Chapter 27
Make It Happen
In This Chapter
♦ Implementing all the changes
♦ Are you a Lean Six Sigma Master?
♦ Adapt your knowledge or die
♦ How healthy is your program?
♦ Refresh, renew, and reap rewards
There’s a time in the life of every major initiative when it moves from planning and preparation to implementation. That’s where we’re at now in this chapter. You’ve assessed your organization’s performance and diagnosed major performance gaps. You’ve carefully worked with business leaders to set the performance and financial objectives for every division of your company.
You’ve also built a strong infrastructure for Lean Six Sigma change, on-boarded all your Champions and Belts, trained them, and have given them everything they need to be successful. Now you’re ready to implement all your plans and projects. And you’ll soon be conducting all the necessary activities to Sustain the momentum of the initiative over time.
We cover the main points of the Implement and Sustain phases of Lean Six Sigma deployment in this chapter: executing and managing projects, developing Lean Six Sigma trainers and mentors, checking and monitoring results and progress, adapting your deployment approach, and bringing fresh energy to the effort when needed. These are the points of concern. Pay attention to them and reap the rewards!
Execute and Sustain Road Map
Five activities are key for Lean Six Sigma leaders as they engage in the Execute and Sustain phases of deployment. First, you roll out your first wave of projects and review progress along the way. Second, you develop your own internal Masters, or Master Black Belts, or Lean Six Sigma Masters, or whatever you want to call them. Third, you adapt your program based on learning and experience along the way. Fourth, you conduct an annual health check of the initiative. Fifth, you re-energize your program as needed to keep it alive.
Here are the steps you should follow in the Execute and Sustain phases of Lean Six Sigma deployment. Depending on your experience and unique situation, you may or may not follow these steps in set order.
Execute and Review Progress
When implementing Lean Six Sigma, you’re essentially putting all your project and initiativewide plans into action. It’s as simple as that. Some say success is 90 percent perspiration, and maybe this is true. But maybe success is 90 percent preparation. Maybe you need a lot of both to succeed. You’ve certainly prepared the organization for Lean Six Sigma, and now it’s a matter of executing your plans.
The Implementation Plan
Just like you have a plan for completing a Lean Six Sigma project, you also have a plan for executing the whole deployment initiative. Some elements of your plan should be …
♦ Strategies and plans for integrating Lean Six Sigma with other initiatives, such as ISO 9000, Baldrige, Customer Relationship Management, ERP, SAP, and so on.
♦ A detailed Stakeholder Analysis.
♦ All the units and divisions within which Lean Six Sigma will be deployed (with the Deployment Champion for each unit noted).
♦ The specific business unit or division goals for Lean Six Sigma, including the amount of dollar savings targeted and by when.
♦ An infrastructure installation plan, including specifics for the various key functions of human resources, finance, training, information technology, project management, and communications. (All of these plans are large plans in and of themselves.)
♦ Timing for the initiative’s rollout in all the business units, and as a whole, shown with a large Gantt Chart.
♦ A list of all the initially selected projects in each business unit.
♦ Plans for project tollgate reviews after each phase of DMAIC, and plans for reviewing the initiative as a whole with leadership at appropriate intervals.
♦ Provisions for transitioning the initiative from the expertise of the consultant to internal resources and control.
♦ An interconnected Lean Six Sigma performance dashboard that holds Key Performance Indicators (business indicators), as well as enabling indicators related to the initiative (e.g., number of projects completed, number of people trained, etc.).
Quotable Quote
Have a bias toward action—let’s see something happen now. You can break that big plan into small steps and take the first step right away.
—Indira Gandhi
Execute and Review Projects
You should have a portfolio of projects entered in your tracking software and ready for execution. The queued projects selected and scoped by your Champions should have been reviewed by your Finance Champions to initially validate the proposed savings. Your Lean Six Sigma practitioners—Black Belts, Kaizen Event Facilitators, maybe even Green Belts—are poised on the starting line, trained and ready to go.
