[Music Intro]
>>Hi I'm Devin Deen, Content Director here at ProjectManager.com. Hi. Welcome to today's whiteboard session.
In a departure from tradition I'm not going to talk about project management topics. Instead,
I'm going to go over a couple of process improvement methodologies that have been out in the marketplace
for about 50 or 60 years in an effort to maybe just highlight some key points from each of
those methods that you might want to take on as your own when you're looking to improve
your processes on your projects.
If nothing else, it'll help you score better the next time you play boardroom bingo. So,
the 2 processes I'm going to talk about are Kaizen, or improvement is good. And Six Sigma
which is about eliminating defects. And in this case Six Sigma refers to about 3.4 defects
per million products that you are getting out there, and that's where the Six Sigma
comes from.
Now these methodologies have been out there for about 50, 60 years. Kaizen came about
in post-World War II, so this is after World War II is over. America sent a number of business
consultants over to Japan to help them rebuild their economy and get the industry and industrial
and manufacturing base up and running again.
Out of that era came popular improvement methods like TQM, total quality management, and also
Kaizen. Kaizen was born in that era. Six Sigma came in the mid-80's, so specifically 1986
is when it first formally surfaced but in the mid-70's it was starting to be beaten
about by a company called Motorola in the United States. They manufactured quite a lot
of communications equipment. They found that quality control was dropping off, products
were getting worse and worse, and the profitability as a result was decreasing. So the CEO at
the time decided they wanted to do something about it, so they started looking at ways
they could improve their processes in manufacturing at Motorola. The methodology was finally encapsulated
and packaged, if you will, in 1986 and since then they've been using it as well as probably
the top 500 Fortune 500 companies have adopted that methodology for improving their product
and their quality control.
The philosophies differ slightly. For Kaizen, the philosophy is more about humanizing the
workforce. So, in this way, your workforce is empowered. Everybody from the CEO down
to the janitorial staff have a part in improving the processes of that company to help it work
more effectively, more efficiently, and certainly safer. For Six Sigma, it's more of a command
and control approach. Six Sigma is your traditional consulting engagement where people go in,
look at the size of the problem, do their gap analysis, and figure out what to do and
how to solve that in a more project by project approach.Kaizen is about a culture change,
Six Sigma is more about solving particular problems, OK? So there's slight difference
there.
How they achieve this is quite similar. In this case, for Kaizen, they achieve this by
having executive leadership all the way down to, as I said before, the janitor staff being
part of that process- partaking in the improvement process. In Six Sigma, certainly you have
to have that executive mandate as well. So, the executives and the senior management team
are adopting and embracing a change for the better for improving quality and improving
processes and ensuring each of the team members in their company actually has a part in that
as well. The difference is that, in Kaizen, it's - like I said - it's part of that culture,
it's how we do things at X company. Whereas in Six Sigma there are initiatives.
There are Six Sigma initiatives where they are actually looking to drive improvement
but, again, every team member has got that participation and that responsibility but
primarily in Six Sigma you're looking at it more at a project by project basis.
Now, how they do this. So, the key process in Kaizen is based on Deming's key process
of PDAC and what that stands for is Plan, Do, Analyze, and Change. And the idea is that
PDAC is actually a bit of a cycle, right? So it's a repeatable and iterative cycle where
you are doing your plan, doing analyzing, changing. Then do that once for a particular
problem that you are having, then you go on and do it again. Small incremental changes
make improvement in the long term. So a Kaizen company is one that embraces that change but
knows it's a journey, knows their not going to get there in the first step, and recognizes
that the best way to do that is small incremental improvements at the team level - at the business
unit level, if you will.
In Six Sigma, how they achieve their result and their processes - they've got loads of
processes but, first off, it is a statistical based improvement process. So, in this one it's
very important for them to be able to define and measure the output they are looking to
achieve and then to find specific ways at addressing that. And we're not talking small
increments or changes. We're usually talking big bold changes to improve those processes.
So there's 2 primary processes that are used in Six Sigma. The first one we call DMAIAC
and that stands for Define, Measure, Analyze, Improve, and Control. The other process is
similar to that. It's DMADV, Define, Measure, Analyze, Design, and then Verify. And these
2 processes, they are similar, and what they're talking about, like I said before, it's more
of an organized, if you will, more of a project by project initiative where you're defining
actually what the problems are, your measuring what that might be costing you or where that
efficiency loss or that quality loss might be occurring. You analyze, again, where you
can make those improvements. You make the improvements and you control them, or in this
case, you design the new processes that you need to follow and then you verify that that
works.
Some key features of each of these, the first one I want to say and if you haven't gotten
it by now I'll write it up on the board again. It's really culture change here, right? Companies
that embrace Kaizen do it holistically. It's the entire company, it's how we do things.
Toyota has done so and you might read the book or Google it on Amazon and you'll see
a book called 'The Toyota Way'. This is Toyota's approach towards Kaizen. It talks about the
philosophy at Toyota. It talks about every team members responsibility. It is certainly
a cultural sort of aspect.
You talk about companies that are Kaizen companies and you mention Toyota - look, even where
I work here in New Zealand, we've got a bank using Kaizen and they're using Kaizen to improve
the close the books process, if you will, and the finance team. So it's not just manufacturing
companies that can use this, it's all types of industry and the thing to remember it is
a cultural change. It's a cultural process.
With Six Sigma, whilst it is cultural in terms of it's embracing the need for improvement
of quality approaches and streamlining the workforce, the thing to remember that it is
statistical based. Usually within a company you've got designated champions of Six Sigma.
You've got people, in some cases, that it's their full-time job to look for areas of improvement.
These folks are called your black belts. They've gone through the Six Sigma training and their
familiar with the hundred or so different processes and hundred or so different ways
to measure quality improvement and their out there running and leading those projects that
are out there to improve quality in your manufacturing base or streamline your processes.
You've also got green belts who might, as an example, it might be a side responsibility
for a department head to be a green belt in Six Sigma. So they've got a key part in a
Six Sigma project. They're there at the operational level where the rubble meets the road to actually
enact some of those improvement processes but they're not driving that change. That's
what the black belts are doing. You've got a series of other color belts and just comprising
different Six Sigma project teams to try and improve that process as well. So, they use
the champion approach where you've got a designated person who's there to deliver Six Sigma projects.
So this in a nutshell is a quick chart on distinguishing the different features between
these quality improvement programs. I suggest that if you're interested in knowing more
about them, certainly I would take that up, Google it on the internet or go to your local
library and pick up a couple of books. Certainly each of these different quality processes
can give you some ideas of your own when you're running your project teams on how to improve
your efficiency or streamline your workforce and also improve the quality of products that
you are producing from your projects.
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