Rahul Ganapathy

In project management, a hammock activity is a task or series of tasks that covers all or part of the project timeframe and helps or guides in grouping and organizing other similar activities.
It performs the job of a supervisory level work which oversees multiple intricate tasks within the main tasks, this helps in ensuring the project is as per the schedule and no major milestone is affected.
Comin to Lean Six Sigma way of working, we do already have schedule management within the framework of the project, hence Hammock activity is in a way inbuilt within the framework, to understand the applicability of usage of hammock activity within lean six sigma we can check the below listed points:
Define Phase:
Hammock activity will be deployed where we plan the overall schedule of the project with main tasks and sub tasks clearly listed with a defined time of completion for each, subtask could be preparing project charter, understanding, and onboarding required stake holders.
Measure Phase:
In Measure phase Hammock activity comes into play in terms of data collection and processing the data based on the need, understanding the current KPI’s, any other factor that needs to be included in the project for monitoring purposes.
Analyze Phase:
In Analyze phase, we often use tools such as fish bone, why why and other tools to analyze the root cause of the problem, which is identified in measure phase, Hammock exercise will helps in going to the depth of these causes which are lying under the problem.
Improve Phase:
In Improve phase, we talk about implementing the solutions identified for the root causes, this will include Pilot deployment in certain cases, process improvements or changes based on reflections from previous steps, all these are taken up under Hammock activity.
Control Phase:
In control phase there are again multiple subtasks which needs to be performed, these tasks include creating and establishing control plans, SOP preparation and deploying, in this phase Hammock assists in establishing process enhancements.