Quotable Quote
A dream becomes a goal when action is taken toward its achievement.
—Bo Bennett
As the project work commences, finally everyone gets the chance to apply what they’ve learned. The practitioners collect data, look for waste, analyze, and experiment—according to the project execution process we laid out for you in Parts 2 and 3. If you’re a Project Champion, the information in these parts is all you need to know when it comes to executing projects.
While we don’t want to repeat ourselves, we will give you just a few reminders before launching into project execution mode. One, be sure you have selected the right and very best projects. They need to be aligned with your business objectives, they need to be properly defined and scoped, and they need to have a high probability of yielding significant, quantifiable financial benefits.
Two, make sure you have enterprisewide project management software that everyone can use. Various options exist, but all the good ones give you the ability to customize performance dashboards, slice and dice project data at will, manage people and tasks, and even include important prompts and tollgates that help you move smoothly through such popular road maps as DMAIC.
Three, you want to regularly review project progress at the process level after each stage of DMAIC. These are called tollgate reviews for a reason: if you haven’t met the completion criteria for one stage, you cannot move on to the next. Develop your review criteria and process well; make sure reviews are attended by all pertinent stakeholders.
Champion Review
As much as you review projects, you have to review the people who are responsible for project success—the Champions. Lean Six Sigma Champions should meet weekly, or at least monthly, to review two things: the status of the deployment and the progress of practitioners.
First, Champions must review the deployment initiative. Remember the dashboard we recommended you create in Chapter 25, the Enable phase? Make it visible and take a look at how your desired results compare to the real thing. Compare the number of projects, average savings, range of savings, project cycle time, Black Belt dropout rate, and anything else the dashboard shows.
Second, Champions need to remain acutely aware of how each of their practitioners is performing. Is Black Belt John on track? Are his results coming in as expected? Is his first project progressing as expected? Same for all the belts under your purvey, if you’re a Champion.
Who needs coaching, and who needs a kick in the pants? Who is blazing trails, and who just can’t cut it? The Champion is responsible to answer these questions, and to design plans for closing shortfalls and gaps. Don’t be afraid to reallocate people if need be. The success of your deployment depends on it!
Real-Life Story
A national grocery store chain offered its senior executive Black Belt candidates the opportunity to become company officers in the future. Still, 30 percent of the executives who initially signed up dropped out later, going back to their old jobs. The lesson? Revisit Black Belt candidates during or after training to re-evaluate their interest and aptitude.
Steering Committee Review
The Lean Six Sigma steering committee should meet monthly for a scorecard (dashboard) review. You guessed it. The purpose is to look at the planned improvements and all the dashboard indicators to see how they’re performing. Look at the number of projects in progress, as well as how many have been completed and how many are in the pipeline.
In addition to quantity, examine the quality of your projects. Are you meeting the financial goals you predicted? Is project cycle time too slow, too fast (you wish!) or just right? Do you have the right number of Belts trained, and have their old positions been filled? How about the climate in general—are people getting on board with the new way of working, or do you still have some change management and communication work to do?
Executive Team Review
Last but certainly not least, the organization’s executive leadership team should meet at least quarterly to discuss the Lean Six Sigma deployment. The main question they need to ask is whether or not Lean Six Sigma is moving the business metrics in the right direction.
If you find that you’re falling short, explore and implement corrective actions to keep the deployment on track. And this may entail more involvement from executives than just contacting their local Deployment Champion. Sometimes shortfalls in the Lean Six Sigma program are symptomatic of deeper business issues.
Sustain the Initiative
If you’ve gotten this far, presumably you want to make Lean Six Sigma the way your organization does business, everywhere, all the time, with everyone involved. If you’ve achieved measurable gains throughout the company, why wouldn’t you want to just keep on going and make improvement what it should be—continual and never ending?
