Learning Project Management Through Six Sigma Part-I

Dear Friends,

 

The following article talks on how project management methodologies can pick clues from Six Sigma approach to improve themselves.

 

Lesson 1: Start with the customer

 

Lean Six Sigma puts customers and customer satisfaction at the heart of everything it does. It starts by considering the needs of the customers (voice of the customer), and defining quality in terms of the customer.

 

Lean Six Sigma seeks to improve customer satisfaction, reduce defects (anything unacceptable to a customer), reduce waste (non-value adding activities), and reduce cycle times. Good is not good enough, quality can always be improved further.

 

What is the lesson for projects? The best projects have a relentless focus on customers, but all too often customers are treated as people who are spoken to at the start and end of the project. In between they are forgotten. On a daily basis there is no questioning of ”how is what I am doing adding value to the customer?” Only work which progresses towards outcomes of real customer value, or reduces the risk of achieving them, should be included in the project.

 

Lesson 2: The importance of data

 

Lean Six Sigma is a fact based discipline with an obsessive focus on data. Of course, in many situations there is no adequate data to understand situations and measure improvements. When this is true, Lean Six Sigma does not just accept this, but find measures – whether this is by counts, samples or other approaches.

 

In Lean Six Sigma you cannot claim a benefit unless you have a baseline to measure against, and much of the training in Lean Six Sigma is on measurement and data analysis. But not just any data will do, it has to link back to the customer’s needs.

 

Some projects are brilliantly analytical, but the lesson for other projects is clear. Drop those weak business cases with half thought through metrics, immeasurable claims and unproven benefits. If there are no measures in place early in the project, put them in place and build your baseline to show progress against them.