"At Raytheon Six Sigma Works, Too, to Improve HR Management Processes"

Sally Lanyon

Journal of Organizational Excellence

Autumn 2003, pp. 29-42

Raytheon is one of only a handful of companies that have extended the practice of Six Sigma to the HR function. This article gives examples of some of the projects that HR has tackled at Raytheon, as well as explaining the Six Sigma approach Raytheon uses. Included is a very good discussion of the Kaizen Blitz approach Raytheon's HR group has used for fast-track improvement.

In summarizing what Raytheon has learned from its dozens of projects, the following key factors and lessons are identified as contributing to the success of Six Sigma efforts within the HR function:

1. Kaizen Blitzes eliminate multi-tasking—"By allowing the team members to focus solely on a project for a specified time period, a number of 'stop/start again later' actions are avoided, along with their inefficiencies of lost momentum"
2. Involve the customer—Raytheon brings the voice of the customer into the assessment of the current state and the identification of a desirable future state
3. Set clear expectations—Vagueness can slow down the concentrated schedule of the Kaizen Blitz
4. Just start somewhere; It doesn't have to be perfect—Hands-on experience builds credibility as the power of Six Sigma is demonstrated
5. Provide mentors—Start with outside experts until you can build internal capacity;
6. Provide strong leadership support—This includes "encouraging people to go to Six Sigma training, setting goals for trained and qualified specialists, staying the course with messages of support, helping teams to overcome barriers and find elegant solutions, celebrating successes"
7. Talk in their words—Don't overuse Six Sigma lingo with those who are not convinced yet
8. Capitalize on the power of networking—Bring together HR people from all over the organization
9. Set stretch goals and track success—People will accomplish more if they know where they are going and track how they are doing

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"Why Companies Flunk Supply-Chain 101: Only 33 Percent Correctly Measure Supply-Chain Performance; Few Use the Right Incentives"

Miles Cook and Russ Hagey

Journal of Business Strategy

2003, Vol. 24, No. 4, pp. 35-42

Research by Bain and Company has identified four major reasons why companies are not doing well on supply chain basics:

1. Most companies are hazy about their supply-chain performance—"Only 15 percent say they have full information on what's happening in their own companies…Even among companies that say supply-chain improvement is a priority, slightly less than two-thirds say they have got all the necessary information"
2. Too many companies are supply-chain introverts—"In other words, many companies fail to adequately recognize that the supply chain extends far forward to customers, and back, to suppliers and their suppliers"
3. Incentives do not tie to supply-chain improvements—"Only two out of five respondents said their companies use pay-for-performance rewards to motivate their supply-chain executives...But even those doing so often make the mistake of using the wrong targets. Almost 80 percent of those incentives fail to take into account customer feedback and vendor results"
4. There is still a bias toward quick IT fixes—"Businesses too often rely on sophisticated software to solve their supply-chain problems. And most of them turn their inventories no faster than they did a decade ago."

The authors provide five fundamentals to shore up supply-chains and begin to see bottom-line benefits:

1. Get the strategy right first
2. Put star players on the problem
3. Replace hunches with metrics
4. Reach past your four walls
5. Realize that not all parts are created equal

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"Managing Human Capabilities"

Alan Brache

Journal of Organizational Excellence

Autumn 2003, pp. 61-72

The author of this article states: "Human capabilities are people's unique sets of skills, knowledge, and personal values and beliefs. It is useful for an organization to determine what human capabilities it needs—by examining its strategic, business process, departmental, and job level requirements—and then identify what human capabilities it currently possesses and the steps it can take to close any gaps."

An eleven-step process is presented for addressing the human capabilities dimension of an organization:

1. Develop a strategy for your business
2. Identify and (re)design your strategic and key support processes
3. Define the outputs that each department should produce as its contribution to each key process
4. Based on the department outputs, identify the outputs expected from individuals and/or teams
5. Identify the skills, knowledge, and personal values and beliefs that are required by each job output
6. Where needed to elucidate the output of Step 5, identify (a) the physical capabilities, intellectual capabilities, and psychological capabilities needed for each skill, and (b) the intellectual capabilities that are essential for each knowledge requirement
7. Document your current capabilities in terms of the "should" established in Steps 5 and 6
8. Identify and set priorities on the gaps between your current capabilities and what you need
9. Develop a human capability plan that describes how the gaps will be closed using skill development, succession planning, and/or career development
10. Use your performance measurement system as the basis for determining which of your performance gaps are and are not being caused by human capability deficiencies
11. Regularly monitor and update your human capability plan

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"When Worlds Collide: Culture Clash"

Jerry Want

Journal of Business Strategy

2003, Vol. 24, No. 4, pp. 14-21

The author of this article states "In the current age of radical change, failing corporate cultures directly contribute to more business failures than at any time in the past." In this article, the author classified various corporate cultures, gives some suggestions for corporate culture building, and identifies barriers to culture building.

