Simplify, or the problem with Six Sigma

I was on a conference call last night with the other members of the PMI Agile Community's steering committee. Last week we had a successful launch event at Agile 2009 in Chicago and we were discussing how we continue to move forward.

We were discussing vision and values and principles and finally one of the members called "in the grass" meaning our discussion was getting to detailed. As another member stated, we should be focusing on short term plans, not some long term vision when it's hard to figure out what any of us will be doing a year from now.

At this point, I recall a conversation I had with David Allen, author of Getting Things Done. He said we tend to want to focus on where we feel the pain. If our boat just hit the rocks, we don't think about our ship's vision, we figure out how to fix the hole.

To me, this is one of the challenges with Six Sigma. Taking a traditional DMAIC approach takes some time, 6 months is not uncommon for a DMAIC project. There's a lot of analysis that happens before any changes are made. I prefer a Lean approach. Go in, make a quick assessment, improve on the process, and then take another quick look at where to go next. I've implemented new business processes in as little as 3 months with only 1-2 weeks focused on analysis.

With my Agile Community it's even simpler since we don't have any processes in place yet. We need to try some stuff out and see what works. That's not to say a vision isn't important, it helps us make the right decisions. However, now that we're getting members, we need to think about what we have to offer them so they find value in our group. A year from now we can conduct our retrospective, figure out what works and what doesn't, and adjust our vision then.

When Six Sigma isn't enough

I had an interesting conversation with a client last week. They had a process that was a "burning issue." They threw a couple Six Sigma Black Belts at it to make process improvements.

Six months later, they approached Lombardi to ask if this process was a good one for Business Process Management (BPM), which is were I got involved.

So what does BPM provide that 6 sigma doesn't? In their case, they had a manual process for tracking metrics. Someone would go into a time tracking system, acknowledge that they were starting a task, go do the task, and go back to the time tracking system to say it was done. This is what is referred to as a "swivel chair" integration. The task execution and time tracking aren't truley integrated. This is one area that BPM can help, it tracks execution of the task because the task and tracking of the task are integrated in the same tool.

So BPM can improve capturing metrics, what else? In their case, the task itself was still being performed with emails and spreadsheets. Moving to BPM will eliminate these activities. All process data and communications happens via the BPM platform.

A BPM platform also lets you tweak the process easier. You identify a bottleneck through metrics captured automatically, figure out how to work around it, make a change to the process, and you're done. Kaizen at its finest.

So while 6 sigma gets you in the right direction, BPM will set the groundwork for continous improvement.