Comments on: The Lean Six Sigma Elephant in the Room

By: Carl Wright

Carl Wright — Wed, 03 Oct 2007 02:51:23 +0000

I know there are too many “quick belts” being handed out, and the problem only gets compounded when you add lean manufacturing principles into a Six Sigma green or black belt course. If an individual is to learn Six Sigma enough to become a black belt, and all lean principles with enough depth to apply in the real world, it would take a several months of education, not to mention the weeks of application.
There are companies that spend several months training in the classroom plus months of working with a few experts prior to handing over a project to the individual.
All companies should be judged on their own, but the quick courses are not helping give the “Lean Six Sigma” practitioner a good name.

There are some good courses out there. The public courses at http://www.6sigma.us are excellent. We’re partial to our own separate Six Sigma and lean online courses at http://www.1stcourses.com which take months to complete. We would do them in person but couldn’t charge enough.

By: K T Cat

K T Cat — Sat, 24 Feb 2007 14:18:00 +0000

If you need Leaders (whatever they are) to make a process improvement technique work, then it’s doomed. We have Leaders, and right now, we’ve got the best one we’ve had in decades, hands down. She is very smart, tenacious, visionary, knows exactly what she wants to do, articulates it clearly and has organized her leadership meetings to cut out everything except what is important.

LSS still doesn’t work for us and it’s not even close.

By: robert thompson

robert thompson — Fri, 23 Feb 2007 08:27:44 +0000

A great comment about Deming. I believe Deming’s writings about Leadership understood that traditional supervisory activities are reactive rather than proactive. Many managers to pay a great deal of attention to reports and data which tell them what happened yesterday, last week, last month, or last year. Often such reports highlight the things that have gone wrong. Deming has compared this to attempting to drive a car by looking only in the rear-view mirror. Because of this, he observed that, “A supervisor is an auditor of failure, while a leader listens and learns, studies and understands and works to improve the system.” He also noted that “One important characteristic of a leader is that he will forgive a mistake – there will be mistakes.” It is therefore clear that Leaders are required to make lean Six Sigma work!

Rob
http://www.rob-thompson.net
http://www.63buckets.co.uk (lean blog)
http://www.qualityhero.co.uk (6sigma blog)
http://www.linkedin.com/in/robertthompson

By: Bob Wells

Bob Wells — Tue, 20 Feb 2007 22:00:02 +0000

But does this say something more about mismanagement than Six Sigma? You could train surgeons in a week, send them out and watch them fail, and then cast aspersions on surgery. Would that be right? Farmers know more about creating good conditions for growth than most business managers.

By: Karen Wilhelm

Karen Wilhelm — Mon, 19 Feb 2007 17:33:26 +0000

Too much Six Sigma “training” takes the form of putting a bunch of people who work in disparate parts of the company into a room for a week. They do their round of powerpoints, role playing, lunching, and so on. Then they are told, “Thou art a green belt. Go forth and do Six Sigma…” Then the company can brag about how many Six Sigma green belts it has while nothing gets improved. The trainers pocket their fees. Oh, and usually the words “standard deviation” are never mentioned, nor are any other hard core statistical details. So no one even knows where the term “Six Sigma” even comes from. True story.

By: K T Cat

K T Cat — Mon, 19 Feb 2007 14:56:27 +0000

All I can say is, “Wow.” Thanks for the very kind words.

I knew friends at work read The Scratching Post and we all yuck it up over LSS. It’s particularly hilarious when the head of our parent organization sends out an email to all proclaiming $43,000 of savings attributable to LSS, but not mentioning the cost of implementation, which is in the millions. I had no idea that others were tuning in to confirm their own suspicions.

I’m glad you like my writing. If you want a single post that gets to the heart of the issue, of which LSS is a single instance, try this one.

Passchendaele in the Office