Let's delve into the soft side of Six Sigma a bit...

Six Sigma helps develop leaders for an organization because:

a.) Six Sigma resources are trained to attack problems and solve it the right way by relying on facts & data. You don't want leaders to make decisions using intuition - just shooting from the hip.

b.)Six Sigma resources work on projects and hence they know how to lead teams and get things done in a team atmosphere.

c.) Six Sigma resources are familiar with and can compute financial implications of their decisions/projects.

d.) Six Sigma resources usually work on projects that are crucial to the company's success - hence they get exposed to the areas that are important for the company.

e.) Six Sigma resources focus on customer satisfaction - a trait which will enable them to be successful in other areas.

f.) Six Sigma resources understand how to deal with resistance and effectively manage change.

g.) If a Leader is trained in Six Sigma, it will be hard for others to fool him/her with improper data analysis.

What are your thoughts on this topic?

Dear SJ,

I agree with this but strongly feel that you should have supporting management / working environment. When your management is not yet convinced / not even willing to spend some time to understand six sigma benefits, how one should go ahead. For example, I have been trained as BB in August 08. Still I am finding it difficult to allocate dedicated time for doing six sigma project just because the bosses and management are not that much interested. Every time the priorities are different ( sometimes irrelevant also) & at one point I feel I am loosing my six sigma competency/knowledge.

May be you can throw some ideas...

Thanks

Manik

Dear Manik,

I agree that Top Management support is the number one Critical Success Factor for success of Six Sigma within a company.

With respect to your project, are you working on a project that is strategically important for the company? Is there a pain area for your managers that is keeping them awake at night and if you are able to solve that problem, then the manager can sleep peacefully. One of the reasons for lack of support is the selection of the wrong project.

If managers are not supporting Six Sigma, maybe you can try using some of the change management techniques to turn them around. Sometimes even this may not be successful in some cases, so the only option left would be to work on your own time in the evenings and weekends to complete a Six Sigma project for your own learning and benefit.

PS: This open forum is for beginners who are new to Lean and Six Sigma. Please post this question in the private forum for past participants where you can get feedback from other past participants who may have other suggestions to help you with this issue.

 

Dear Mr suresh,

Very good points. Would you pl eloborate on Data analysis-?

Regards, Iyer R.N

 

Dear Iyer,

I presume you are talking about the last point regarding data analysis on my original article.

What I meant was that if you are a manager and understand how to work with data and are comfortable with preliminary statistical measures, you are more apt to find out if your subordinates did a good job with analyzing the situation at hand and are they making the right recommendations.

You could check that the data that they have picked is representative of the entire population, it is truly random, it is not biased etc. so that the right conclusions can be drawn from the data.

A manager who is not familiar with Six Sigma may just accept the analysis of their subordinates and will not know if wrong conclusions are being made from incorrect data analysis.

Hope this helps.

SJ