"Six Sigma is a leadership development tool..." - Interview with Dr Ronald Snee

One of the United States' leading experts in Six Sigma, and co-author of three Six Sigma books, Ronald D. Snee, PhD, is a highly-respected, well-known authority on designing and implementing Six Sigma solutions for a variety of organisational environments, most notably life sciences firms. He has more than 25 years of experience in process improvement, strategic planning, quality, management, statistics, and is a recognized leader in innovative Six Sigma applications.

Dr Ronald D Snee

Prior to joining Tunnell Consulting, he was Vice President, Process Assurance, at Bell Atlantic, and managed the first company-wide continuous improvement program at DuPont.

Dr. Snee has won more than 20 top awards and honors, including the American Society for Quality's Shewhart and Grant Medals and the 2006 Deming Lecturer Award.

A graduate of Washington and Jefferson College with a B.S. in Mathematics, Dr. Snee received his M.S. and PhD degrees in Applied and Mathematics Statistics from Rutgers University.

Dr Snee says: "Global competition and information technology are forcing changes in business around the world, levelling of the playing field, and making it easier for countries, organizations, and individuals to compete more successfully. As a result, the need to improve is more important than ever before, with many organizations undergoing massive change. Toyota, for example, has just passed General Motors as the largest auto maker.

"The need to improve will continue to be critical to success in the future. Improvement methodology has been developing over the last 100 years. In the past 25 years, much has been accomplished; Six Sigma, Lean Manufacturing and Lean Six Sigma have been very effective. "

What is your definition of Six Sigma as a methodology?

How do you see the future of Six Sigma?

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What is your definition of Six Sigma as a methodology?

As an improvement methodology, Six Sigma improves process performance. But it’s also a business strategy because the result is enhanced customer satisfaction and improved financial results. And it’s a leadership development tool, too, because people involved in Six Sigma projects enhance their leadership skills in the process.

How and when did your interest in Six Sigma start?

When I joined the DuPont Company in 1968, my first project was a process improvement study. I’ve always been interested in improving things and my interest has deepened over the years. In the 1980s and early 1990s, I was involved in Total Quality Management and continuous improvement at DuPont.

My work in Six Sigma proper began in 1995 when, as Vice President of Consulting at Joiner Associates, I led a team that designed and delivered Six Sigma Master Black Belt training for GE Capital. Since then, my work has focused on improvement using Lean Six Sigma and has involved 20 major deployments using that combined approach.

What do you think is the key to a successful Six Sigma deployment? And the main pitfalls to watch out for?

First, you need management leadership and involvement – not merely support and commitment. Second, because improvement and change are too important and too difficult to be left to anyone other than your best people, you should use top talent. Third, you have to create the requisite infrastructure, including roles, responsibilities, and training for Champions, MBB, BB, and GB; and management systems such as strategy and goal setting, project selection and completion, communication, recognition and reward, and management reviews at the project and Six Sigma initiative level. Fourth, you should employ a holistic improvement methodology that works in all parts of the business, for all types of improvement needs, and in all types of cultures.

Failure modes occur at both the management system and project levels. At the management systems level, failure can occur as a result of:

• Little leadership from top management including deployment plans – strategy, goals, and the like
• Poor or infrequent management reviews
• Top talent not used
• Poor support from Finance, IT, HR, Maintenance, QC Lab
• A focus on training rather than improvement
• Poor communication of the initiative and its progress
• Lack of appropriate recognition and reward

At the project selection and management level, failure can occur as a result of:

• Projects not tied to business goals and financial results
• Poorly defined project scope, metrics, and goals
• Wrong people assigned to projects
• Project leaders and teams having insufficient time to work on projects
• Many projects lasting more than 6 months
• Little technical support from Master Black Belt
• Large project teams – more than 4-6 persons per team
• Infrequent team meetings, which should meet at least every two weeks and weekly in the beginning.

You have co-authored three books on Six Sigma. What inspired you to write them?

Roger Hoerl and I co-wrote Statistical Thinking – Improving Business Performance, which discusses the nature of statistical thinking and the fundamentals and key tools of Six Sigma, for four reasons:

• To enable students to better understand and learn the use of statistical thinking and methods in the improvement of business and other types of processes
• To emphasize the importance of a process focus in the improvement of processes
• To enable business professionals to better use statistical thinking and methods to improve business performance. This book contains a chapter on “Business Processes” which cannot be found in any other statistics book.
• To present an alternative approach to the presentation of statistical thinking and methods by beginning at the conceptual level with the elements of statistical thinking – process, variation and data – and then introducing the tools as they are needed. While this approach differs greatly from many others, it has received many favourable comments from those who have used it.

