Change Your Business
Use a systems approach to become six sigma Savvi
The pressure to improve is nonstop. And it's everywhere. It makes us constantly reinvent ourselves - and it constantly drives our businesses to change. All improvement initiatives strive to improve efficiencies and performance, and make us more competitive. And no toolset is more proven and reliable than six sigma.
But while the deployment of six sigma can be the most powerful capability ever unleashed for effecting performance breakthrough, it requires a systems approach to really work. Traditional deployments - where waves of black belts are trained to scour the company in search of defects - are effective to a point.
The real power and advantage is in developing a management system that that aligns people, processes and tools to bring predictability, consistency and control to the business.
The systems approach to predictability, consistency and control
With business reinvention as the goal, six sigma is a large part of what can get you there - but only if you know how to use it and leverage it to your advantage.
To engage in reinvention and culture change, an organization must intimately understand its operating environment - how innovations, trends and developments affect what customers want and the way the business creates more value over time. Perpetually generating value for customers and shareholders on an ever-increasing basis is the call for the business savvy today, as it will be tomorrow.
While particular changes have particular implications for particular organizations at particular times, all great companies engage in a constant and global drive toward excellence. This means perpetually developing better strategic intent and superior ways of achieving that intent.
Today's challenges are multifold for businesses of all sizes, structures and types. No matter what business you're in, you're dealing with the adoption of new technologies, and with understanding how your competitors are leveraging technologies to their advantage, or even to their detriment.
Other new realities include economic and workforce globalization, Sarbanes-Oxley, outsourcing and terrorism - all of which present themselves to different organizations in different ways, and all of which demand a thoughtful and engineered response.
Whether your response is to improve performance using six sigma, or any other tool or set of tools, you will need a proactive management system that is capable of functioning under changing business circumstances.
The Savvi way to achieve predictability, consistency and control in a business is to foster systematic management, productive learning, thoughtful intervention and complete culture change.
Manage systematically
A six sigma intervention works best when it's dovetailed into an effective management system that aligns people, processes and tools in a controlled and predictable manner - with direct aim at business goals and objectives.
The key is to fit the six sigma tool into the total scheme of a management system by focusing on business strategies and leveraging six sigma to improve your core business processes.
True to its reputation, six sigma is a power tool for solving stubborn operational problems and improving business performance. But training people and turning them loose on six sigma projects, in the absence of an effective management system and overall process structure, is not an optimal approach.
Learn productively
Any effective performance improvement drive requires the workforce to adopt new values, behaviors, capabilities and, generally speaking, new ways of conducting business.
This in turn requires new attitudes, skills and knowledge - which are instilled through various communication and learning forums.
The problem is that not all training programs are the same. Nor are they optimized for consistent and low-cost delivery across borders, boundaries, cultures and organizations.
Those who are savvy about training know how to get the right knowledge and skills to all the right people in the right place at the right time. They know how to:
- Configure knowledge quickly
- Deploy knowledge broadly
- Enable multi-modal learning
- Maximize learning ROI
Think before doing
The traditional path of a six sigma initiative has been to first lead, then do: first stimulate change, then execute according to a stepwise methodology.
Only after years of experience do practitioners internalize the guiding principles of six sigma, and apply those principles as second nature in everything they do.
What you really want is people thinking like change agents as quickly as possible, even before they step into their leadership roles as champions, black belts and other belts.
You want them internalizing six sigma thinking before leading or applying the DMAIC methodology.
When someone says "work smarter, don't work harder," what does that really mean? It means there's a better way to think than the way you think now, inasmuch as there's a better to do what you do.
New knowledge transfer techniques make it easy and inexpensive to instill six sigma thinking in every single employee of an organization.
Change the culture
Total culture change happens when you create a learning organization that leaves no worker behind, and that makes every worker a source of valuable knowledge, innovation and competitive advantage.
True culture change happens when you rally the workforce around an imperative, and make each singular employee feel like a critical and respected part of achieving that imperative.
In large part, total and true culture change is accomplished by distributing the motivation, skills and tools of change to very large numbers of employees through an efficient and modern knowledge transfer system.
In times past, the goal was to "change the corporate culture" - but the knowledge, mechanics and tools of widespread change were not pervasively available.
Today, every employee in every part of a global enterprise has access to the same knowledge and tools. In this environment, even the smallest of individual contributors know what they can do to move the corporation.