Most probably you've heard about Green Belt and Black Belt a dozen times already. But up until now, you barely have an idea or two about them. No, they're not about martial arts, but rather a class of people who have achieved levels of mastery of system, methodology, tools, and techniques of a breakthrough improvement process called Six Sigma.
This article was taken from the book, "Six Sigma Playbook," which will be published soon.
Keys to Understanding
Any human undertaking that requires more than one person to achieve a worthwhile purpose needs to be organized. The required tasks are assigned to people with the requisite knowledge and skills. A company is one organization, and it is composed of many departmental and functional organizations. Six Sigma is one functional organization that must be defined, structured, and authorized to implement improvement to the corporate organization.
Six Sigma infrastructure is composed of people who perform different tasks to achieve the corporate goal of improving its processes.
Six Sigma Infrastructure
Six Sigma organizational infrastructure are staffed with people who are capable to fill the numerous roles necessary to create the change. The infrastructure creates a critical mass of change leaders to successfully deploy the change initiative. It addresses most of the reasons why change initiatives fail.
There are different key roles for authorizing the change initiative, selecting and authorizing projects, approving resource budgets, training key leaders on Six Sigma, approving project activities on the work process, selecting project team leaders and members, etc. Figure 1 illustrates the reporting structure of the different Six Sigma roles.
Figure 2 summarizes the different Six Sigma roles and their main responsibilities.
On the strategic level, there are the Executive Council, the Deployment Champion, and the Master Black Belt, who establish and maintain policies and direction and guide the organization to achieve the improvement goals.
On the operational level, projects are established and executed by cross-functional teams led by Black Belt, and in smaller scale projects by a Green Belt. Team members are composed of selected personnel from the process being improved. Oftentimes, Subject Matter Experts (SMEs) are invited to join the project team to provide expert knowledge on given topics.
Six Sigma Infrastructure is the Key Differentiator
Many detractors of Six Sigma pointed out that it just borrowed tools and techniques from earlier improvement systems chiefly the Total Quality Management (TQM), and repackaged and marketed it under a different name. While both reasons are true, there is one reason why Six Sigma is different from its predecessors and why it is such a powerful improvement system, and it is the infrastructure to manage and sustain organization-wide process improvement. Here are some of the success factors why Six Sigma is a proven effective business change initiative:
Top management driven: The organization’s CEO or President leads the Six Sigma infrastructure and drives the process improvement by actively promoting Six Sigma internally.
Alignment with vision and objectives: Six Sigma leadership ensures that all projects are aligned with the corporate vision and the objectives of all key stakeholders (customers, shareholders, employees).
Guiding coalition: Everyone in the Six Sigma infrastructure are bound by a common conviction to achieve business improvement. The change initiative is guided by and deployed from the top, and executed down every level. The infrastructure is peopled by leaders who work in boundaryless collaboration, ditching the inflexible traditional silo mentality.
Strong buy-in from the people: Six Sigma is a vehicle for employee to actively engage in process improvement, thus enriching job and workplace satisfaction.
Clear performance goals: Project teams establish clear performance and financial improvement goals to achieve the overall corporate objectives.
Simple and rigid methodology: Six Sigma infrastructure imposes a robust, clear, and simple DMAIC methodology— that is, Define, Measure, Analyze, Improve, and Control phases. It harnesses a set of well-known tools and techniques for each phase that were demonstrated to be successful in bringing improvement to the process and change to the organization as a whole.
Proven successful results: Six Sigma practitioners are customer-centric, process-focused, data-driven and analytically rigorous, which strengthen the probability of meeting both project’s and corporate’s goals and expectations.
The next time you're be involved in a conversation about Six Sigma, you'll be confident to show your know-how.
Don't be left behind, be sure to have your copy of the book, "Six Sigma Playbook,"when it becomes available. Subscribe to this blog to receive more information.
