How to do lean Six Sigma is a question that is often asked. Described are what might be considered traditional lean Six Sigma best practices.
How to do Lean Six Sigma
Smarter Solutions receives many calls from prospective clients that want Lean Six Sigma (LSS) training, which we provide, but they generally only want the training with no other support. It is usually a money issue, where the company is trying to spend the minimum amount. Good training is expensive, but what truly costs more? Wasting money on doing training the wrong way is the most costly in the long-term.
This post is about methods that have been shown over and over again as the BEST way to introduce LSS into a company in a perfect scenario.
1. Create the support infrastructure before training belts. This involves training the leadership on how to apply the skilled belts, training the financial group on how to support the LSS financial estimates, and creating a HR plan to deal with the trained belts after they are re-integrated into the workforce. This support infrastructure also helps to ensure that the belts will have good projects at the start of training.
2. Provide a Master Black Belt or equivalent mentor for all belt students. It is ideal if the mentor is a company employee, but it would be unusual if one exists when the program is just starting. The next best option is to contract for this support. The person should have experience in the specific course in which the students are being trained and he/she should spend about four hours per month with each student if possible. This one-on-one time should involve reviewing the project, class skill retention, and team management.
3. All students should be trained together in one wave. This provides a support network between students, which is very beneficial to their learning. Scheduled teleconferences after the training ends improve their networking. A good size for a group of students is 16-20, so large deployments may have multiple waves.
4. All active LSS belts and belt students should be involved in a monthly project progress review that is attended by company leadership. Without the management exposure, too many students are pulled away from their projects for non-LSS issues. This also provides the leadership insight into what is being discovered and what the benefits of LSS are to their company. It also provides the belts corporate recognition!
The first four may seem like common sense, but the next one is difficult for many companies.
5. The training course should be off-site to limit distractions. To gain the best training, all students should be staying at a single hotel, even if they live locally. This allows for after-hours discussions and builds a good team. The students treat it like an out-of-town trip, limiting the contact with work yet the corporate leadership is still able to stop by to observe for short periods of time.
There is one more issue that is not solely about on-site training, but is an issue that is not recognized by many companies.
6. Train Black Belts (BB) for a full time process improvement roll and train Green Belts (GB) to use the LSS skills in their current job. This concept is important because GB training is intended for people to work within their own expertise. It is not until BB training that the student gains a full set off of skills to lead an improvement effort in an area of the business in which they are not an expert. BB training can be used to improve the skills of workers, but the GB training does not provide enough for full time improvement project tasking.
All of these points are essential to improve the probability of success in a deployment of Lean Six Sigma. You can be successful without all of these methods, but the probability of failure is increased.
Contact Us to set up a time to discuss with Forrest Breyfogle how your organization might gain much from an Integrated Enterprise Excellence (IEE) Business Process Management System Lean Six Sigma 2.0 implementation.