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Heretic Articles

ROI President Steve Ouellette writes a popular monthly article for Quality Digest's InsideSixSigma online newsletter. These articles humorously (and usefully) discuss the good, the bad, and the ugly of how Six Sigma is implemented. You can access those articles here.

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Top Ten Stupid Six Sigma Tricks #6

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Constraining your improvement activities to manufacturing processes

In this installment of my arbitrary and capricious list of the Top Ten Stupid Six Sigma Tricks (SSST), let’s talk about an error that is perhaps less frequently made now than it has been, but is still common. I call this error SSST No.6, constraining your improvement activities to manufacturing processes.

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Top Ten Stupid Six Sigma Tricks #7

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Inadequate infrastructure

The Stupid Six Sigma Tricks countdown continues this month with an increasingly common error: “Inadequate Infrastructure.” By infrastructure, I mean those systems and processes that need to be in place in order to support the objectives of Six Sigma.

Regardless of how you define Six Sigma, we expect to see Black Belts working as problem-solving experts attempting to make big improvements. The Black Belts get all the glory but, as is usually the case, the success of the few in the limelight is due to the efforts of many others.

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Top Ten Stupid six sigma Tricks #8

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Optimizing processes that lose money

So far, we've discussed Stupid Six Sigma Tricks #10: Conflating systems, methods and tools and #9: Confusing breakthrough with continuous improvement. This month, I’ll spend some time on a more subtle, and no less costly mistake that, in its extreme form, we’ll call Stupid Six Sigma Trick #8: Optimizing processes that lose money.

“Well,” you might say, “Isn’t that what Six Sigma is all about? Taking unprofitable processes and fixing them or making profitable ones more profitable?” And you would be right. For the explanation, we need to dip briefly into the world of accounting. As your dentist says, “Don’t worry, it won’t hurt much and will be over soon."

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Top Ten Stupid Six Sigma Trick #9

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Confusing breakthrough with continuous improvement

This month let’s examine another common mistake that some people (not my loyal, intelligent, heretical and, let's face it, downright attractive readers) make when they use Six Sigma.

I expect to seriously annoy some practitioners when I say that Six Sigma isn't a method of continuous improvement—no matter how many times you've heard someone say exactly that.

Bold assertion, you say? Remember, Six Sigma heretics don’t accept arguments from authority, so keep an open mind and don’t take me at my word. Let’s take a more detailed look.

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Top Ten Stupid Six Sigma Tricks, #10

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Conflating systems, strategies and tools

As I said in my premier Heretic column, “Dogma and Definition,” I'm interested in examining our assumptions and premises about Six Sigma so we can discard the dross and refine the potential benefits in implementing it.

To that end, I have decided to co-opt an omnipresent element of pop culture. No, not “reality” TV (though a Six Sigma reality show strikes me as very funny—you heard it here first).

And so I humbly present to you the Top Ten Stupid Six Sigma Tricks, beginning with no. 10: Conflating systems, strategies and tools.

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Heretic Articles

This article was originally published in InsideSixSigma, a monthly online newsletter published by Quality Digest. Subscribe to InsideSixSigma if you would like to receive these articles when they are published.

Random Heresy

I'm not saying that the following apply to you... really. But, you might be a Black Belt if...

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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.