Pinoy Entrep

Six Sigma projects bring about great improvement in organizations. It is necessary to sustain these improvements – and that requires efforts for continual improvement initiatives to be undertaken at various levels. This helps organizations get a competitive edge over others, fine tune their processes to customer needs and sustain themselves in tough business conditions. There are various methodologies such as DMAIC and DMADV used, but companies sometimes do not achieve the expected results in terms of employee morale and customer satisfaction. There is a variation in levels of success amongst Six Sigma adopters. There are issues that need to be addressed to achieve success in the change deployment process.

The foundation of support for Six Sigma must be strong amongst the employees and management. It is necessary for all parties to understand the current state of the business as well as the desired goals of the business. Additionally, speed and time often present a common problem, because of timeframes imposed at the onset of the process. The time schedule is honored, while certain activities which must be completed carefully and correctly are overlooked. The end result is that of a speedy job, but desired results are not achieved.

For the Six Sigma project deployment to be successful in a real sense, the aim should be to achieve a common objective shared by all. A team cannot bring about change in a short timespan. They have to communicate well to get the support of everyone involved. Further, they need to ensure that the pace of improvement activities is maintained. The entire workforce has to be galvanized to come together to achieve progress. If the systemic constraints that limited progress in the older system are not eliminated, new roadmaps, tools and techniques cannot make miracles. This would be a case of new vision with old constraints – making it difficult to achieve anything. Such roadblocks should be addressed in the beginning of the project, which will help boost morale and provide momentum to overcome all types of hurdles throughout the organization.

Successful management of large projects should allow for their division into smaller projects. This will allow team members to achieve short term goals, thus boosting their morale and confidence. Higher morale will lead to a greater chance for success and profits. Any initiative must be required to produce some measurable economic benefit, and care must be taken to assure that all processes are correlated to ultimate bottom line success.

Strong leadership in an organization is important as well, and is not defined by quantity, but quality. If change is to come to the company, each project needs to have leaders who can stimulate breakthroughs and transform cultures. Minimizing risk and bringing efficient change must be the goal. Upper management must understand and addresse these issues if expected results are to be achieved by the Six Sigma deployment.