In today’s economy employers expect more than what is listed in your job description. To meet your employer’s expectations and stand apart in your organization you need to be able to help cut costs, improve quality, enhance revenue or delight the customer. A Six Sigma certification teaches you how to do them all.
Using Six Sigma to analyze problems, create improvements and implement solutions makes you invaluable to the company and makes your job more rewarding. But you already know the advantages that a Six Sigma certification can give you.
Don’t stop there.
A Project Management Professional (PMP®) certification teaches different skills, but can give your career the same kind of boost. This certification gives you a framework for organizing people and tasks, and helps you complete a project on time and on budget. And like Six Sigma, if you learn PMP well and practice it wisely, it can make you invaluable to your organization.
What’s the Difference Between Six Sigma and Project Management?
While advancing your career is usually considered a secondary benefit of Six Sigma and methodologies, the main objective of them both is to improve process performance.
The PMP methodology helps get your project up and running as quickly as possible. The main goal of PMP principles is to implement the project by the assigned deadline, so time is of the essence.
Project management works best for projects that have clear beginnings and endings. It is well suited to training programs, implementation projects, taking inventory, creating specialized reports, event planning, and sales and marketing planning.
With Six Sigma, it’s not enough that a process is working, it must also produce at a high level of quality. Ideal Six Sigma performance allows no more than 3.4 defects per one million opportunities. Where is concerned with getting a process operating on time and on budget, Six Sigma principles focus on improving that process by reducing its variance and the number of defects it produces. Six Sigma improvements can be applied to a process at any point during its lifetime not just at the beginning of the project.
Six Sigma and PMP Stand on Common Ground
Implementing a new process or improving a current one can require dealing with mountains of details and coordinating large numbers of people. Both Six Sigma and help make a team’s efforts to improve a process methodical and manageable by providing a five-step map for organizing team efforts.
Project Management methodology guides teams through implementing a new process by giving them five general steps to follow.
- Initiate
- Plan
- Launch
- Monitor and Control
- Close
Six Sigma also has five stages that help focus a team’s efforts to tackle a project.
- Define
- Measure
- Analyze
- Improve
- Control
The two methods also use similar tools to improve processes. Both Six Sigma and use Fishbone diagrams, Flowcharts, Pareto diagrams, Histograms and Control Charts to help processes to start and run smoothly.
Six Sigma and certifications complement each other, and when used together they can expand your skills and give you the tools to become a process improvement master.