To do this you have to make Lean Six Sigma second nature. You have to install additional mechanisms and supports to ensure a full transition to full self-sufficiency. As we’ve said, you’ll need a consulting or training firm to get your leadership team on board, your deployment infrastructure installed, and your people trained. After this, however, shame on you if you don’t figure out how to do it yourself.
Master Development
The reason you have to develop Masters, or Master Black Belts, is because they become your Lean Six Sigma experts after the consultants are gone. Your Deployment and Project Champions already know enough to keep growing with the initiative and performing their leadership functions. But it’s the technicalities of Lean Six Sigma that can drag you down.
The devil is in the details, and you don’t want your initiative to stall later for lack of knowledge and deep Lean Six Sigma expertise. Therefore, make sure you invest in developing Master Black Belts by first defining their role and, second, training them, coaching them, and certifying their skills.
Role Definition and Selection
Master Black Belts are more than just tool masters and technical experts. They’re also a strong force for change as they work with management to configure improvement opportunities. Almost always full-time in their roles, Master Black Belts develop curricula and course content, train Belts, and mentor Belts. They also get called upon to lead large or complex projects, and to advise management on business governance issues.
You may decide that certain Master Black Belts will specialize in the Six Sigma skill set, while others will specialize more in Lean. In true Lean Six Sigma spirit, it might be wise to integrate this expertise at the Master Black Belt level. This way their intellectual leadership will serve to bring the two methodologies as close together as possible for reasons we’ve certainly articulated in this book.
Typically, Master candidates are selected from amongst your highest-performing Black Belts. However, if your organization employs highly educated, statistically minded people who also have a demonstrated teaching ability, you may have yourself a built-in Master Black Belt.
Again, the size of your organization and the complexity of the Master role will determine how many you need. Once you’ve chosen your candidates, you need to review their qualifications against some set of criteria using a tool like a Pugh Matrix (there’s an example in Chapter 25).
Train and Certify Masters
In addition to a customized training track for your Master teachers and technical leaders, you should follow a certification road map that ensures they are willing and able to meet the higher expectations of the job. Becoming a certified Master Black Belt means more than just high scores on Black Belt exams. The typical requirements are listed here (your certification program may vary, of course):
♦ Classroom training—A mixture of hard and soft skills training is recommended, keeping in mind the specific role the Master will fulfill.
♦ Black Belt equivalent exams—Typically a high score (90 percent or above) is required on all exams.
♦ Project submissions—As many as three projects may be required to show competency. At least one project should be a larger, more complex project. Preferably, even more project experience is a big plus.
♦ Demonstrated teaching ability—Candidates must have previous teaching experience or co-teach a set number of hours to gain proficiency in this area.
The bottom line is to establish your Master criteria based on the needs of your organization, then make it enterprisewide and stick to it (at least for the first couple of years). Nothing is more demoralizing than requiring a stringent certification path for some, while others squeak by due to inconsistent enforcement.
Adapt and Customize Deployment
After your first deployment cycle, you want to take a huge step forward and evolve your program. From a knowledge standpoint, this entails upgrading your intellectual property and disseminating the many lessons you learned. Just remember that it’s not enough to do well; you have to do even better and use past experience to fuel future success.
Mine for Gold in Your Own Backyard
After your deployment has been running at least six or eight months, and many projects have been completed, you’ve accrued a whole lot of learning. And people are a lot smarter about your organization, its customers, its weaknesses, and its processes than ever before. So what will you do?
The right answer is that you’ll make sure all that learning and knowledge gets out of the heads of a few and into the heads of many. You have to go and find it, organize it, publish it, distribute it, reward it, manage it, and incorporate it back into your training and curriculum.
Mine for the gold nuggets. Talk to practitioners, team members, and Champions. Search the project tracking system. Review project reports and tollgate presentations. Take these nuggets—examples and success stories—from your own program and sprinkle them throughout your intellectual property and your curriculum. Your next round of students will be the better for it, as will those on the periphery who still don’t quite “get it.”