With a book on fundamentals of process improvement completed and because improvement requires much more than statistical tools, Roger and I turned our attention to the deployment of Six Sigma in Leading Six Sigma. Based on experiences in deploying Six Sigma in more than 30 organizations, Leading Six Sigma is designed to help leaders use the approach to improve business performance. There is arguably no other book of its type on the market. Many books talk about the rationale for Six Sigma, its tools, and its benefits; but none of them provide the detailed, step-by-step approach of Leading Six Sigma.

While writing Leading Six Sigma, we realized that improving processes outside of manufacturing was sufficiently different to warrant a book dedicated to the subject. It is generally agreed that there is as much, or more, opportunity for improvement outside of manufacturing processes as there is within manufacturing processes. So we turned out attention to those issues in Six Sigma Beyond the Factory Floor: Deployment Strategies for Financial Services, Health Care, and the Rest of the Real Economy.

What is your advice for organisations looking to combine Six Sigma and Lean?

In the May 2007 issue of Six Sigma Forum Magazine, Roger Hoerl and I made these key points about integrating Lean and Six Sigma:

• Adopt DMAIC (Define, Measure, Analyze, Improve, and Control) as the organization’s problem-solving process, including using it to guide all Lean/Kaizen projects. Many agree that DMAIC offers the best problem-solving framework available today.
• Use a project portfolio approach to project selection and management, combining the Kaizen projects, Six Sigma projects, and “Quick Fix” projects into a single project portfolio. Because all of these projects compete for a common resource pool, they should be managed by a common plan and process.
• Assign a Black Belt or Master Black Belt to help guide each Kaizen event, because they typically have more training in how to run an improvement project than anyone else.
• Carefully analyze each improvement opportunity to determine if the source of the problem lies between process steps in issues such as material and information flow, or within the process steps as when a value-adding transformation step is not working properly, producing bad product, long cycle times, and high costs, or all three. Lean principles typically enable improvement between process steps, while Six Sigma helps improve performance within process steps. Process problems can of course occur both between and within process steps; hence the need to combine the methodologies into a single holistic methodology that can address all types of problems.
• Make analysis of process variation a consideration in all improvement projects because all measures of process performance – quality, cost, and delivery – are affected by process variation.

Are there other process/business improvement tools that work well with Six Sigma?

Baldrige assessment provides a good way to identify improvement opportunities from an organizational perspective. It is not unusual for the Baldrige assessment to identify opportunities missed by assessments of process performance.

Six Sigma and DMAIC also fit well with ISO 9000 as the improvement process to perform continuous improvement required by ISO 9000. Linking Six Sigma with Baldrige assessments and ISO 9000 are discussed in Leading Six Sigma.

With pressure to get results quicker, project delivery timescales are getting shorter. In Europe we have organisations running entire DMAIC projects in one month, and even one week. What is your take on this?

The time it takes to complete a project is a function of at least four things:

• Amount and frequency of management support
• Improvement approach that matches the complexity of the problem/project
• Capability of the improvement team
• Amount of time/day or week the team works on the project.

I’ve seen DMAIC projects done in a week or a month. I’ve seen DMAIC projects take a year. I’ve seen Kaizen projects take months as well. Proper diagnosis of the type of issue being addressed (flow, poor process step performance, or both) assigning the right people to the team and giving them the time to work on the project, and other needed management support will typically get the problem solved in the shortest possible time. I would note that it isn’t a methodology issue of whether to use Lean, Six Sigma, or Lean Six Sigma. Rather, it’s a matter of getting the right people with the right skills on the project and giving them the time to complete the project as quickly as possible.

Recently, publications such as "Stat-free Six Sigma" and "Six Sigma for Dummies" have claimed to simplify the Six Sigma process. Do you believe that the basic, rigid structure of DMAIC should remain intact for Six Sigma to be successful? Or is this simply evolution?

People are always looking for easier ways to do things and that is admirable. In the case of Six Sigma, some think that avoiding the use of statistics is a good way to accomplish this goal. But a key to success in Six Sigma has been the use of data to guide improvement and decision-making in general. In fact, the lack of such statistical rigor was a critical defect in most Total Quality Management initiatives. After all, the collection and analysis of data is fundamental to the scientific method.

The justification for using statistics goes like this: Excessive process variation typically results in poorer quality, higher costs, longer delivery times, and lower customer satisfaction. We collect data to identify, characterize, quantify, and reduce variation. Statistical tools are needed to analyse the data and identify the root cause of the variation. So if processes didn’t vary there would be no need for the statistical tools and no need for improvement and Six Sigma, for that matter. Unfortunately, process variation is a fact of life.

