I've Gone Lean Six Sigma
Claire Berlinski, Ed. ·
Aug 12, 2011 at 8:18am
I figured out how to do it from the Internet. It seems pretty straightforward, so I don't think we really need to pay to send all of our government on a Lean Six Sigma workshop, frankly.
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Dec '10
Re: I've Gone Lean Six Sigma
Agree with Gingrich. I've implemented it in numerous companies, and run many workshops myself. I like the Lean part, which is about 80% of the gain with the first 20% of the effort. These are techniques implemented in the Toyota production system. The first and most important part of the lesson "keep it simple". My concern is that the whole initiative will turn into a consultant boondoggle and we'll end up with a new department of six sigma paid for by tax dollars. Just get rid of waste wherever you see it. Competition is the best way to get rid of waste so I would get rid of collective bargaining and privatize as many services as possible first, as suggested by Gingrich on many occasions, let the companies figure out how to do it leaner.
Re: I've Gone Lean Six Sigma
But don't they know rule #2 of Carneynomics? Inefficiency is the second most powerful mechanism for combating unemployment.
Re: I've Gone Lean Six Sigma
Lean Claire: Of course it will.
Jan '11
Re: I've Gone Lean Six Sigma
I agree with Steve from Texas. Hugh Hewitt interviewed a Defense Dept. Official (I can't recall who), but it was interesting how they were able to alter carrier operations to reduce down times, maintain operational combat rediness and it saved quite a bit (hundreds of millions per carrier group). What was interesting though was that the military appeared to be the only government sector utilizing this process.
I'd been involved with a six sigma working group at work and found what was most useful was how much one learns about your operation from doing it-I was astounded how much we worked at cross-purposes and how much duplication there was. Our process flowchart was shortened somewhat but ultimately stalled out. I don't think we had the buy in from above to really affect change. It comes off as a nice sounding phrase but like alot of these comissions - if you don't implement their reccomendations, you're just spinning your wheels.
Sep '10
Re: I've Gone Lean Six Sigma
Claire Berlinski, Ed.
Lean Claire: Of course it will. · Aug 12 at 8:43am
Is Lean Claire like Laconic Claire but with less hoplite and more Pythagoras?
Jun '10
Re: I've Gone Lean Six Sigma
Precisely. My 25-year career in a very large corporation taught me that stuff like this (even though it makes sense) becomes a boondoggle for consultants.
There are no silver bullets. There is no new way of analyzing things that will solve the problem other than this one: figure out what you're doing; decide which of those don't make any sense; get rid of them. Fancy management fads are merely variations of this simple common sense formula. [A formula, by the way, that is largely absent from government].
Edited on Aug 12, 2011 at 9:11amDec '10
Re: I've Gone Lean Six Sigma
Claire Berlinski, Ed.
Lean Claire: Of course it will. · Aug 12 at 8:43am
Hey people! Back off on dissing us consultants!
http://www.despair.com/consulting.html
Jun '10
Re: I've Gone Lean Six Sigma
"If you see a snake, just kill it. Don't appoint a committee on snakes." (H. Ross Perot)
Dec '10
Re: I've Gone Lean Six Sigma
As they say in Alcoholics Anonymous, it works if you work it.
The Great Adventure!
Hey people! Back off on dissing us consultants!
http://www.despair.com/consulting.html · Aug 12 at 9:35am
You beat me to it!
Dec '10
Re: I've Gone Lean Six Sigma
The King Prawn: As they say in Alcoholics Anonymous, it works if you work it.
The Great Adventure!
Hey people! Back off on dissing us consultants!
http://www.despair.com/consulting.html · Aug 12 at 9:35am
You beat me to it! · Aug 12 at 10:46am
To steal from Dilbert - (Dogbert to the Pointy Haired Manager) "I like to con people. I also like to insult them. If you combine 'con' and 'insult' you get 'consult'. I'm here to consult you."
Aug '10
Re: I've Gone Lean Six Sigma
I'm trained in Six Sigma, and I've run a number of Six Sigma projects. Six Sigma works very well when analyzing and optimizing processes such as factory assembly lines which can be broken down into numbers, allowing various mathematical tools to be applied to them. When applied to 'soft' skills such as office management, it rarely works.
In addition, Six Sigma is only going to help if you have the freedom to actually change things based on the results of the analysis. Trying to apply it to a sclerotic bureaucracy where change is met with obstinacy and people can't be fired or easily re-assigned is simply a waste of time.
Also, with Six Sigma it's very easy to produce false 'savings' through the process of garbage in-garbage out analysis. At one time, everyone in our company was forced to do a Six Sigma project every year to accelerate 'savings'. Every project had to document how much it would 'save'. Needless to say, this requirement created a lot of garbage projects that somehow managed to find big savings numbers - which somehow never materialized on the bottom line.
Oct '10
Re: I've Gone Lean Six Sigma
Sorry to get all engineer on you, folks, but six sigma (6σ) has a precise definition in statistics: six standard deviations from the mean. In terms of manufacturing, this means that of the products you ship, 99.99966% are free of defects, or, otherwise stated, only 3.4 products per million have problems.
Are we giggling yet?
No? Okay, bear with me. To reliably measure a six sigma defect rate, you would need to have shipped tens or hundreds of millions of identical products, made with the same processes and delivered to a homogeneous group of customers with the same criteria for evaluating success or failure. To how many products does that apply these days?
Let me put this into concrete terms. Suppose your Internet Service Provider (ISP) made you a guarantee of six sigma uptime for your Internet connection. This would work out to a maximum mean downtime of around 107 seconds per year—less than two minutes. Do you think your ISP can guarantee you this? Would they contract to provide it, notwithstanding exogenous events, and at what cost?
Feb '11
Re: I've Gone Lean Six Sigma
I'm inside the belly of the beast, there are attempts to do six sigma etc. Sorry, the problems are not going to be solved by something like that, unless the problem your trying to solve involves consultant/contractor bank accounts.