h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

Ah, now I can return to the Dilbert cartoons that take the pi$$ out of another pointy-headed management fad called "six sigma", knowing exactly what it is that Scott Addams is extracting the urine from... I understood the cartoons were pointing at the latest American fad in expensive business insultancy , the sort of Management-B-speak that combines wishful thinking with something pseudo-scientific that would appeal to pointy-headed bosses everywhere; but I was short on the details, as it hadn't crossed the Atlantic to GB yet.

Thank you for filling in the blanks!

Having worked in a call centre (until I was invited to resign for showing too much individuality)I look upon this and am going "uggh, uggh, uggh"

How to micromanage your employees every inch of the way and crush every last drop of spark, individuality and creativity out of them... I may be wrong, but businesses do not grow by recruiting or encouraging dull blobby clones? At some point you are going to NEED that spark and creativity and that last pesky 0.00034% of individuality that SixSigma seems to want to eradicate. Even if it's a nuisance to the bosses now (like somebody going onto the Internet in works time to refresh his mind from all the work-related stuff)they will need it in the future...

As I mentioned in one of the footnotes, Six Sigma works really well in production lines, and can be made to work well in Call Centres sometimes, but if it stifles any process improvement from the people closest to the process (that is the people who actually do the work, rather than look at the reports) then it is not being done right.

Sadly a lot of "process improvement" is labelled as being the result of a Six Sigma Initiative, but is actually a process to "downsize".

In these cases the decision on how to "improve" the process has been made long before any analysis is started, so the Black Belt can either do the analysis properly, present recommendations for improvement based on that analysis to the "sponsor", and be told "Thank You", then never hear from them again. Or they can fudge the results of any analysis in order to present the recommendation for improvement they know the sponsor wants to hear. Then when the downsizing is done and the process performance doesn't improve, but gets worse, guess who usually gets blamed - often it's not the project sponsor, nor even the Black Belt, but "Six Sigma".

I fully agree that telling the people who execute the process that they cannot possibly have any ideas on how to improve it, but a "process analyst" can, is not only soul destroying for the employees, but also a guarantee of missed opportunities to improve.

One other point, Six Sigma HAS crossed the atlantic. I know of companies based in both the U.K. and the U.S. who use Six Sigma, and can bet that some of them apply the label (but not the process) in order to justify downsizing.

Just out of interest, today's Dilbert cartoon is about SixSigma... since tomorrow this will have dropped into the cartoon archive for a month, the reference point is the date as Scott Addams puts it, (being as he is American), o1/19/07.

http://www.dilbert.com/

This should be accesible to 20/02/07, and then drop out of sight altogether.

Good one - my boss just spent three days learning about "lean". My guess is it will be watered down until all that is left are the buzzwords (much like Six Sigma was where I last worked).

avagoodweekend

Is six sigma the same as lean sigma?

(It's creeping into my company too...)

Sorry I just saw your question.

According to a randomly selected web site
"Lean is a systematic, continuous improvement approach that focuses activities on reducing waste while aligning them to an overall growth strategy. A Lean Enterprise essentially eliminates waste throughout the business. Waste costs you resources, but adds no value to the customers you serve."

While "The central idea behind Six Sigma is that if you can
measure how many “defects” you have in a process, you can systematically figure out how
to eliminate them and get as close to “zero defects” as possible."

So while both are approaches for continuous improvement, and (I guess) both put a lot of effort into removing "non value-added" components, they are not the same. I know that some work has been done to merge the two into "Lean Six Sigma", and you will see a lot of training products to support this, but I don't know who uses it, or how succesful it is.

Um. Thanks. Would this be the wrong place to say that I sort of like the idea of stopping unproductive work?

And that Six sigma is maybe hard to do in an R&D environment, where 'defects' is hard to measure, but improductive is easier to find...

Interesting times ahead, in any case...

Surprisingly enough (and while I too really like the idea of stopping unproductive work) when working one Six Sigma project I found that often it was the Finance department who were the hardest to convice that certain processes added nothing to the operation (except effort) and could be eliminated.

Inone case, they had a "request and approval" process which involved obtaining a signoff in one country, then faxing a signed form from one country to another (because of finance operation had been offshored to save money)for approval, before an approval number could be supplied to the originating country.

On investigation, I found that 100% of requests were approved (unless they hadn't been signed!), that there was no signature validation of the local approver, nor any other assessment as to the appropriateness of the request. So basically there was a process to provide an approval number to the requestor of every request, which required the completion of paperwork, two international faxes and a resource (whose only competency was to be able to add 1 to the last approval number they gave out). Since this step was the most time consuming of the whole process, I thought I had won a watch when I identified it.

When I advised the process owner and recommended the removal of this step his exact words were "I'll need to look into this.. I'll get back to you." No surprise that he never did.