Blog posts on six sigma

Posts selected fromManagement Blog - Engineering Blog - Investing Blog and other blogs

• Six Sigma Theory?

  An interesting paper exploring what six sigma means and what it mean that what it means depends on who you ask. The ideas explored provide good information for most management improvement programs as most share common tools and concepts but vary significantly between implementations. 

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• The Exciting Life of Industrial Statisticians

  All of this provides great new opportunities for industrial statisticians to serve as statistical leaders-a term popularized by the late and great Ed Deming (see Hahn and Hoerl, 1998). Statistical leaders engage principally in leveraging statistical concepts and thinking (see Hoerl, Hooper, Jacobs and Lucas , 1993), and focus their activities on mentoring and supporting the most business-vital and technically challenging problems dealing with getting the right data, and converting such data into actionable information.

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• 3M CEO on Six Sigma

  ...the adoption of a newly branded management fad (from MBO to TQM to BPR to Six Sigma to Lean Six Sigma…) as the “solution” to this problem is doomed to fail (just like the last 5 times it was done) and rightfully make managers adopting such a re-branding solution the subject to ridicule by Dilbert readers. Adopt a management system. Make it yours. Incorporate good ideas from the outside but incorporate them into a long term management system that remains stable.

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• Lean Six Sigma Efforts

  ...management is the most common and most persistent obstacle, not “shop-floor personnel.” Others can resist yet another effort to adopt the latest management fad but the real challenge is in getting management to change their poor practices.

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• Six Sigma Outdated? No.

  ...execution of six sigma often focused too much on cost reduction, optimizing short term projects (which resulted in sub-optimizing the entire system), ranking and rating employees… But innovation is not harmed by a good six sigma program – in fact a good six sigma effort a decade ago understood the importance of innovation perfectly well.

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• Profound Podcast with John Hunter – Curious Cat

  In this podcast I discussed a bit of my history with management improvement. My father introduced me to the ideas as I was growing up.  And that became formal during high school, when I attended a class for City of Madison employees (during the summer) on management improvement (Deming included a couple pages on those efforts in Out of Crisis).  I also discussed: Design of Experiments, Peter Scholtes, W. Edwards Deming, PDSA cycle and six sigma.  This podcast is part one of the interview.

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• Six Sigma Won’t Fix Bad Management?

  Like most management concepts how it is applied varies tremendously. If one just uses some tools that are part of the “Six Sigma tool kit” (mostly tools from TQM and the like) then you might improve bad management only marginally.

  But if you read the work of Roger Hoerl, Soren Bisgaard, Forrest Breyfogle III… and learn and apply what they talk about as Six Sigma you will definitely have to address bad management practices...

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• Department of Defense Lean Six Sigma

  Gordon England, the Deputy Secretary of Defense, signed a directive establishing policy and assigning responsibilities to institutionalize the Lean Six Sigma effort throughout the USA Department of Defense.

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