A client CEO recently suggested he wanted to demonstrate his commitment to the company’s Process Excellence efforts by participating as a team member in one of the organization’s next Lean Events. This approach is fairly common. Executives often participate in Green Belt courses, some will act as Executive Sponsors for one or more projects led by Belts within their organization, and a few will even lead their own DMAIC projects. These types of highly visible activities usually result in the intended increase of organizational change momentum, but it is often only short lived.  Why?  Because the Executives are only “walking the walk.”

Oftentimes after the act of demonstrating their commitment, except for the occasional progress review, organization leaders revert back to their old familiar behaviors and work routines. They delegate the pursuit of Process Excellence to those beneath them in the organizational hierarchy. For Process Excellence to weave deep and permanent roots in an organization, leaders need to do more than “walk the walk,” they need to “live the life.”

“Living the life” entails making Process Excellence (including Lean and Six Sigma) a part of everything you do.  It includes:

• Personally striving to continually improve the efficiency and effectiveness of all your daily activities.
• Employing Process Excellence as the primary vehicle for achieving the organization’s strategic objectives.
• Utilizing Process Excellence concepts to improve decision making, such as applying the Pareto principle to focus on the critical few items; responding appropriately to special-cause and common-cause variation; asking to see the statistical significance when someone says “something has happened;” and drilling down to identify deep root causes rather than fixing symptoms of poor performance.
• Continuing to investment in Process Excellence, even when times are tough.
• Rigorously monitoring Process Excellence progress and results, and taking appropriate action to improve performance when necessary.
• Linking a large component of company leaders’ compensation to the internalization and effective application of Process Excellence within their organizations.

To gain a better understanding of how much, as a leader, you “live” the values needed to sustain Process Excellence - or Lean Six Sigma - success, download and complete the assessment contained in the following link:

http://proficiencysystems.com/media/Leadership_Self_Assessment_Form%20v1.0%20(090608)_.pdf

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.

Reversing the trend of underperforming Green Belt deployments is one that demands comprehensive change rather than a few tweaks. There’s no reason GB-like approaches can’t be successful as long as organizations are willing to accept the premise that the status quo isn’t working and fundamental change is required. To start, a fundamentally different project structure called a Lean Event is in order.

The traditional GB approach calls for team members to work part-time on their DMAIC project, oftentimes with more than a week between project activities. When it’s time to reconvene, valuable time is wasted getting back up to speed, and project meetings often are poorly attended or get rescheduled because of issues with members’ regular duties. Paralysis by analysis is another common pitfall of traditional project approaches, as statistical studies often take precedence over actionable elimination of waste.

Lean Events emphasize action over analysis, stripping away the busy work and focusing on the key DMAIC tasks. After thorough preparation, the team members immerse themselves in the project for a week. The full-time nature of the Event week enables teams to focus in an uninterrupted manner on making real, lasting improvements. Interestingly, once scheduled, the looming Event date is a major motivating factor in reducing project cycle time. With it being scheduled so visibly on the organization’s calendar, team members and supporting stakeholders tend to do whatever it takes to hit the targeted date.

A key benefit to the Lean Event model is it does a much better job at weeding out low-priority projects early. Affected leadership must fully support the importance of the project, since they’ll need to give up resources for the 100-percent dedication required during the Event.

The Lean Event approach obviously compresses project timelines significantly. But this isn’t just about saving time – Lean Events produce sustainable results faster, make companies more agile in reacting to changing priorities, and create more cycles of learning for team members.

One pharmaceutical industry client recently converted to this approach and successfully completed 80 percent of its projects within 4.5 months at a very conservative bottom-line impact average of $150,000 per project. I challenge anyone to find a traditional GB deployment that successful!

While the Lean Event project approach is the most visible element of this new model to get the most from Green Belts – or their Lean Belt equivalents – true deployment success requires more. The additional factors impacting success will be discussed in future blog entries.

What are the primary causes of poor Green Belt (GB) performance?

The fundamental issue making Green Belt success so challenging is the part-time nature of the role. GBs are typically expected to lead Lean Six Sigma (LSS) process improvement projects on top of their normal job duties. This arrangement can quickly relegate the LSS project to the back burner whenever anything more pressing comes up – especially if the project isn’t aligned directly to a critical issue within the GB’s work area. While proper project selection and scoping is a critical success factor for all LSS efforts – including those with full-time Black Belts (BBs) – it is even more critical in the world of the part-time GB.

Even when the project is critical and properly linked to the GB’s area of responsibility, success can still be elusive. The first few cycles of applying what was learned in the classroom to a real-world project can be a daunting task. Unfortunately, GBs are often expected to successfully navigate the technical and political challenges of projects in a vacuum – without the needed support infrastructure around them. Master Black Belt-led project coaching support is typically targeted at helping Black Belts, with GB coaching relegated to inexperienced BBs and applied with minimal rigor. Similarly, Sponsor and Deployment Champion support of GBs is also commonly lacking.

These issues often lead to excessive project cycle times and delayed results, which can turn into a vicious cycle. As project activities get delayed – and time moves on – it becomes increasingly difficult to achieve meaningful results. Team members often lose focus, and more importantly, business priorities often change. What was most important six months ago is oftentimes less important today.

With all of these issues, it’s no wonder only a small percentage of projects ever find their way to completion – and an equally small portion of expected benefits are realized.

The next blog entry will discuss a proven solution to help organizations combat these issues and get the most from their LSS resources.

Green Belts (GBs) – trained to lead projects on a part-time basis in parallel with their day-to-day jobs – are ever-present with Lean Six Sigma (LSS) deployments, but how many organizations are truly satisfied with the results they deliver? While I can point to many successful LSS deployments, I honestly have not come across an example of a truly successful GB deployment!

Instead, here’s what I see:

• Excessive GB project cycle times, with averages of >100 days to complete the Define phase and projects taking three to four times longer to complete than originally anticipated. In some cases, only a minority portion of GB projects are ever completed.
• Certification rates of less than 20 percent of those trained appears to be the norm rather than the exception.
• In the last year, I have seen multiple organizations with mature LSS deployments (3-5 years down the path) conduct DMAIC projects to improve GB process performance. Unfortunately, none of the projects resulted in much improvement.

These observations have led me to the conclusion that the standard GB model is fundamentally flawed; but interestingly, since it is a relatively ‘standard model,’ organizations are oftentimes reluctant to make radical changes to it. In the meantime, many consultancies, and increasingly colleges and universities, are more than happy to keep training and pumping GBs out of their belt factories.

The next series of blog entries will explore the root causes for poor Green Belt performance and provide recommended alternative approaches to help organizations get the most from their LSS resources.