Change Your Viewpoint

You must capture the viewpoint of the customer in the purest possible form. This may be in the form of customer surveys, feedback forms, marketplace measures or other feedback. Your customers should be able to recognize these measures and agree that they reflect their view. Success in your project will be determined by the customers’ view of your project, not your manager’s. Identifying the customer is not always straightforward in business-to-business transactions - the CEO, the sourcing department, the engineers, the receiving dock?

Develop the Team Charter

It should be clear at the onset what the team members are going to be doing and how communication is going to work. The project is going to have a limited lifetime and team members will be engaged in other projects at the same time as this lean Six Sigma project. You may have to include team members’ managers in the communication plan to deal with resistance. The Team Charter is a written document that defines the roles and responsibilities. At his point, there is only an estimate for the magnitude of the problem and the impact of the solution. During the Measure phase the data required to quantify the problem will be gathered.

This Charter will continue to change as data analysis is conducted throughout the project. More team members may be required as the business process is dissected. The Charter is part of your communication plan and should be shared and modified by the team.

Scope the Business Process

When a dedicated and motivated team is assembled to tackle a complex business problem, the project can suffer from scope creep when others keep expanding the business process. Carefully determine what parts of the business process are in-scope and what parts are out-of-scope.You have to balance this tendency for projects to expand with the fact that business processes are infrequently well defined and contained to begin with. Three months is about right length of time for a project - shorter times usually mean the project is a trivial one or is not rigorous enough to sustain the improvement - longer ones make the project lose momentum with endless meetings and conflicting new tasks for your team.

If the project seems to large, it is. Ask the question, “If this is such an important problem for the business, why are we spending 6-9 months solving it?”