The classifications of cultures are:

1. Predatory cultures—"Predatory cultures are punitive, alienating, and exploitative. They are blind to the true stakeholders of the business and are not able to anticipate future consequences of their actions"
2. Frozen cultures—"Frozen cultures are paralyzed by gridlock and denial. These cultures have an aversion to risk-taking while showing little innovation and no 'over-the-horizon' planning…New ideas rarely see the light of day while stepping outside the chain of command is not tolerated"
3. Chaotic cultures—"Chaotic cultures are fragmented and unfocused. They rarely have a focused mission or strategy that can be sustained in the competitive marketplace"
4. Political cultures—"These companies are balkanized by warring factions. The organization, as a whole, never equals the sum of its parts as turf warfare, hero building, and retaliation are normative behaviors"
5. Bureaucratic cultures—"The bureaucratic culture places the needs of customers below the needs of the bureaucracy"
6. Service cultures—"Companies with service cultures focus on fulfilling the customer's needs first, in order to serve their own. Mission, strategy, structure, systems, policies and operations all start and end with the customer"
7. New age cultures—"The new age culture is the top performing culture as it combines innovation with strong commitment to the customer and its employees. It fosters an egalitarian work environment that encourages bottom-up feedback from the workforce while employees share fully in wealth generated by the company"

Requirements for corporate culture building include:

1. Close the gap between business planning and corporate culture
2. Create a corporate culture that embraces change
3. Keep innovative people and their ideas at home
4. Break down the bureaucratic mind-set
5. Identify natural change leaders and empower them to lead the change process
6. Build a broad consensus for culture change from the bottom up as well as the top down
7. Reinforce ethical conduct at all levels
8. Create sponsorship at the top
9. The culture is about behaviors
10. Never lose track of the customer

Some major barriers to culture building are:

1. Widespread resistance and fear
2. Over-reliance on the fads, fix-its, and magic bullets
3. Not enough resources
4. Incremental goals which will not accomplish the needed change
5. The company may be too swamped with problems to make changes
6. Complacency until something major goes wrong

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"Gain a Competitive Edge by Preventing Recalls"

Trevor White and Renata Pomponi

Quality Progress

August 2003, pp. 41-49

The authors address the issue of re-calls by examining research on product stewardship, which "integrates regulatory compliance and health, safety and environmental considerations into product development and maintenance."

Four key components of product stewardship capability are identified:

1. Strategy—This includes demonstrated senior leadership; commitment of the necessary resources to implement and maintain safety, regulatory, environmental and health management practices
2. Organization—Elements here are a safety oriented culture; established goals and responsibilities; and teamwork across organizational boundaries
3. Processes—Included here are structured processes to integrate product safety, regulatory, environmental and health considerations into product development activities; best practices decision processes; and risk management and characteristics
4. Systems—This includes knowledge management systems and risk management systems

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Theory Into Practice: Our Work to Avoid Ineffectual Implementations

John McNeil, GP Deltapoint

Two-thirds of corporate improvement programs grind to a halt because of their failure to produce results, according to a McKinsey report. Despite spending nearly $100 billion on initiatives such as TPM, Lean Manufacturing, Six Sigma, and others, efforts to implement such methods generally failed to produce results.

The ability to learn about these improvement methods is not a significant barrier, but successful implementation certainly is. For example, according to a 2003 survey, nearly 60% of aerospace executives remained dissatisfied with their Six Sigma programs.

Our clients are often frustrated by the gap between what they know they can do and what actually happens in the cut and tumble of real business. We find they often need guidance and help implementing sustainable cultural and process change together.

Indeed, there is a huge difference between companies that use the tools (SMED, Six Sigma, Lean and many other flavors of alphabet soup) and those that change how people think. Great organizations like Toyota and Federal Express uses a “system” to engage everyone in improving their operations—it becomes the way they think.

This even applies to humble 5S: many companies have programs, but few use it to its fullest, as a means to change a culture. Great 5S arises when people no longer think about tidiness and organization—instead, they think about finding and eliminating waste. 5S makes waste visible, and once a cultural change occurs, everyone can see that waste.

Our task is to help our clients move from simply applying the tools to changing the way that people think and are engaged. In changed organizations, it's amazing how many people are involved and really committed day-to-day to solving problems and driving change. It has been said often, but bears repeating: cultural change leads the application of analytical tools, sustained problem solving, and change. It is almost impossible to run that machine in reverse.

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