Chapter 25
Design Your Destiny
In This Chapter
♦ Establish your big objectives
♦ Influencing people to get with the program
♦ Why you need an infrastructure for success
♦ You’re only as good as you govern
After you assess your readiness for Lean Six Sigma and solidify your opportunities for improvement as a business, it’s time to Design the rollout of your Lean Six Sigma initiative. Like any major undertaking, good planning (design) turns into good implementation, and good implementation turns into good results.
In this chapter, we outline and discuss each major step of the Design road map, which takes you through all the many activities required to plan for a successful Lean Six Sigma deployment. If you follow these steps as a Lean Six Sigma leadership team, you’ll secure a great probability of success for your initiative.
Design Road Map
Four activities are key for Lean Six Sigma leaders as they engage in the Design phase of deployment. First, you establish your deployment objectives. Second, you engage and leverage leadership support. Third, you align practitioner and project strategies. Fourth, you design a governance model for Lean Six Sigma deployment.
Here are the steps you should follow in the Design phase of Lean Six Sigma deployment. Depending on your experience and unique situation, you may or may not follow these steps in set order.
The complete Design activity is called deployment planning by many Lean Six Sigma companies. Deployment planning is the process of defining and documenting the executive vision and goals for a company’s performance-improvement program, then turning those goals into a workable strategy and tactical plans for the desired Lean Six Sigma results.
Establish Deployment Objectives
Three key activities comprise the road map for establishing your Lean Six Sigma deployment objectives. First, you design your overall program objectives. Second, you design your priorities for your first year of deployment. Third, you design your deployment organization, which will be responsible for driving and ensuring your Lean Six Sigma performance results.
Design Overall Objectives
The first major step of deployment planning is to design the overall objectives for the Lean Six Sigma initiative. Depending on your unique organizational needs, and competitive situation, you might need to increase market share, improve customer satisfaction, cut costs, grow revenue, improve capacity, reduce defects, increase speed, improve capability, and/or change your working culture.
You might need any combination of these objectives in various parts of your company or organization, especially if it is truly global or large. Certain operational areas might need help in improving manufacturing capacity, while other areas might have customer satisfaction or defect issues. And so on, and so on.
The Lean Six Sigma core team, or steering committee, takes the outputs of its assessment activities (Chapter 24) into account to formulate the initiative’s objectives. Care is taken to link those objectives to organizational strategies via such methods as Hoshin Planning.
Lean Six Sigma Lingo
Lean Six Sigma core team/steering committee is the team that configures, drives, reviews, and is responsible for the Lean Six Sigma initiative. Members include a company’s primary executive sponsor, deployment leader, a hand-selected group of multidisciplinary leaders from critical organizational support functions, and others as determined or required.
Hoshin Planning is the practice of cascading top-level organizational strategies into increasingly lower levels, with performance metrics attached. A sound Hoshin Planning system also provides a mechanism for regularly reviewing performance-to-plan at all levels, making necessary adjustments over time to ensure success.
Current-Year Priorities
The key to remember in setting priorities for the first year is money. That’s it. And incidentally, that’s why for-profit companies exist: to make money (with zero negative consequence on the natural and social environments). So the most important criterion to keep in mind is the financial benefit of Lean Six Sigma to the organization (unless you’re a nonprofit organization; but even if you are, you want to be as fiscally responsible as possible, and Lean Six Sigma helps you do this).
Primarily this means you look at the true, realized savings you can generate from your initiative as it removes waste, eradicates rework, and improves productivity with little or no capital investment. Secondarily, you should focus on balance-sheet impact through inventory improvements, accounts receivables, and the like. After this, you can identify projects and priorities that have strategic value for the future but cannot be tied to dollars saved now.
Chapter 8 provides more details about the different financial categories within which you can segment your Lean Six Sigma objectives and projects. The rule of thumb is that no more than 10 percent of your first year’s priorities should be focused on soft savings or future savings. All other projects should yield hard dollars in the first year.
Design the Organization
Any change initiative that involves a companywide deployment needs to be organized, and this includes Lean Six Sigma. Therefore, you will need to build a Lean Six Sigma organization before launching into the next major phase of Design (engage leadership support). The sample organization that follows should be a guide.