I don’t see DMAIC as a rigid structure. The five words to which the letters refer are easy to understand and accurately describe the problem- solving process. Define the problem; collect process measurements to understand the process; analyze the data to identify the root causes of the problem; identify and test improvements to mitigate the root causes; and put controls in place to hold the gains and keep the problem from occurring again. The tools selected to do the work are those needed to solve the problem. Not all tools are used on all the problems – the tools should fit the problem. Often, simple graphical analyses of the data identify the root cause, thus leading to improvements.

Certainly, organizations unaccustomed to using a structured, data-driven problem-solving framework like DMAIC will have to learn the methodology; but it can be learned by all disciplines. I have not seen a discipline that, after proper training, couldn’t use the Six Sigma approach. People vary in their skills and some have a greater aptitude for improvement work, but I find this to be true in all disciplines, including engineering.

Is there a difference in the way Six Sigma and Lean should be deployed depending on whether it is in a manufacturing or service environment?

Manufacturing and non-manufacturing improvement environments do differ in certain conceptual and technical respects. Conceptually, the service environment lacks tangible output or “product,” a process view of work, and an improvement mindset. Technically, the service environment usually lacks measurement systems and data, standardized work processes, and “engineers.” Service environments also tend to require a greater amount of human intervention in processes.

Despite those differences, manufacturing and services environments have much more in common. All work, whether in manufacturing or services, occurs through processes, and processes provide information and data that can be used to improve them. All processes have “hidden factories” that add cost and reduce the amount of output. All processes involve people, equipment, materials, measurement, methods or procedures; and they operate in an environment where there are sources of undesired variation, which is a common source of process problems.

Certainly, the language of the methodology, training materials, and training delivery should reflect the environment in which the training and improvement is taking place.

There are also some differences in the tools used in both environments. Gage R&R studies are used in both places, with continuous measurement Gage R&R being used more frequently in manufacturing and attribute Gage R&R used more in non-manufacturing projects. Design of experiments is used less outside of manufacturing today but I believe that will change in the future. Ledolter and Swersey provide a good discussion of the use of DOE in marketing and service operations.

In a recent article, you said: "Six Sigma... will need to expand to include change management principles". Could you elaborate on this?

Because all improvement methodologies necessarily entail change they require change management techniques for their successful implementation. Whether the change takes place in organizational structure, information technology strategy, or some other aspect of the way work is accomplished, it must be smoothly transitioned into the fabric of the enterprise. The more profound the change, the greater the need for change management.

Six Sigma, and the quality movement from which it springs, require the most profound change of all – not just a new way of doing things but a new way of thinking. Unlike other methodologies, Six Sigma reaches deep into each individual and fundamentally changes his or her way of looking at work and of problem solving.

The change management literature provides an extensive body of knowledge on change management concepts, methods, and tools. The methods and tools vary from the tactical, such as how to form and run a team, to the strategic, such as how to create and deploy a new strategic direction.
Given the magnitude of the change that Six Sigma requires, change management should be thoroughly prepared for from the first. Although it’s seldom remarked, GE, famous for its adoption and implementation of Six Sigma, had a change management system, called “Change Acceleration Process,” well established before Six Sigma was introduced.

By itself, Six Sigma will not bring about the thorough culture change that ambitious organizations seek – and seek to sustain. In fact, there is sometimes a tendency in the Six Sigma community to focus almost exclusively on statistical techniques and technical matters to the exclusion of larger organizational considerations. The result is a kind of unfocused virtuosity – as with all-star teams that come together for some dazzling individual performances and occasional victories but who fail to transform themselves into a genuine team.

Similarly, in the absence of change management, organizations may achieve some temporary successes but they will not achieve a new culture. Only when they harness the power of Six Sigma, through change management, to repeatedly achieve significant measurable results will they convert the revolution of the mind into a remaking of the culture.

Another frequent topic of discussion in the Six Sigma industry is management buy-in. Do you have any methods, tips or experience you can share with us on how best to obtain it?

First, you must identify both the process performance and financial impact of the overall improvement needs and the projects being undertaken. As quality pioneer Joe Juran told us long ago, the language of management is money. You must answer the question: “What financial impact will these improvements have on the business?”

Second, the projects must be aligned with business goals. This further establishes the importance and value of pursuing improvement to the business.

Third, management must understand their role in the improvement process. Support and commitment are necessary but not sufficient. Leadership and involvement are needed. Management roles must be defined and accepted by management. They must receive training on what their role is and what is expected of them.

