Don't substitute Six Sigma for thinking. For IT staffers particularly, the urge is strong to first use tools they know (that is, technology) before dipping into untried methodologies. Resist that urge, counsels Fidelity Wide Processing's Sutton. "If you just throw technology at a business problem, all you wind up with is a bad process with new technology. If you wring out the process first, then you can really use technology to move it to a higher level."
As a case in point, Fidelity Wide Processing used Six Sigma tenets to re-engineer its inbound, paper-based, customer data processing operation. Only after gaining 32 per cent improvement by streamlining the process did Sutton's department start to consider new technologies. The company is currently expanding its use of advanced character recognition technology to speed processing of customer data.
Don't be afraid to tinker. While the philosophy behind Six Sigma is, or should be, sacrosanct - focus on the customer, reduce defects, streamline and improve processes, evaluate continuously - you needn't treat the tactics and tools as if they're set in stone.
Many big companies, including Honeywell and Textron, have their own internal "brands" of Six Sigma that have been tailored to their line of business and oftentimes combined with Lean, another manufacturing technique designed to weed out non-value-adding subprocesses. Other organisations fine-tune the DMAIC model as needed. Chase Financial, for example, added a step called "implement".
At the toolset level, Raytheon's Debrecht says his teams have wide latitude when it comes to suggesting which measures are appropriate for which projects. "We use brainstorming, value mapping, fishbone diagrams and something we call the 'five whys' to help us get to the root cause of an issue," he says. Textron's Bohlen gives that approach a thumbs-up. "Six Sigma is a system of tools," he says. "There's no prescribed set. You have to determine what you want to bring to your workforce before you choose your tools."
One word of warning: A cautious CIO might be tempted to try a little bit of Six Sigma here and there to see if it works. That's a mistake, says Costa. "We tried too hard to go part-time on some of this stuff, so projects were taking too long. Now we try to focus black belts full-time on a project, and in most cases we're seeing between $US1 million and $US3 million in benefits," he says.
Don't get bogged down in numbers. Like any other measurement-based system, Six Sigma can be driven into the ground by too many numbers. "All that statistical analysis that the black belts use, all those data points don't add up unless you understand what you're measuring," says Gartner's Light. The "define" phase in DMAIC is, in his opinion, probably the most important part of the discipline, and it's the one that involves the fewest metrics. "Chartering the team and specifying who the customers are and defining what a good experience is and what's a defect, that's where the value is," he says.
"You can use statistics in degrees," echoes Sutton. "People hear 'measure' and they say: 'Oh, we gotta have a control chart.' But there are certain areas where we have no control charts. What's important is the methodology and how you apply it."
How to Sell Six Sigma
For all their enthusiasm, CIOs acknowledge that the most difficult aspect of Six Sigma may well be trying to sell its benefits to the rank and file, many of whom have lived through too many rah-rah kick-offs in the conference room to embrace any more management initiatives.
Six Sigma can certainly turn into some executive's pet leadership strategy that's launched and forgotten three months down the line. But if it's done right, practitioners say, Six Sigma stimulates a fundamental change in the way an organisation conducts business and makes decisions.
So what's the best way to introduce that change? Maybe not at all. Fidelity Wide Processing's Sutton is a fan of the show-first-tell-later strategy. When Six Sigma was new to his organisation, he sometimes shunned the words Six Sigma or training or quality.
"We don't come in with touchy-feely training and have [sceptics] say: 'Oh yeah, right, Six Sigma'," Sutton says. "We say: 'Let's talk about your business problems. You need to drive improvements in your business, and we're going to show you how to do it.'"
