What is Lean Six Sigma?

Lean Six Sigma, a management buzzword that seems to persist and many don't understand. But what is it and how is it related to Project Management? Lean Six Sigma is an approach for Process Improvement Projects, combining many different conceptual tools depending on the situation. Essentially Lean Six Sigma is a fusion of two ideas: "Lean" and "Six Sigma":

Lean
Lean is a approach that seeks to eliminate Waste during a production process; it originated in Japan on the production lines of Toyota. It tries to make a process as efficient as possible, to reduce excessive costs and time - meaning the customer get the product they want faster and cheaper, the company improves their margin. It identifies seven categories of Waste which should be investigated and eliminated (though others have since been suggested):

1. Overproduction - It puts more pressure on the production process and reduces flexibility to change production
2. Waiting - Any time delay adds has a knock on effect on the final time to delivery
3. Transporting - Moving stuff costs time and money and provides no return
4. Over Processing - Gold plating additional features which aren't being requested don't provide a return
5. Inventory - Undesired costs to create and store products
6. Motion - Needless movement add time to processes
7. Defects - Obvious issues that need fixing

Lean will often start by interrogating the Process and conducting Value Stream Mapping and producing Value-Add Maps/Charts to show in detail what value every step in the process brings. It then used changes call Kaizen to fix these; small incremental changes that generate quick wins, made repeatedly to improve the overall process

Six Sigma
Six Sigma looks to improve the quality of the output of a process by reducing the variation of the output; it was introduced at Motorola in 1986 and resulted in $16 billion of savings. The term sigma comes from the statistical concept of standard deviation of the normal distribution; if points are normally scattered about a mean then one sigma is defined such that it would capture 68% of data points, 2 sigma would capture 95%, 3 sigma 99.7% etc. Six Sigma has a strong statistical focus, and defined in purely statistical terms a Six Sigma process is one in which 99.99966% of all opportunities to produce some feature of a part are statistically expected to be free of defects.

Six Sigma uses a lifecycle called DMAIC, that has five distinct phases each consisting of an array of tools that can be employed - depending on the nature of the project:

• Define - What are you actually trying to do? Define the Problem, the associated Goals, who in involved, the key measures and the rough timescales
• Measure - Quantitatively what is the current performance? Define a measurement plan and associated operational definitions, and check the quality of your measurement systems
• Analyse - Interrogate the data with statistical techniques to understand the process and it's performance. Understand weaknesses and root causes.
• Improve - Identify potential solutions, plan and implement them
• Control - Monitor implemented changes to confirm they have the desired effect

A Lean Six Sigma project can be a really effective way of delivering Process Improvement Projects - a distinct methodology from PRINCE2 or PMBOK. Alternatively, if you are managing mainstream project using either of these methodologies, you could then run a LSS Project using DMAIC on the across the Project processes themselves e.g. your demand management process, testing processes etc.

What are your experiences of Lean Six Sigma and DMAIC, good and bad? Let us know in the Comments!

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