How Project Managers Benefit from Lean and Six Sigma

WHITE PAPER
Good enough is not
good enough anymore
How Project Managers benefit from Lean and Six SigmaGood enough is not good enough anymore
The Empire State Building in New York City, with its 103 stories, 73 elevators, 2,500,000 feet of electrical cable and 6,500 windows, was built in 410 days. The framework rose at a rate of 4 ½ stories per week. That is nearly a floor a day. And According to the Six Sigma Academy, perhaps most impressive is the fact that it came in under budget and ahead of professionals with Black Belt certification save companies approximately $230,000 schedule. 410 days is one year, 45 days! It seems smaller scale projects today take per project and can complete four to six longer than 410 days and we currently have the technology available to do things projects per year. General Electric has faster than was possible 75 years ago. So, how did the project managers for the Em-estimated benefits on the order of $10 pire State Building do it? Obviously, they had to have been the best project manag-billion during its first five years of Six ers of the day. They not only applied the tenets of sound project management, but Sigma implementation. they also used something beyond that. They used Quality Management concepts found in Lean and Six Sigma.
Lean has it origins in the teaching and writings of TQM and JIT, which espouse the idea of 'delighting the customer through a continuous stream of value-add-ing activities.' The value stream defines the Lean Enterprise. The objectives of the Lean Enterprise are to identify and specify the value to the customer/consumer in all its products and services; to analyze and focus the value stream so that it does everything from product development and production to sales and service so ac-tivities that do not create value are removed; and to keep continuous flow to fulfill customer pull. From the time a customer need is recognized until it is satisfied, the process and all its elements must add value for the 'value stream' to be meaningful. The basic components of this Lean system are waste elimination, continuous flow, and customer pull.
Six Sigma literally refers to reduction of errors to six standard deviations from the mean value of a process output or task opportunities, or about 1 error in 300,000 opportunities. Motorola coined the phrase 'Six Sigma' because a process needs a minimum of six sigma's between the center of variability and the customer require-ments to ensure no more than four defects per million opportunities. To put that into perspective, if you were fortunate enough to live to age 75, you would have 1/3 of one meal that would be defective. That would be like getting cooked carrots that were served cold once in your whole lifetime; everything else would be fine (assuming one likes cooked carrots). Simply put, Six Sigma is a philosophy of relentless efforts to continuously reduce process and product variation. Today's project managers have the skills to define the scope, establish time estimates, provide detailed plans for task sequences, etc. They are also skilled in budgeting, cost containment, constraint management and risk management. But do they have the tools and techniques to reduce variation and defects, and attack waste? Some project managers do have these skills, others do not. According to the
2 Villanova University | World Leader in Online EducationCopyright © 2005 Villanova University | All rights reserved | www.VillanovaU.comBenefiting from Lean & Six Sigma
PMBOK®, control charts, cause-effect diagrams, and design of experiments offer some help, but they are only a few of the tools available to minimize variation. Six Sigma offers histograms, capability studies, chi-square tests, T-tests, F-tests, analysis of variance (ANOVA), multi-vari charts, and scatter diagrams, just to mention a few. The PMBOK® does not list value stream maps, 5-S, standard work, error proofing, total productive maintenance, overall equipment effectiveness, TRIZ, kaizen, or set-up reductions. A project manager needs all of these tools and Thousands of companies around the techniques. That's where Lean Six Sigma comes in.world have discovered the far-reaching benefits of Six Sigma. Professionals who Lean Six Sigma is just as the name would suggest: the marriage of Lean principles have earned a Six Sigma Black Belt have and Six Sigma methodologies. The first principle of Lean Six Sigma ... [download for more]