This chapter is from the book
This chapter is from the book
This chapter is from the book
Six Sigma—The Discipline
Six Sigma provides one very clear benefit within the scope of process improvement—the creation of a disciplined organization. This does not mean you will create a bureaucracy to support Six Sigma. You will, however, create a straightforward, comprehensive, and comprehensible system by which strategic projects are identified, prioritized, resourced, tracked, and completed. While you will create an infrastructure and systems to support your Six Sigma program, this infrastructure will not in any way obstruct your organization from becoming excellent in business execution.
As Jim Collins says in his book, Good to Great, "Sustained great results depend upon building a culture full of self-disciplined people who take disciplined action." The goal is to create a culture of discipline with an ethic of entrepreneurship. The infrastructure you create to support Six Sigma will ensure you are getting the return on investment in dramatic business results that you deserve.
By training your people to follow the Six Sigma process improvement methodologies, you will create a disciplined organization around problem solving and process improvement. This strategy makes sense because everything your customers see from you of value is the output of a set of business processes. You will see consistency in the way your organizations select, prioritize, resource, and complete strategic projects. You will see projects that are consistently aligned to your strategic goals. You will create a new core of process improvement experts—Master Black Belts, Black Belts, and Green Belts. And you will see serious accountability for results. With all that, you will see enormous growth in creativity and innovation. You will also allow for each of your businesses to apply Six Sigma to the problems that are unique to them.
While the Six Sigma methodologies provide a standard, disciplined roadmap for attacking problems, the tools within the roadmaps provide the insights that stimulate creative solutions. With the Six Sigma enterprise support systems you implement, you will be able to track the impact of your new Six Sigma capabilities to the bottom line in terms of earning per share, productivity improvements, and organic growth.