Depending on your company and its approach to Lean Six Sigma, your organizational chart for the initiative may look something like this.
Engage Leadership Support
If you’ve been involved in quality improvement or change initiatives in the past, you’re well familiar with the party line about leadership commitment and support. If you have it, and it is tangible and real, then your initiative will succeed. If you don’t have it, you’re in trouble. And we might point out that leadership support means support at all levels of an organization, not just at the top.
Engaging leadership, therefore, means securing executive sponsorship at the top. It also means educating executives about the benefits and process of deploying Lean Six Sigma. Further, you have to educate and coach Champions, who oversee and lead Lean Six Sigma deployment in all your different areas, geographies, and functions. Finally, engaging leadership means equipping those who oversee work at the process level, the Process Owners.
Secure Executive Sponsorship
Sustainable change initiatives are typically the result of a fully committed executive team and superior leadership. Unfortunately, large-scale change or paradigm shifts do not happen overnight and can take years. But results can be accelerated when you successfully gain wide support from your leadership team.
The Lean Six Sigma initiative must be driven from the top at the CEO level or very close to it. As with any change initiative, significant change usually starts with a small handful of visionaries in positions of influence and power. From there, as we covered in Chapter 24, those people begin to influence key stakeholders, and begin to orient the organization toward the desired change.
Lean Six Sigma Wisdom
Begin to generate support and buy-in for Lean Six Sigma to foster true believers, and leverage small victories to gain momentum. And remember: the power of influence lies in your ability to get people actively engaged in the process.
Demystify the Approach
We are the first to admit that programs like Lean Six Sigma can seem daunting at first, even to very capable and educated managers. Yet once you get to know what Lean Six Sigma is and does, it all makes sense. Therefore, you’ll want to schedule sessions and workshops with your business leaders, and Champions, to demystify the Lean Six Sigma approach.
Once key leaders understand that Lean Six Sigma really works, and makes the company stronger and more profitable, they buy in and help drive it. In some cases, your strongest naysayers in the beginning become your strongest supporters later—once you’ve done them the justice of proving that Lean Six Sigma is worth their time and effort.
At first, you can demystify Lean Six Sigma by clearly articulating and demonstrating the soundness of its principles and practices. You can also make sure to present the many success stories of companies that have achieved impressive results using Lean Six Sigma. (We covered some of these in Part 1.) Finally, after you implement your first successful pilot projects, you can use these to whip up support.
Engage Deployment Champions
In large-scale initiatives, the Deployment Champion is a business leader who reports directly to a business unit President. The Deployment Champion is responsible for the planning and deployment of Lean Six Sigma within that particular division, region, or other large segment of a company.
Deployment Champions are engaged through education and working sessions that facilitate performance-improvement goal setting, initial project selection, Project Champion selection, Black Belt selection in some cases, and other important planning and implementation activities.
Naturally, Deployment Champions have a great deal of rapport among their peers and have typically led other initiatives in their business units. They have established reputations, so you’ll have to make them Lean Six Sigma believers before they will agree to lead and drive the initiative.
Champions and Process Owners
At this stage of the game, you also want to select and engage your Project Champions and Process Owners. Project Champions are respected operational leaders and managers who help select Lean Six Sigma projects, define them, and make sure they are successfully completed. In this role, Project Champions clear organizational barriers for Black Belts and Green Belts (those actually leading process-improvement teams).
Project Champions also work with Process Owners after projects are completed to make sure the gains made are sustained over time. As well, Project Champions spread lessons learned from one project team to others, and to other parts of the organization. Finally, Project Champions (most of the time called just Champions) are coaches to Black Belts and Green Belts. In this sense they are friends, but also push Belts when they need to do better.
Process Owners have primary responsibility for the operation and output of a given process. In some cases, Process Owners are also Green Belts or Black Belts who drive the execution of a Lean Six Sigma project. In other cases, they work closely with Green Belts and Black Belts to achieve and sustain Six Sigma improvements. Additionally, Process Owners help Champions identify improvement project opportunities, since they know the most about their particular performance issues.
Due to their high level of influence and closeness to work processes, both Champions and Process Owners play a vital role in ensuring Lean Six Sigma success. Therefore, it pays big dividends to have them properly trained and equipped before making them accountable for the targeted results.