By the way, case studies are a terrific way to illustrate the results of Lean Six Sigma, especially for anyone not intimately involved with the processes or areas of current focus. You can publish your success stories in trade magazines, or simply make them available internally to generate buy-in and encourage others to join the effort.
Manage and Disseminate Knowledge
Take some time to think about how you manage and disseminate the knowledge gained from your Lean Six Sigma deployment. Where do you store all the updated documentation to ensure that process changes stay intact? What about lessons learned? If someone has already solved the problem, how do you disseminate that knowledge so that someone else doesn’t have to reinvent the wheel? And how do you encourage best practices or project replication? After all, a successful outcome in one area of the business may spark a project idea in another area.
Quotable Quote
Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.
—George Santayana
There is no one-size-fits-all solution (although you can bet Microsoft is trying). You can share project information informally (e.g., case studies, company newsletters, and word of mouth), or you can take a more rigorous approach. Many organizations use their project tracking system as their knowledge management and dissemination vehicle. Not a bad idea, but you can use other methods, too, such as your existing document management system or network.
One good idea is to set up a Lean Six Sigma web page on your company’s intranet (if you have one). Such a portal can provide one-stop shopping for everything related to your initiative—general information and announcements, case studies, project highlights, training schedules, and employment opportunities. Plus your portal could have e-learning programs for practitioners, chat rooms or bulletin boards, policies and guidelines, possibly even a log-on to the project tracking system or other relevant applications.
Health Check and Dashboard Review
Similar to the shorter-cycle Champion and steering committee reviews mentioned earlier in this chapter, you should plan on conducting an annual checkup of your deployment. How well has the initiative lived up to expectations? Are any adjustments or changes needed? Just like anything, if you don’t check up on it from time to time, it tends to go awry.
Deployment Health Check
Even if you’ve weaned your deployment off of consultants by now, this is one time you might want to bring someone in from outside the organization. For one thing, an outside opinion will keep you from having the same discussions you may have been rehashing in all your other reviews. For another, you may encounter issues that you’re not sure how to get past, especially if you’re fairly new to Lean Six Sigma.
Whether or not you involve an objective outsider, your health reviews should occur at the business-unit level—the organization over which each of your Deployment Champions presides. Your reviews should include the Deployment Champion, various Master Black Belts, certain Functional Champions, Project Champions, Black Belts, Green Belts, team members, and executives.
View the health checkup as a state-of-the-union meeting for Lean Six Sigma in the particular deployment division. But it’s not a place people go to hear a speech, although that may happen. Your health checkups are a time and place to ask difficult questions, make adjustments, and do whatever you have to do to keep your initiative on track.
Here’s a rundown of what you’ll want to look at during your checkup. Just as a physician evaluates your health on several levels, you’ll want to assess all the different dimensions of your deployment:
♦ Strategy: Evaluate the objectives/goals of your deployment.
♦ Focus: Evaluate the focus of current projects.
♦ Methods: Evaluate your current approaches to performance improvement and how well they’re integrated.
♦ Project Selection: Evaluate your current approaches to project selection and how they’re linked to business strategy, operations, and customer processes.
♦ Engagement: Evaluate how well key leaders and Process Owners are aligned and linked to performance improvement strategies.
♦ Execution of Projects: Evaluate the extent of project achievement and financial benefit.
♦ Process Management: Measure the process management maturity of your organization and the degree to which Lean Six Sigma enables that path.
♦ Knowledge Transfer: Measure the degree to which performance improvement knowledge has been transferred and customized to your organization’s needs and culture.
♦ People/Leadership Development: Evaluate talent attraction, development, and retention regarding your Lean Six Sigma deployment.
♦ Communication: Evaluate existing internal and external communication approaches.
♦ Culture: Discuss how Lean Six Sigma is viewed by your entire organization, and to what degree it enables the desired cultural shift.
♦ Metrics: Evaluate the metrics and measures used to drive your business.
