- The project needs to have a major impact on your company. Projects that have minimal impact may be easier to achieve, but the benefit of the training is in solving problems that have been previously considered unsolvable. Maximize your return on your investment.
- Make sure that you have sufficient support by area managers. If you are attempting to solve a problem that you haven't been able to solve before, you will have to do something different than what you have done before. Many people believe that doing what you do now, but more of it, will solve these problems. You will be asking them to go beyond that during the course of your team's work. Without strong management commitment to change, you will find that the closer you get to a solution, the higher the probability that the people in the area resist your team's efforts. It is best if the decision-makers in the area in which you are working have a financial interest in following the DMAIC methodology.
- Make sure that there is a link between the project you choose and the business' strategic direction. This is part of making a "business case." In the absence of this linkage, it would be difficult, and perhaps inappropriate, to maintain interest in completing the project throughout the project lifetime.
- Improving quality is not necessarily the best way to increase profit. Although improving product or service quality frequently results in bottom-line savings, there may be other ways to make bigger improvements to your bottom-line. Six Sigma is a business improvement initiative, not a quality improvement initiative. For example, you may find that eliminating a certain product or service results in a much larger contribution to profit than improving its quality.
- Manufacturing is not always where the money is. Manufacturing has borne the brunt of improvement activities and cost-savings over the years because it is easy to quantify the savings. In many cases however, the non-manufacturing aspects of a business have not been examined and improved as a process. This is frequently where inefficiencies and waste occur, and since most businesses allocate these costs equally across all products and services, the opportunities for improvements are hidden and massive. Bob Galvin estimates that starting out by focusing solely on manufacturing at Motorola may have cost the company tens or hundreds of millions of dollars.
- Customer satisfaction is not necessarily related to profit. People frequently think that businesses always need to improve the satisfaction of their customers. In reality, many businesses have gone out of business doing exactly that. Some customers do not contribute to profit, some product or service improvements incur costs but customers are not willing to pay any more for the improvement, and some customers tell you they want one thing when they really want another. These and many other reasons are why customer satisfaction improvement alone is not a reason to do a project. The project needs to be linked to improvements in profitability, or to the survival of the company.
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FAQs Project Questions How do I choose a project?
FAQs Project Questions How do I choose a project?
How do I choose a project?
Ideally, you have a support infrastructure that takes input from Champions and selects and prioritizes potential projects and delivers these to Black Belts-in-training. Of course, this is not always the case, so here are a few thoughts to help you choose a good Black Belt project.
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I found the Six Sigma course extremely interesting and appropriate for our times, as US companies in many industries strive to regain a competitive edge in the global economy of this century. The format and the general layout of the topics was very well designed and easy to follow. The tools introduced in this course were extremely powerful and the know-how about how to identify, assess and manage opportunities for improvement was invaluable. The convenience of being able to view the sessions on-line, along with the availability of the instructor to answer any questions, made the entire learning experience more effective for someone like myself with a tight schedule in today's fast paced world. I would recommend this course to anyone involved in management, decision making and problem solving who wants to take their company to the next level by implementing an ongoing business performance improvement strategy throughout their organization. --R.Tr. |
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During this recent economic downturn, we have been contacted by a number of people who are looking to add more qualifications to their resume, either to increase their value at their current job or open some options as they seek employment after a layoff, as well as businesses looking for training with a high return on investment. Six Sigma Online would like to do what little we can to help you out if this is your situation.
Six Sigma Online already offers one of the lowest price ways to get your Black Belt while still offering much greater depth of knowledge than you can get anywhere else. In addition, for a limited time we will offer you a 10% discount to make it that much easier to get the skills you need to achieve your employment objectives. Just go to the order page and it is automatically deducted during the time of this offer.
Businesses right now desperately need to find ways to improve profit and reduce the costs of quality. Black Belts are the "edge of the blade" in this endeavor and so are in demand. Our training will maximize the success of your projects with knowledge you will need as you encounter real-world problems to solve. Here at Six Sigma Online, we hope that our training, and the discount above, will go some way to help individuals and businesses survive these tough times.
Unemployed in Colorado? Get state help for your Six Sigma training!
On October 15, 2010 The ROI Alliance (Six Sigma Online's parent company) became an approved provider of Six Sigma Black Belt and Master Black Belt training for Colorado's Workforce Investment Program (WIP), which helps people who are unemployed pay for the training they need to succeed in this competitive market place. If you are looking for a job that is in high-demand, and you meet the requirements of the WIP, they may be able to help pay for your Six Sigma training!
Random Heresy
By the time you read this, the amazingly long U.S. presidential election will be over. All U.S. citizens will be wandering around aimlessly bumping into objects, pressing their hands to the sides of their heads as the indignation poisons slowly leave their bodies, leaving them with a hangover-like malaise and an intermittent need to babble a mishmash of campaign slogans. So, to cheer you up, I present you with the rest of the story I began last month about acceptance sampling. |
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In the News
Six Sigma's lead instructor Steven Ouellette wrote an article with Dr. Jeffrey Luftig on "The Decline of Ethical Behavior in Business."
Six Sigma Online's lead instructor Steven Ouellette was profiled in the June 2008 issue of Quality Digest magazine. If you want to learn more about Steve's peculiar view of the world, as well as what he studied for a year in Europe, read the profile online.