Install Deployment Infrastructure
While hundreds of companies employ Lean Six Sigma practitioners (Black Belts) and realize continuous improvement, few companies take the time to install support systems that can drive true breakthrough performance. So let’s be clear: you only achieve significant corporate breakthrough when you install a deployment infrastructure through the proper initialization of Lean Six Sigma.
Let’s break it down. In the performance-improvement world, initialization is a term that refers to the many systems, people, structures, and procedures you must put in place at the corporate level to ensure widespread success. The resulting deployment infrastructure is your actual Lean Six Sigma foundation; it is the glue that holds everyone and all projects together and working in harmony toward the common goal of improvement sustainability.
Knowing this, your deployment infrastructure is installed in the following areas: human resources, finance, information technology, project management, training, and communications. We’ll cover these one at a time so you get a feel and flavor for what’s involved.
Human Resources
Your HR infrastructure includes clear job roles and responsibilities for Champions, Black Belts, Green Belts, Master Black Belts, and others as defined by your company. (Some designate Yellow Belts, White Belts, and other job roles.) Your infrastructure also defines the policies and procedures by which you select Champions and Belts, hire new ones from the outside, develop them, promote them, evaluate their performance, and reward accomplishments.
Finance
Your finance infrastructure focuses primarily on defining the many categories of project savings and results (hard savings, soft savings, revenue increases, cost avoidance, and so on). We define the classic financial categories in Chapter 8. What you need to know is that all Lean Six Sigma project savings and benefits must be quantified, categorized, and tracked. Usually, this is done with the aid of 1) a trained team or staff of Lean Six Sigma Finance representatives, and 2) enterprise project tracking software.
Additionally, you will have to train your group of finance reps to be involved in every Lean Six Sigma project from its beginning. At first, you have procedures for evaluating the potential savings of identified projects. This is done in the Define phase when deciding which projects to pursue and which to table. Later, often during the Measure or Analyze phases, a finance rep will reevaluate the project from a financial standpoint to ensure it is still worth pursuing.
Finally, after a project is completed, usually after about six months, the finance function becomes involved again to validate the actual savings from the project. No matter how well you do in making an improvement, or how much money you are certain to save, it only matters that you actually make the improvement, that it is sustained, and that it returns your investment in time, money, and effort many times over.
Information Technology
Your information technology (IT) infrastructure will consist of enterprise and desktop software in the following areas: data collection and analysis; process definition, modeling, and simulation; project tracking and management; and e-learning. Don’t underestimate the need for all the necessary technology tools, including this software as well as notebook computers for Black Belts, Champions, and others.
As with your other infrastructure planks, the IT plank requires that you form a special team of experts. Remember, you are deploying Lean Six Sigma to perhaps as many as 20 or more major divisions and hundreds or thousands of people spread all over the country or the world. You’ll want to drive and manage all the technology aspects from one command center.
Despite the high level of technological competency shared by many practitioners today, proper data, network compatibility with possible outside vendors, security settings, and hardware and software guidelines should be established to enhance the initiative, limit confusion, and prevent any security threats from intruders.
Project Management
The infrastructure for Project Management has two key components: technology and process. As for technology, you’ll likely need an enterprise system that can keep track of all the many projects that are planned, underway, and completed. Some of the bigger-name systems are Power Steering, Microsoft Project, Instantis, and others.
These are professional performance-improvement software systems that enable you to engage in all the aspects of executing and managing projects. Check them out to see what they can do for you and your deployment. Their features are too many to list here. In general, however, these systems enable many people to view and manage thousands of projects in all areas of an organization. They are powerful and necessary tools for Lean Six Sigma leaders, executives, Champions, Belts, finance reps, and Process Owners.
Also, you’ll need a process for regularly reviewing, or tollgating, Lean Six Sigma projects. The process entails assembling a review team (Champion, Master Black Belt, Process Owner, finance rep, other stakeholders) for every project. After each stage of DMAIC is completed, this team looks at the project activities and ensures they are on track. If they aren’t, adjustments are made to ensure the project’s success.
