Behaviour and Cultural Change Towards Lean Six Sigma

Getting a business improvement programme ingrained within the every day culture of an organisation continues to be a relevant issue within the community, and it was given a lot of attention at the conference.

Behavioural change is not just creating the awareness of LSS at an organisational level, but in trying to make it work within functions.

Dr Radouane Oudrhiri, CTO of Systonomy, and Dr Michael Philip VP of SAP Sigma gave a joint presentation entitled The Software Solution: Integrating Six Sigma and Value-Based Software Engineering. Dr Oudrhiri highlighted that 23% of software projects fail to deliver any working software at all. For those that do deliver, on average 46% are over budget, 63% over schedule and 67% of the projects delivered the originally planned features.

Dr Philip went on to demonstrate how by following a DMAIC project he was able to select Earned Value Management System (EVMS) as a solution and gain earned value in Software development projects by tracking the three main parameters; scope, time and budget. The results from the pilot highlighted that forecast-accuracy of project delays and cost variances were improved by a factor of two. It is assumed that there will be a saving of about 5% of the operational development budget due to improved buffer-management. The success of the pilot has led to management agreeing to roll-out the EVMS across the business unit by 2007.

From an organisational perspective, it is vital that Six Sigma and Lean are viewed as permanent additions to the company philosophy and not simply as ‘quick fixes’. Many Six Sigma programmes have encountered stiff resistance in their attempts at changing an organisation’s – and, consequently, the individual’s - behaviour.

Tina Hüsing and Rick Morrow of Motorola gave an accomplished presentation about Changing Paradigms to Enable Lean Six Sigma Results that dealt with the issue of culture change, claiming that it is the biggest challenge facing Green Belts. They pointed out that Toyota, often seen as the model for Lean implementation, don't have belts as such, but everyone within the organisation is trained in quality to equivalent GB level at least. Everyone is also engaged in Kaizen, and as a result one of Toyota’s key measures is that last year they had over 600,000 new ideas from employees.

Motorola have taken on this philosophy so that in addition to their Belt Programme, they also have what they call “QualityIQ”, where they ask all their employees to pursue a ‘white badge’ certification that offers them an understanding of the organisation’s approach to quality. The employees are then given the opportunity to move on to a ‘yellow badge’, offering functional training that can be used in their specific jobs.

Involving everyone in the organisation in some kind of quality improvement programme ensures that the mentality of the company changes to a one that is focused on quality. Luc Vander Beken of BMG called it the difference between “…fire-fighting and fire-prevention”. Similarly, Jeff Ayland described how Network Rail are striving to move from “…a 'find & fix' mentality into a proactive 'predict & prevent' operation”.

Christoph Remmert, of SKF GmbH Germany, presented on Global Deployment: evolving a flexible approach to accommodate variance in geographical cultures. Mr Remmert emphasised the need to determine the local critical “x” to the Six Sigma implementation, and suggested a Cause & Effect Matrix for providing an understanding of which “x” needed to be addressed to make Six Sigma work locally. At SKF, they develop a local deployment plan for each area taking into account regional cultural differences to ensure a good deployment, which then eases the integration of Six Sigma into the culture. For this local plan to work, it is essential that local management are fully trained so that they can efficiently translate the global message into the local dialect. Further details of Mr Remmert's presentation can be found in the appendix to this section.

The need to allow for regional variances was also raised as an important aspect in Voice of the Customer collation, discussed more fully elsewhere in this report. It was made clear at the conference that any deployment of Lean Six Sigma should be truly global; both in terms of making all of the organisation’s employees aware of the importance and benefits of quality management, but also tailoring the programme to meet specific geographical needs.