Last week’s blog entry discussed John Kotter’s new book “A Sense of Urgency.”  In the book, Kotter states that a key component in creating a true urgency for change is the relentless purging of non-important activities.  While he may not have realized it, this links directly to a key continuous improvement concept, the Pareto Principle.

The Pareto Principle, sometimes known as the 80/20 rule, is based on the common natural occurrence in which a large proportion of effects result from a critical few causes.  While the concept first gained popularity as a tool to help improve product and process quality - 80 percent of defects result from 20 percent of the causes - In today’s complicated and fast-paced world, it is proving to be an extremely flexible and powerful management tool that can be applied to many situations.

For instance, in his 2007 bestselling book “The 4-Hour Workweek,” Tim Ferriss employs the Pareto Principle when he recommends firing the 80 percent of your customers who take up the majority of your time and focusing on the 20 percent who make up the majority of your profits.

The Pareto Principle can be applied in almost any situation where there are a large number of items vying for attention - part SKUs, software bugs, potential Lean Six Sigma projects, change related activities, etc.  In these cases, treating every item with equal importance can overwhelm the system and make it difficult to make any progress.  Instead, apply the Pareto Principle so the critical few items receive the vast majority of attention.  The time and energy that would have been spent on the trivial many can now be fully focused on the things that really matter, resulting in the most impact with the least amount of effort.

I suggest using the Pareto Principle as an ongoing reminder to spend your time and energy on things that are really important.  Don’t just work hard, work hard on the right things.

The Black Belt class I’m teaching this week follows the traditional model in which each participant has a pre-assigned DMAIC project to work on in parallel to the four-month training period (four training weeks over four months). The assigned projects have two purposes:

1. Increase comprehension by enabling BB candidates to apply what they’ve recently learned to a real-world issue
2. Deliver results to the organization by fixing a key issue

While the vast majority of projects are related to important business issues, there are many that aren’t good fits as initial training projects. This is not an uncommon occurrence. These projects generally fall into four categories:

• Some are better fits to Design for Lean Six Sigma (DFLSS) than improvement (DMAIC)
• Some are very qualitative in nature, providing little opportunity for the participant to apply the suite of learned data analysis tools
• Some are scoped too large
• Some are simply “just do it” projects that require good project management skills to implement previously identified solutions, but don’t require the specialized skills of a Black Belt

While the DMAIC methodology is very robust and experienced Black Belts usually can navigate the above issues easily, they often are very problematic for inexperienced BBs. This results in longer project cycle times (as Belts struggle to apply the new concept); lower results (if tools are misapplied or details missed); high levels of BB frustration, and less learning (which can have huge consequences later – extending future cycle times and lowering results per project because tools are poorly applied).

Strong mentoring support – which also is often a gap – can help new Belts better navigate poor training projects, but why not start with the right projects?

While proper project selection is a critical success factor for any deployment, it is even more important for a Belt’s first project. Instead of just focusing on the short-term business need, the long-term benefits of picking projects that support and align with classroom learning also need to be part of the equation.

Key takeaway:

Balancing the need for short-term results with the long-term benefits of learning through application leads to better performing Belts, reduced project cycle times, and more results (in the short- and long-term).