Training
Any organization that would practice Lean Six Sigma first needs to train and educate its leaders and practitioners—and this is an ongoing rather than a one-time activity. At first, the services of an outside training/consulting firm are almost always necessary. When retaining a consulting firm, however, you should do so with the intention of learning to fish yourself.
Therefore, your training infrastructure should focus first on getting Champions and Belts trained and ready to execute their first projects. Then, while you are enacting your first round of projects, you should begin to train Master Black Belts. These are expert Lean Six Sigma practitioners and teachers who can train (and mentor/coach) subsequent rounds of Belts (Black, Green, Yellow, etc.).
Other aspects of your training infrastructure include:
Curriculum development. This can be a major undertaking, depending on your industry and needs. For instance, you may be a global company with several hundred thousand people, in dozens of countries, speaking multiple languages. If this is the case, you’ll need curriculum for all the Lean Six Sigma roles in different languages, maybe even loaded with course content that is specific to your industry.
Mentoring and support. Using your consulting firm at first, you should develop and designate certain expert individuals to coach and mentor practitioners, and leaders. Part of this should include an instructor feedback system that evaluates the effectiveness of all your trainers.
Online support. In this day, you almost have to have an e-learning component to your Lean Six Sigma training. Such a component should provide Green Belt and even Black Belt training. It should also provide Champion training and awareness training for such others as Process Owners. In addition, many companies take advantage of chat and mentoring systems that provide real-time, online support to Belts.
Communication
Your communication infrastructure should mirror the way you normally communicate in your company: e-mail, video broadcast, meetings, and so on. Every organization has its set communication vehicles, like the Monthly Reporter or the Message from the President. You get the idea.
It’s a good idea sometimes to designate a new communication vehicle dedicated solely to the Lean Six Sigma initiative. This is often necessary at first as you are trying to get the initiative off the ground. Like a jumbo jet, it takes a lot of force to get liftoff; once you’re flying you can turn down the engines.
Lean Six Sigma will fundamentally change the way your company thinks and operates. So your communication will have to address this, and will have to address a range of emotions—from fearful resistance to enthusiastic support. Here are some tips you can give to your communications team:
♦ Key messages need to focus on the “Why?” behind Lean Six Sigma. Cite the burning platforms.
♦ Messages need to be consistent and clear, and message repetition and frankness are key.
♦ Communication must occur in all directions and at all levels of the organization.
♦ Milestones and updates need to be provided as the process unfolds.
Design Governance Model
You need to manage and govern your Lean Six Sigma initiative, just like you’d manage a company or oversee the construction of a jet engine. You need an organization. You need performance metrics. You need timelines for achieving program milestones. You need a charter that defines what your governance body is all about. And you need to engage in certain governance activities.
Design Governance Metrics
You can’t enjoy a car very well without a dashboard telling you how fast you’re going, how far you’ve driven, when something malfunctions, and so on. Lean Six Sigma is the same: you need a robust dashboard of metrics to give you feedback on how well the program is progressing, and where and when you need to make adjustments.
Your dashboard metrics should include your Key Performance Indicators (KPIs), which stand as the performance targets for your initiative. These are business-level metrics like Cost Savings, Growth, Customer Satisfaction, Capacity, and Quality. Supporting these indicators are project indicators as follows:
♦ Project pipeline—The quantity and quality of projects.
♦ Project volume—The number of projects you have in process and completed at any given time.
♦ Project cycle time—Time from project initiation to completion (usually 6-8 months at first, 3-4 months later).
♦ Project results—How much money did the project(s) save or add to the top line?
The following is a stylized Lean Six Sigma dashboard, complete with business and enabling metrics, which include those related to projects, process, people, intellectual property, and culture.
This is a stylized dashboard for Lean Six Sigma deployment. Your dashboard may have some of these elements and other elements/metrics as well.
Long-Term Practitioner Strategies
The key is to decide whether your Belts will become the future leaders of the company, or whether you just need them to enact certain improvements, then go back to their normal jobs. Either scenario is valid, and it just depends on your needs and approach.
If you’re going to use Lean Six Sigma as a springboard for future leaders, then you need to choose Belts that have demonstrated technical capability, as well as great interpersonal, communication, and influencing skills. Then you need to give many of these full-time Belts a promotion after their tour of duty for 18 to 24 months solving problems in different parts of the organization.
