Project Selection and Review Questions
17. How do I select good projects?
This question was discussed at length in chapters 4 and 5, so we will only summarize the key points here. First, you want projects to be strategically chosen based on well thought out criteria, rather than selected in an ad-hoc manner. The two main focus areas should be current strategic initiatives, and in any areas in which the organization is experiencing pain, such as a serious complaint by a critical customer. Process baseline and entitlement data is very helpful here.
In general, you should be maintaining a project hopper that identifies potential projects, reviews them, and selects the most promising projects ahead of time. In this way, once a Black Belt completes a project, there will be other pre-screened projects waiting to be done. The project hopper avoids “downtime” for Black Belts, and also helps prevent the selection of poor projects, which could happen if Black Belts are rushed in selecting their next assignments. The Six Sigma organization is responsible for maintaining the project hopper. We do not recommend each Black Belt selecting his or her own projects.
Some general criteria for selecting projects are:
Clear connection to business priorities
Solution to problem of major importance to the organization
Reasonable scope— doable in four to six months (if not–split up into several smaller projects)
Clear quantitative measures of success
Support and approval of management.
18. How do I properly scope a project?
As we've noted throughout this book, proper planning is key to the success of Six Sigma projects, and to the overall Six Sigma effort. The project scope is a critical component of the charter, your contract that also defines the problem to be addressed, goals and objectives, high-level project plan, resources, and so on. The scope specifically defines what you will and will not do. A draft of the charter, including the scope, should be developed when the project is put into the project hopper. Once the project is given to a Black Belt, this draft needs to be further refined.
A common pitfall is for Black Belt teams to overcommit and thereby fail when they might have succeeded with a more reasonable scope. In setting the scope, it is important to document what you think you can actually accomplish in four to six months. (We address projects that can't possibly be done in four to six months below.)
It is equally important to document what you will not accomplish. By explicitly stating what is outside your scope, you can minimize the risk of “scope creep” sabotaging your project. Scope creep occurs when you start with a reasonable scope, but gradually the scope is widened as “just one more thing” is added several times.
For example, in designing (DFSS project) a new web-based system, one manager may suggest that it would be great if the system had foreign language capability. Later, a business leader may ask for customization for one of her critical customers. Later, the Champion may point out that marketing would be delighted if you could just add one more platform to your architecture. This is a very common phenomenon, and results in a well-scoped project becoming a “boil the ocean” project destined for failure. However, if the scope explicitly excluded foreign language capability, customization, and additional architectures, saying no would be much easier.
In summary, we recommend that a high-level scope be developed when the project is put into the project hopper. The Black Belt and Champion who take this project should then refine the scope, ensuring that they can achieve meaningful results in four to six months. It is helpful to consciously think about, and document, what is outside the scope and will not be done in this project. Future projects could add to the original project, and address some of the important issues outside the current scope. In general, the scope should be “frozen” in the define or measure phase of the project.
19. What if my project can't be done in four to six months?
Isn't four to six months unrealistic? Recall that Six Sigma uses a four to six month drumbeat of projects being completed and savings being realized. Six Sigma avoids long, drawn-out projects that tend to test managers' patience. You can best handle major, multiyear projects in Six Sigma by splitting them up into several smaller, but well-coordinated, projects. Some companies refer to this approach as a multigenerational project plan when the projects are done sequentially. Each project produces a tangible deliverable in a reasonable amount of time, and this deliverable is a milestone towards a longer-term objective. Subsequent projects build on this deliverable to take it to the next level, producing their own deliverables. After several such projects, the organization reaches its desired end-state, but since it has produced tangible deliverables along the way, management's patience is not tested.
Another alternative is to have several Black Belt teams working in parallel. When this is done, someone (typically a MBB) should “own” the overall initiative and periodically bring the individual Black Belts leading each project together, to plan and coordinate the overall effort. This results in a tiered structure for the overall initiative, allowing each Black Belt to produce tangible results in a four to six month time frame while still working toward the overall objective.
20. How do I structure project reviews?
This topic was discussed in Chapter 5, so we will provide only a summary here. Similar information about reviews of the overall initiative is in Chapter 6. Management review of projects is critical for several reasons. These reviews demonstrate management's commitment, ensure that Black Belts take the projects seriously, and provide direct feedback to management as to how things are progressing.
We recommend that Champions review projects weekly, and business unit or functional managers review them monthly. The idea is to have a quick check to keep the project on track by finding out what has been accomplished in the last week, what is planned for next week, and what barriers if any need to be addressed. The Champion review is typically short, about 30 minutes, and covers topics such as the following:
Activity this week
Accomplishments this week
Recommended management actions
Help needed
Plan for next week
The monthly management reviews are typically even shorter, about 10-15 minutes per project. A typical agenda for these reviews is:
Project purpose
Accomplishments since the last review
Plans for future work
Key lessons and findings
Notice that this agenda is similar to that for the weekly review with the Champion. In the monthly review much more emphasis is placed on performance versus schedule, progress towards process and financial goals, and key lessons and findings. As Six Sigma grows, the number of projects may become large and reviews may require a lot of time. The review time can be reduced by rating projects as Green (on schedule), Yellow (in danger of falling behind schedule if something isn't done) and Red (behind schedule and in need of help), and reviewing only those rated Red and Yellow.
21. How do I close out projects?
Project closure was discussed at length in Chapter 5, so we will only provide a summary here. Project closure is an important part of your project identification and prioritization system, for the simple reason that Black Belts can't take on additional projects until they complete their current ones. You can't inhale unless you are able to exhale. The key participants in this decision are the Black Belt, the Champion, the finance representative, and the “process owner”—the person who has responsibility for the process being improved by the Black Belt.
The organization should have a standard set of steps to close out a project, a project closure form that is an integral part of the project tracking system, and a method for electronically archiving the project in the reporting system so the results will be available to the whole organization. This last item is important because Black Belts working in non-standard areas, such as risk management, find documentation of previous projects in this same area extremely helpful. The specific closure steps and form should be tailored to each organization, but we recommend that the following steps be required:
Successful completion of each phase of the DMAIC (or DFSS) process
Finance sign-off on the savings claimed
Control plan in place and in use by process owner
Needed training implemented
Final Champion and management reviews