Annoyed about transactional six-sigma
It’s interesting to see that Six Sigma is being applied more frequently in transactional environments:
Buffalo, NY (WBEN) – Throughout his successful campaign for County Executive, Republican Chris Collins spoke often of Six Sigma as one of the primary tools to get Erie County moving toward a more prosperous future.
Although this clearly upsets a few people:
I don’t like the idea of running government like a business but the six sigma sounds too much like someone out to make a profit whereas government is about providing services to taxpayers of which they pay taxes for.
And
The whole Six Sigma analysis process is time consuming, resource oriented and costly. There are probably thousands of human-driven operational processes resulting from services provided by the county. To improve them all would take several lifetimes.
As Michael Marx says:
Proclaiming the desire to be a Six Sigma county as candidate Collins has done, only implied that he’ll start looking at processes from a business improvement perspective, using Six Sigma tools to do it. No one becomes Six Sigma overnight. GE has hundreds of thousands of human driven processes, and that didn’t keep Jack Welch from his Six Sigma objectives.
To me this is just a case of becoming jaded by political rhetoric?
Transactional Six Sigma to me simply boils down to: All work is a process, all processes have variability and all processes create data that explains variability. Analyse the data to make improvements and sustain these!
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Comments
By Shaun Sayers on November 14th, 2007 at 8:16 am
There are a few things that I find incredible about the matters highlighted in this posting.
Firstly I love the quote about the belief that government should not be run like a business. A classic. The good news for this person is that it rarely is, so no need to worry
Secondly from our “certified green belt who knows a thing or two about six sigma”. This person embarks on a diatribe that describes the inappropriateness of the approach, comparing it to manufacturing, and simultaneously identifying that it is an inappropriate comparison. Time consuming it may be, but the time and money spent on managing risk should always be in proportion to the risk itself. There is an inference here that there are no government processes that are worth a lot of QA time on the basis that the impact of a problem does not warrant the effort in trying to prevent it. Hmmm. This actually strikes at the heart of a lot of what is wrong with the mind set of many organisations, not just Government. And those organisations that launch headlong into heavy handed and disproportionate risk reduction strategies (some involving six sigma) only add fuel to these arguments
We can get caught up in skewed discussions about various statistical and non-statistical approaches, however if the fundamentals of cause and effect, cost of failure and cost versus benefit evaluation are not understood we are always going to have problems. Unfortunately I have found many organisations diving headlong into six sigma before achieving a fundamental grasp of these principles. And guess what?
By Shaun Sayers on November 14th, 2007 at 2:16 am
There are a few things that I find incredible about the matters highlighted in this posting.
Firstly I love the quote about the belief that government should not be run like a business. A classic. The good news for this person is that it rarely is, so no need to worry
Secondly from our “certified green belt who knows a thing or two about six sigma”. This person embarks on a diatribe that describes the inappropriateness of the approach, comparing it to manufacturing, and simultaneously identifying that it is an inappropriate comparison. Time consuming it may be, but the time and money spent on managing risk should always be in proportion to the risk itself. There is an inference here that there are no government processes that are worth a lot of QA time on the basis that the impact of a problem does not warrant the effort in trying to prevent it. Hmmm. This actually strikes at the heart of a lot of what is wrong with the mind set of many organisations, not just Government. And those organisations that launch headlong into heavy handed and disproportionate risk reduction strategies (some involving six sigma) only add fuel to these arguments
We can get caught up in skewed discussions about various statistical and non-statistical approaches, however if the fundamentals of cause and effect, cost of failure and cost versus benefit evaluation are not understood we are always going to have problems. Unfortunately I have found many organisations diving headlong into six sigma before achieving a fundamental grasp of these principles. And guess what?
By admin on November 14th, 2007 at 6:11 pm
I agree totally! You should be a consultant …
By admin on November 14th, 2007 at 12:11 pm
I agree totally! You should be a consultant …
By lotro gold on November 11th, 2008 at 11:00 pm
Firstly I love the quote about the belief that government should not be run like a business. A classic. The good news for this person is that it rarely is, so no need to worry.
Secondly from our “certified green belt who knows a thing or two about six sigma”. This person embarks on a diatribe that describes the inappropriateness of the approach, comparing it to manufacturing, and simultaneously identifying that it is an inappropriate comparison. Time consuming it may be, but the time and money spent on managing risk should always be in proportion to the risk itself. There is an inference here that there are no government processes that are worth a lot of QA time on the basis that the impact of a problem does not warrant the effort in trying to prevent it. Hmmm. This actually strikes at the heart of a lot of what is wrong with the mind set of many organisations, not just Government. And those organisations that launch headlong into heavy handed and disproportionate risk reduction strategies (some involving six sigma) only add fuel to these arguments