Common Practices And Best Practices

Best practices. We read about them all the time, but what is a best practice? Does it mean someone has figured out how to do something better than everyone else? I doubt it. If you really had a best practice, why did you develop it in the first place?

The answer, undoubtedly, is to achieve some level of competitive advantage over your competition. However, if you truly believe that your practices are the best, would you be willing to just give them away? Probably not. What we often read about as best practices, are often little more than common practices.
In a recent telephone survey of 27 companies, respondents were asked, How long is the expected duration of a Six Sigma Black Belt assignment at your company. The choices of answers included: about one year, about two years, about three years, about four years, unspecified, and indefinite. The survey results are presented in the adjacent chart (Fig.1).

The question I ask is, if AlliedSignal and GE have decided their Black Belts should serve three years instead of two years, what would this chart look like? Countless companies are playing follow-the-leader, concluding that the practices of a successful company must be the best practices. However, it simply is not so.

Project Duration

It is commonly accepted that Six Sigma projects should take about four-to-six months. Some say three-to-five. Moreover, it is true that Six Sigma projects generally take this long. Let’s look at some of the literature on the subject (Fig. 2). What kind of behavior does this drive? Let us look at the first one. Can it be completed within three-to-five months?

It does not read, can it be completed in less than five months, but rather, three -to-five months. That immediately creates the expectation that if it cannot be completed in less than three months, it is not a Six Sigma (or Lean Six Sigma) project (Fig. 3). Such a statement establishes a lower bound. However, who in their right mind wouldn’t want to finish a project faster? Is a minimum time really an important criterion? I would think that companies would want to get projects completed as quickly as possible. Wouldn’t you?

Now consider what Mikel Harry writes in his book, Six Sigma.

Again, a two-sided expectation, but look how much shorter Harry sets the expectation. How is it then that the timeline has crept up? I have found several reasons for time creep. First, there is certain, conditioning that goes on as a result of the traditional Six Sigma training regimen, which consists of four or so weeks of training over a fourmonth period. A trainee cannot get through a project any faster than the training because someone that has not studied the tools of the Analyze Phase of Six Sigma, for example, cannot use those tools until after the training. Once training is completed,  there is still some time needed to implement the solution. In other words, the first projects are gated by the training schedule.

The second reason is poorly defined projects. There is a saying that I’m very fond of that goes, a problem well-defined is a problem half solved. However, most companies spend too little time on the project definition, which centers on the selection of the right metrics to drive the problem solution. Instead, they are very anxious to get into data collection and analysis. The problem is that if not well planned and not well focused, data collection can be a very time consuming exercise that delivers little results. The third reason is that typical Black Belts

are doing too much. They’re working on projects that are too large in scope and they’re spending too much time developing action plans to take care of the low hanging fruit they encounter en route to process optimization. We have to maintain our sights on where the breakthroughs really come fromoptimizationsolving the equation y=f(x). Team members can handle a great deal of the other things encountered along the way. And why shouldn’t they be?

The team members typically own the process. Let us not forget what we are really trying to accomplish in Six Sigma.

The chart below (Fig. 4) illustrates a typical profile of project metrics over the course of a project. This is the result of aggregating data from hundreds of projects. Any given project may look very different. In the early stages of a project, the project metric improvement profile follows that of a typical continuous improvement project. Very early, as soon as we shine a spotlight on the process of interest, people start to pay more attention to what they’re doing. As we move through the Measure and Analyze phases, we’re constantly identifying opportunities for improvement using traditional quality improvement tools. It’s not until we get to the Improve phase and really focus on solving the relationship, y= (x) that achieve the real breakthrough. This is when we achieve process optimization and is really what we’ve been missing in the past.

Now ask yourself this question. How do I get the biggest return on investment in my Black Belt’s time? The answer: sprint to optimization . Black Belts must be thought of as a scarce resource. And as such, managers (often referred to as Champions) are in the business of allocating scarce resources. So again, where do you want to allocate this very valuable resource called a Six Sigma Black Belt? Focusing on the low hanging fruit is easy. But it’s also distracting. Companies that want to accelerate their breakthrough results and get project timelines down to weeks, not months, need to really focus on the primary goal of Six Sigma.

Project Savings

Another common practice is to set goals on the dollars saved per project. However a simple analysis will demonstrate that this can’t possibly be a best practice, regardless of the value targeted. We spend so much time teaching Six Sigma experts to use good metrics. We teach them to count actual defects per unit (DPU) versus the number of defective units. And we teach them to use normalized metrics such as defects per million opportunities (DPMO) when units are different. But when we set a goal for projects, we use numbers like $175K per project. Now many will tell you that their target value is just that, a target. However these targets are cosntantly treated as lower thresholds. How can anyone argue that all Six Sigma projects are the same. And even if the target is just that, a target, is a target value really appropriate? What behavior does this drive? The answer is that it drives companies to expand the scope of projects to achieve greater value and it diminishes the sense of urgency, since there’s no time component.

What would be a better metric?

How about return on investment in the Black Belt’s time or what one company has termed, the ROBB, (Return on Black Belt). There are different ways to apply the ROBB. One is to simply target a savings rate of $1 million per year. Then it doesn’t matter if it’s 20 projects worth $50K each or a single one million dollar project. Another company is using the metric of $3 thousand per day of project duration, with an expectation of some project overlap. And still another is actually asking its Black Betls to keep track of the portion of their day  dedicated to each project when working multiple projects. In any of these cases, we have a better metric because it’s normalized against time and creates a sense of urgency. What would you rather have? A one month project with a $100K return, or a three month project with a $200K return? One is a rate of $1.2 MM per year. The other is a rate of $800K per year. But metrics like, three-to-five months and $175K per project will drive you toward the second, not the first.

Black Belts as Team Leaders

Again, go to the literature and you’ll find over and over again references to Black Belts as team leaders. But ask any company which project teams are most effective and you’ll get the answer, those with the department manager (which many refer to as the Process Owner) taking a leading role on the project. If we can encourage Process Owners to lead teams, in which case the Black Belt serves as the facilitator, analyst, and often the project manager , Six Sigma project teams will be much more effective and will have the sense of urgency to produce results. Just because Black Belts most often lead teams doesn’t make it a best practice. It’s a common practice. And it doesn’t need to be the same everytime.

The Black Belt, Champion, and Process Owner should sit down at the beginning of every project to discuss how the team will be managed and who will have which role. If the Process Owner will take on a leadership role, the Black Belt can focus on sprinting toward ptimization while the people responsible for the day-to-day business of the process worry about the low hanging fruit. The results are greater project throughput, easier end-of-project transition, and a greater sense of ownership of the solution by the day to day process administrators.

Question your practices

Whenever someone new embarks on a journey, they have to give a great deal of thought to why they’re on the journey, and how they will get where they are going. As others follow, though, they tend to not be as inquisitive. They assume the practices of successful companies to be best practices and blindly follow. But the practices of these early adopters often aren’t the best. They develop a legacy that’s hard to change while companies in subsequent years improve the models. The biggest aren’t necessarily the best. The first aren’t necessarily the best.

Before you decide something is, ‘the best, you better ask yourself, why it’s the best.
Show me some data!