Although most of these quality improvement strategies do have their share of advantages, one methodology that offers perhaps most of the benefits with a win-win situation is Six Sigma.
How Six Sigma Helps In Project Management
It is no wonder that Six Sigma has become the latest craze in most of the business organizations that want to eliminate the defects in their products and services and bring about an improvement in the quality of their processes. Actually, Six Sigma is a cyclic system, which helps in ensuring that the various processes of the company are defect-free.
However, Six Sigma should be implemented with caution during the implementation, ensuring that guidelines are adhered to. This simply means that although Six Sigma helps in improving the quality of the processes by eliminating the defects, the implementation of this strategy will be possible only if a certain process is followed religiously. That's because if any aspect is overlooked during the Project Management stage, it would simply result in the overall failure of Six Sigma.
Therefore, in order to avoid any chance of failure, Six Sigma adopts the DMAIC process for Project Management. DMAIC stands for Define, Measure, Analyze, Improve and Control and when combined with the Six Sigma strategy, redundancies and failures are automatically reduced in the Project Management phase.
The DMAIC and Project Management Relationship
The DMAIC method is nothing but a process that uses all the available statistics, techniques and other data available at its disposal, which thereby reduces any chances of human errors. One of the best things that businesses can do to ensure that the Project Management phase has been implemented with efficiency is to define the problems that may occur at a certain point of time.
After defining the problems that are currently affecting business processes, the next thing on the agenda is to measure the extent of damage that the problem can create. Then, during the analysis stage, the analysts come up with the solutions to tackle the problem encountered. Once thorough analysis of the problem is done, the improvement stage begins which aims at total quality improvement.
Finally, when quality improvement is introduced, the controlling phase is introduced in order to check the efficacy of the change and also ensuring that the problems encountered before are not repeated.
Thanks to the ever-increasing competition, Six Sigma is gaining worldwide popularity and is being used more than ever before. Fortunately, organizations are warming up to the idea of consolidating Six Sigma and Project Management to derive maximum results and thereby increasing profits and their value in the market.
Though the benefits of implementing the Six Sigma strategy to a business's processes can lead to far greater successes that could ever have been achieved without it. However, this is only the case when the implementation of Six Sigma has been done properly. Unfortunately, this is not always what happens. Mis-implementing Six Sigma can be extremely damaging to a business.
Because Six Sigma often leads to an entire overhaul of every single process and function within a business, its implementation impacts all levels and employees. When done properly, this means that every employee and process will be used to its fullest potential, creating the highest level of quality, and leading to the most successful bottom line. On the other hand, when implemented improperly, the changes that are made on every level of an organization's functioning can be detrimental, if not fatal.
This is what makes it so important for companies that are willing to take on wall-to-wall changes that are required by Six Sigma to make sure that they have the correct help in applying the strategies. This is the only way to ensure that it has been done properly.
Unfortunately, this is not the path taken by 80 percent of companies that are attempting Six Sigma implementation. Only 20 percent, therefore, truly benefit from what Six Sigma strategies have to offer.
By making incorrect wall-to-wall changes, they experience the struggle of the transition, and never reap the rewards that are supposed to come afterwards in the vastly improved business processes. Customers are no more satisfied, product and service quality is no higher, and resources are not used any better. Even if the business was able to achieve a similar success level to what it was experiencing before going through the faulty Six Sigma change, it will rarely be able to compensate for the period of struggle throughout the implementation, when dramatic spending occurred, and profits were greatly reduced.
When you make the decision to take advantage of what Six Sigma has to offer your organization, make certain that the necessary employees receive the correct and complete training required. Then, be certain that implementation begins within seventy two hours of the completion of that training, while the motivation and the understanding is still extremely fresh. By waiting too long after the training, details blur, and it becomes too easy to implement the wrong processes.
Tony Jacowski has sinced written about articles on various topics from University, Six Sigma and Information Technology. Tony Jacowski is a quality analyst for The MBA Journal. Aveta Solution's Six Sigma Online offers online and certification classes for six sigma pro. Tony Jacowski's top article generates over 90500 views. to your Favourites.