Lean Six Sigma Green Belt Certification Training

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A company asked about our Lean Six Sigma Green Belt Certification training, where training is conducted in a classroom. A Lean Six Sigma process-improvement deployment can help organizations enhance their processes; however, the success of this effort in the long term depends upon how the organization undertakes their Lean Six Sigma deployment.

In my response to the e-mail inquiry, I wanted to better understand what the organization is looking to accomplish through their Lean Six Sigma Green Belt training effort. Because of this, I asked several questions.

Lean Six Sigma Green Belt Certification Training Questions

How does your company want to address the following in the requested Lean Six Sigma Green Belt training?

  • Squeeze training topics down to one week or have two weeks of training?
  • Include projects as part of the training and overall individual certification process?
  • Simply looking to have people pass an ASQ exam (or equivalent) for individual Lean Six Sigma Green Belt certification; i.e., not focus on the execution of a process improvement project?
  • Create a system where Lean Six Sigma Green Belt improvement projects are identified and executed so that their effort benefits the business as a whole?

Response to Lean Six Sigma Green Belt Certification Training Questions

The following responses were given to the questions:

  • Squeeze training topics down to one week or have two weeks of training? 5 Days Training
  • Include projects as part of the training and overall individual certification process? Project as part of the training
  • Simply looking to have people pass an ASQ exam (or equivalent) for individual Lean Six Sigma Green Belt certification; i.e., not focus on the execution of a process improvement project? Not just Certification, want focus on the execution of a process improvement project
  • Create a system where Lean Six Sigma Green Belt improvement projects are identified and executed so that their effort benefits the business as a whole? Benefit the Business

My Follow-up Response to Lean Six Sigma Green Belt Certification Training Questions

In all honest, to fulfill all the above provided responses is not possible by Smarter Solutions, Inc. or any other company.

One week Green Belt training needs can be geared for practitioners who are to pass an ASQ certification-type test. A week does not provide enough time to effectively learn the tools used in Lean Six Sigma and apply the technique without any statistical software.

Two weeks of Lean Six Sigma Green Belt training is needed with one-on-one coaching, where each Green Belt is to work on an improvement project that has previously been identified. Attendees need to have an effective statistical analysis program such as Minitab. Attendees to the Lean Six Sigma Green Belt training need to report-out their progress in the second week of training and work with their instructor as a training-follow-up coach until the project is completed. This form of training can be accomplished without any executive training; however, these efforts don’t typically occur in silos and don’t benefit the business as a whole. In addition this approach to executing a Lean Six Sigma process improvement effort is not long lasting and often is terminated when times get tough financially. Most projects using a simple train-the-practitioners approach will die on the vine since process owners are not typically asking for the projects to get completed in a timely fashion.

Relative to benefiting the business one needs a business management system to do this correctly, otherwise we are “pushing for project creation” where these projects often do not benefit the business system as a whole. The 9-step Integrated Enterprise Excellence (IEE) methodology is a means to integrate predictive scorecards, process documentation, and improvement efforts (for Lean Six Sigma project selection) that benefit the business as a whole. To do this most effectively it involves management training and the creation of metrics and automatic reporting (with software), where metrics are reported from a process point of view. Strategic improvement efforts are then identified where predictive performance needs pull for the creation of improvement efforts that benefit the business as a whole.

Response to Lean Six Sigma Green Belt Certification Training Resources

For information about the books-documented IEE system and its implementation see: