how to use them.

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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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