"Six Sigma's Seven Deadly Sins"
Quality
January 2005, pp. 62-67
Although many organizations have had great success with Six Sigma, others have not. The authors of this article identify seven conditions likely to be present in the situations where Six Sigma had not delivered expected results:
- Inadequate information—The authors recommend that Six Sigma initiatives should use a consistent set of questions to gather, sort, organize, and analyze information.
- Selecting the wrong projects—Some common reasons for selecting the "wrong" project include:
- Picking easy projects instead of ones that are strategically important
- Avoiding important projects because they appear to be too difficult
- Attempting to solve a marketing problem with a manufacturing solution
- Creating solution-caused problems—Always include an analysis of potential problems and how to prevent them from occurring during implementation.
- Serving the wrong customer—Some projects confuse the voice of the customer with the voice of accounting or some other internal voice that may not be looking primarily towards serving the customer.
- Leaping to the fix—Project teams should spend sufficient time understanding the root cause of the problem before trying to solve it.
- Faulty implementation—Clear project scope and deliverables, potential problem analysis at each step, monitoring, and reviews all are crucial for effective implementation.
- Failing to consider the human side of change—The situation, performer, response, consequences, and feedback must all be aligned. Technically "right" solutions do not work otherwise. The situation refers to the job context and expectations. The performer aspect concerns appropriate skills and knowledge. The response is the clear, desired behavior from the performer. The consequences refers to making sure the results of performance are positive for the performer. Feedback is needed so the performer knows if they are on target or need to make adjustments in their performance.
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