Corporations, government agencies and nonprofit entities have one thing in common: they are all under pressure to continuously improve their processes and increase the quality of their products and services.
In a world of intense competition and constantly increasing customer expectations, many of these organizations are turning to Six Sigma and to help them achieve the quality that today’s marketplace demands.
First, let’s examine the different approaches to improve quality that Six Sigma and take.
Project Management – This discipline helps teams implement critical projects within the required time frame and allotted budget. Project management works well for deploying large projects that have a clear start date and completion date. Project management begins by setting the project’s scope, and then creating a plan that helps reduce costs and keep the project within budget.
An essential tool is the project timeline. The timeline breaks the project down into a series of tasks with individual target dates that act as milestones to measure progress toward overall project completion. Project management breaks the project down into phases and identifies the actions that must happen in each phase.
Six Sigma – Six Sigma improves quality by identifying the root cause of variation in the production process and then correcting the cause of the problem to eliminate variation at its source. This methodology uses a data collection plan to gather information about process performance. The project team then analyzes the information with statistical tools to measure process variation and determine its cause.
The team then creates a solution to the problem and tests it to see how well it reduces variation. After the team finds a proven way to reduce variation, it implements its changes and creates controls and documentation to help the innovation become a permanent business practice.
Six Sigma and Project Management Share Common Ground
These two methodologies use planning and controls to enhance process performance. They also have other similarities which help to increase synergy across the disciplines:
Improve Productivity – When applied well, Six Sigma and both help companies do more with less. Project management eliminates waste by imposing controls over the scope of the project and how teams use their time and resources. Six Sigma increases productivity by reducing the process variance that leads to product defects.
Deploy Project Teams – Six Sigma and are both driven by project teams composed of rank-and-file employees assembled to improve operations. These team members bring experience from all parts of the organization. This broad experience helps the team tackle a wide range of challenges.
Proceed in Phases – Project management takes place in five phases (initiating, planning, executing, monitoring and controlling and closing). These phases give the team direction and milestones encourage progress. Six Sigma unfolds in a series of phases called DMAIC (Define, Measure, Analyze, Improve and Control). Each phase uses a carefully chosen set of tools to achieve outcomes that move the project forward.
The good news for your project team is that you don’t have to use either one method or the other; you can use both. All the practices and tools of Six Sigma and are at your disposal to be mixed and matched in whatever combination works best for you.
We’d like to hear YOUR experiences. Share your Six Sigma and story in the comments section below!