Fourth, management must discharge these key responsibilities:

• Develop the deployment strategy, goals, and plans
• Constantly communicate the purpose and progress of the initiative
• Provide enabling resources, coaching, and counselling
• Periodically review projects and the overall initiative
• Recognize and reward success

How do you see the future of Six Sigma?

Six Sigma, when combined with Lean principles, is widely recognized as the best available approach to process and organizational improvement. The number of books and journal articles devoted to the subject continues to grow. The number of companies using the methodology is increasing. Specialty conferences devoted to the use of Six Sigma in areas such as sales and marketing, supply chain improvement, and pharmaceuticals are being held.

Six Sigma is about improvement, and there will always be a need for improvement in a dynamic, ever changing world of new customer needs, new markets, innovation, social changes, and more. Further, the performance of processes tends to deteriorate over time, even under the best of circumstances. This constant change brings with it a need to improve the existing processes that you use to serve your customers and the need to develop new processes to serve new customer needs.

Six Sigma is the current phase of improvement methodology that has been evolving in the business world over the last 100 years, beginning with the work of Frederick Taylor and continuing through Statistical Quality Control, Quality Circles, Quality Assurance, Statistical Process Control, Total Quality Management, ISO 9000, and Reengineering. A similar evolution of the tools used by Six Sigma (e.g. controls charts, design of experiments, failure modes and effects analysis) can be traced back over the past 100 years. Six Sigma is thus the latest step along the way to better and better approaches to improvement.

Some current and future trends include the expansion from manufacturing to other functions like business processes, R&D, information technology, sales and marketing, engineering and maintenance, and service. Industries recently adopting the methodology include pharmaceuticals, biotech, health care, and finance. The US government, including the US Army, Navy, and Air Force, is also using Lean Six Sigma.

Six Sigma will also increasingly be used to drive culture change and help develop leaders. Many companies, including GE, Honeywell, DuPont, American Standard and 3M, are using Six Sigma as a leadership development tool. Jack Welch observes in his book with Suzy Welch that "Perhaps the biggest but most unheralded benefit of Six Sigma is its capacity to develop a cadre of great leaders.” In other words, Six Sigma is being used as both a process improvement tool and a leadership development tool.

The methodology will continue to grow and evolve. To make Six Sigma even more effective, there are five key things we can do:

1. View it as a leadership development tool.
2. Improve project identification methods.
3. Combine it with Lean manufacturing tools and principles.
4. Make it part of how we work.
5. Streamline its deployment.

Given the potential of these improvements to make a powerful improvement methodology even more effective, the future of Six Sigma is indeed very bright.

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Further reading:

Dr Snee has published numerous articles and is co-author of three Six Sigma books:

Hoerl, R. W. and R. D. Snee (2002) Statistical Thinking – Improving Business Performance, Duxbury Press, Pacific Grove, CA.

Snee, R. D. and R. W. Hoerl (2003) Leading Six Sigma – A Step-by-Step Guide Based on Experience with GE and Other Six Sigma Companies, Financial Times Prentice Hall, New York, NY.

Snee, R. D. and R. W. Hoerl (2005) Six Sigma Beyond the Factory Floor – Deployment Strategies for Financial Services, Health Care, and the Rest of the Real Economy, Financial Times Prentice Hall, NY, NY.

Snee, R. D. (2004) “Future of Six Sigma”, Six Sigma Forum Magazine, August 2004, 39-40.

Snee, R. D. (2004) “Six Sigma: The Evolution of 100 Years of Business Improvement Methodology”, International Journal of Six Sigma and Competitive Advantage, Vol. 1, No. 1, 2004, 4-20.

Snee, R. D. (2005) “When Worlds Collide: Lean and Six Sigma”, Quality Progress, September 2005, 63-65

Snee, R. D. (2006) “Six Sigma – What Can Improve Six Sigma’s Effectiveness?”, Six Sigma Forum Magazine, February 2006, 12-13

Snee, R. D. (2007) “The Six Sigma Approach to Improvement and Organizational Change”, Appeared in the Change Handbook: The Definitive Resource on Today's Best Methods for Engaging Whole Systems. San Francisco, CA: Berrett-Koehler Publishers, Chapter 47, 2007.

Snee, R. D. (2007) “Integrating Lean and Six Sigma – A Holistic Approach” (with Roger W. Hoerl), Six Sigma Forum Magazine, May 2007.

Other reading:

Ledolter, J. and A. J. Swersey (2007) Testing 1-2-3: Experimental Design with Applications in Marketing and Service Operations, Stanford University Press, Stanford, CA.