Real-Life Story
During a recent checkup at a financial services company, participants discussed the fact that the only road map they had ever employed was the DMAIC methodology. Given the transactional nature of their business, they realized that using a Kaizen Event approach, they could improve certain processes better and faster. This became an action item resulting from the annual review.
Doctor, Doctor, Give Me the News
After such a complete examination, you’ll undoubtedly walk away with some healthy recommendations for improving your Lean Six Sigma initiative, and for guaranteeing it a long life. In other words, you should come out of the checkup with a prescription—a list of action items. Delegate the work appropriately, but make sure to follow up to see that the changes are actually implemented (and do this before the next annual checkup!).
After your health diagnosis is a great time for communicating an update to everyone about your Lean Six Sigma initiative. You can convey as many details as makes sense for each audience. But one message should be consistent: Lean Six Sigma works. We’re tweaking it to make it better, but it works and it’s here to stay. It will become the way we do business.
Re-energize the Program
So you’ve reached the end of the Lean Six Sigma road, and there’s nothing more to do. Right? Wait a minute. Wrong! After coming this far, we certainly hope we don’t have to remind you again that improvement is a never-ending journey. Therefore, Lean Six Sigma never ends either, because the world changes, your customers’ needs change, and, therefore, your processes change.
Take these last few actions to make sure your initiative stays alive: regularly review your deployment objectives, evaluate your performance and resources, and establish your focus for the upcoming year—every year, year after year!
Deployment Objective Review
Just when you thought there couldn’t possibly be anything else to discuss, assess, or review, we come to the annual objective evaluation. As with the quarterly executive reviews mentioned earlier, you gather the leadership team together to recall the business reasons for deploying Lean Six Sigma in the first place.
While you should definitely assess how well your deployment met the past year’s goals, the other reason for meeting is to decide on next year’s goals. Will you continue to focus on customer satisfaction, or will you shift focus slightly to encompass a new product line? Can you expand the money-saving processes from one business unit to another? What performance indicators need your attention now?
Real-Life Story
For the first two years of its deployment, DuPont Corporation focused on cost reduction and productivity. In its third year, the company shifted its focus to growth, while maintaining healthy activities in the domains of cost reduction and productivity.
Evaluate Performance and Resources
Remember, you can’t do everything, or at least not all at once. As part of the annual objective review, go back to your business needs assessment. At the organizational level, measure your current performance against your entitlement. Now that you’ve been taught to fish, are you fishing to your ultimate capability?
This is also a time to review your personnel placement. Do you need to hire more resources, or reallocate existing resources to do better? How engaged is management, at all levels? Are your Champions still taking an active role in project selection? Are your Process Owners taking improvements to the bank, or have they reverted to business as usual?
Establish Focus for Next Year
It’s a funny thing. After healthy and visible success, when an organization establishes its Lean Six Sigma focus for the following year, those themes tend to become a key input into strategic planning for the corporation. Now the initiative is viewed not only as a way of sweeping the organization clean of waste and defects, but it’s also determined to be a strategic weapon.
Many famous CEOs have commented about the space between strategy and execution, using such rhetoric as:
“Strategy is all about execution.”—IBM’s Louis Gerstner
“Unless you translate big thoughts into concrete steps for action, they’re pointless.”—AlliedSignal’s Larry Bossidy
Well, ask anyone from any company that’s deployed Lean Six Sigma with a fervor, and they’ll tell you this: Lean Six Sigma is what lives between strategy and execution. It may not be easy, but it’s the real thing.
The Least You Need to Know
♦ The key to successful execution is having a good plan and having everyone lined up to make it happen. Aside from this, you have to review, review, review your progress along the way.
♦ Master Black Belts are the technical Lean Six Sigma leaders. Their skill and strength will determine the skill and strength of all your practitioners.
♦ You should capture your learning and get it to everyone and anyone who can use it, and by all means, upgrade your training materials when you can.
♦ Make sure the Lean Six Sigma initiative becomes fully integrated into the strategic planning process after its first cycle (12 to 18 months).
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