If on the other hand you aren’t using Lean Six Sigma as a development platform, you need only to select those who are technically competent, and able to learn and apply the tools and DMAIC process.
Establish Practitioner Selection Process
Everything is a process, so you’ll need one for selecting your Lean Six Sigma practitioners. This is especially important because you really do need the right people involved in the initiative or it may fail. While your process will be different from the processes of others, you’ll want to use the selection vehicles you currently have in place.
Whether you advertise on the outside for practitioners, or inside the organization, you’ll need specific criteria and job descriptions. Best practices reveal that practitioners are usually selected by the deployment executive and/or deployment leader with input from HR and the career-development process.
Identify Practitioners
You can use a Cause-and-Effect Matrix to systematically select practitioners in a team-based, disciplined environment. Instead of input variables, you’re listing people as your causes, while your criteria are your effects. As the following sample shows, you select the best candidates for the job according to a rating scheme.
Here are the steps you follow to construct a Selection Matrix:
1. Establish the selection criteria. As a selection team, create individual lists of selection criteria that are based on prerequisites and expected roles.
2. Set up the matrix. Create the matrix on a flip chart with selection criteria as column heads and candidates as row heads. This is a good time to reaffirm the common understanding of and commitment to the criteria.
3. Populate the matrix. In each cell of the matrix, enter the appropriate rating by consensus or average of the team’s input. Multiply the rating by the category weight to derive the weighted score.
4. Evaluate the ratings. Add the weighted scores to see which candidates stand out as the best for the job.
A matrix like this enables you to make selections as objectively as possible. You can see that Candidate A is the number-one choice for selection among the four candidates considered.
Align Projects and People
To be successful, you have to assign the right Champions and Black Belts/Green Belts to the right projects. In the case of Champions, it’s simple. If your Champions are full-time (which is rare), you can assign any projects in any areas to them—but it still makes sense to give certain Champions certain projects that fall within their area of experience and expertise.
If your Champions are devoted to Lean Six Sigma part-time, which is almost always the case, then you’ll want to assign projects to them that fall within their organizational area. So a Champion in the accounting and finance area would oversee those types of projects. A Champion in manufacturing would oversee manufacturing projects, and so forth.
Belts are different, especially Black Belts. For them you can take one of two approaches. One approach is to assign them projects that fall only within their areas of immediate expertise. If you take this approach, projects are likely to get done faster. But there is some risk involved. Because the Black Belts are so close to the process, they may not be as likely to think out of the box and generate creative solutions.
The other approach is to purposefully assign projects to Black Belts that fall outside their immediate areas of expertise. This helps them broaden their knowledge of the organization and its processes, and grooms them to become future leaders. So if your intent as an organization is to use Lean Six Sigma as a leadership development mechanism, you’d probably adopt this approach.
Set Performance Objectives
Just as the organization sets its Lean Six Sigma goals, so do the individual Champions and Belts. This only makes sense because, after all, you need a lot of people to make the big improvements your organization desires. They sure won’t happen by themselves!
Therefore, a Champion might be accountable for reducing defects in a certain product within his or her area, or might be responsible for improving capacity in the Southwest region—that kind of thing. Black Belts, on the other hand, are responsible to complete about four projects per year saving close to $200,000 each, sometimes higher. For Green Belts that number is two, because they typically work on less complex projects part-time.
As with everything in the Lean Six Sigma world, you’ll want to document the performance objectives for Champions and Black belts. Signed and agreed is the best way. Then you’ll have a document for reference if needed.
The Least You Need to Know
♦ Before you embark on your journey to performance excellence, make sure that you first establish the overall deployment objectives. This will be your lifeline during the deployment.
♦ You’ve committed a lot of money and time to this new initiative. Set your organization up for success by defining the right priorities to increase shareholder value.
♦ Only real and energetic leadership support will get you the results that you deserve. How do you do it? Lead and live by example, show them the money, and surround yourself with true believers.
♦ Communicate a simple and compelling message that not just echoes in the halls of your corporate office, but penetrates the hearts and minds of your people.
♦ Stay close and informed, and give your people what they need to get the job done.
..................Content has been hidden....................
You can't read the all page of ebook, please click here login for view all page.