Six Sigma--The First 90 Days
Start Six Sigma Fast—And Achieve Powerful Business Benefits Within Months This book offers leaders a proven turnkey approach to launching a Six Sigma initiative in 90 days and using it to transform your company within a year. Drawing on their experience with fifty Six Sigma programs at companies ranging from AlliedSignal to Motorola, Stephen A. Zinkgraf and his contributors show how to rapidly align people, strategy, processes, and customers in support of your initiative—and gain powerful momentum for success. You’ll walk through preparing for an enterprise-wide launch, executing it flawlessly, and establishing a foundation for achieving sustainable results over the long term. Zinkgraf’s techniques, roadmaps, and milestones can help you quickly launch any complex change initiative—even those unrelated to Six Sigma. Taken together, they offer a complete framework for driving and managing change: the #1 core competency for twenty-first century executives. Coverage includesLeading Six Sigma: roadmaps, milestones, and techniques for delivering fast, sustainable gainsEffectively preparing, flawlessly executing, and extending your impact for years to comeIdentifying opportunities, building teams, choosing partners, defining metrics, managing risk, and much moreDiscovering best practices from over fifty successful launches: techniques that work with any large-scale change initiative Discover how to get dramatic business results from Six Sigma faster than you ever thought possible, and use Six Sigma to drive transformative change for years to come. Writing for executives and initiative leaders, Stephen A. Zinkgraf presents a high-speed methodology for linking Six Sigma to business strategy, planning and executing a flawless launch, aligning the entire enterprise behind performance improvement, and achieving powerful results in both the short and long term. Zinkgraf helped lead Larry Bossidy’s pioneering Six Sigma program at AlliedSignal—he and his team have participated in more than fifty Six Sigma launches. In this book, he reveals best practices for leading every step of the process. You’ll learn how to identify, prioritize, and charter breakthrough projects...choose the right partners... define roles...build and train teams...mitigate risks...implement effective metrics...and “evangelize” the organization. Then, after you’ve launched, Zinkgraf shows how to improve your program—and use HR, IT, and other business levers to extend your impact. Simply put, if you’re leading Six Sigma, this book’s Six Sigma roadmaps, milestones, and techniques represent the fastest route to the most business value.Master the lessons of the world’s best Six Sigma deploymentsLearn from the experiences of AlliedSignal, Motorola, 3M, and fifty other Six Sigma leadersLink Six Sigma directly to your balance sheetSet aggressive, measurable business goals—and achieve themPlan and execute a flawless launch—within 90 days!Define priorities, organize teams, choose partners, structure enterprise-wide deployments, and moreSustain Six Sigma for the long termUsing a clearly defined leadership roadmap, align organization structure, compensation, succession planning, IT resources, and moreAvoid the classic Six Sigma “failure modes”Why Six Sigma projects fail, and how to keep it from happening to you Preface  xiiiAcknowledgments  xviiAbout the Author  xixContributors List  xxi PARTI: PRE-LAUNCH  1Chapter 1: Six Sigma—The Initiative, the Deployment, the Technology  3Chapter 2: The True Nature of Six Sigma: The Business Model  17Chapter 3: Six Sigma Launch Philosophy  37Chapter 4: Getting Early Support: Selecting a Six Sigma Provider  55Chapter 5: Strategy: The Alignment of External Realities, Setting Measurable Goals, and Internal Actions  69Chapter 6: Defining the Six Sigma Program Expectations and Metrics  87 PART II: THE FIRST 90 DAYS  103Chapter 7: Defining the Six Sigma Project Scope  105Chapter 8: Defining the Six Sigma Infrastructure  117Chapter 9: Committing to Project Selection, Prioritization, and Chartering  149Chapter 10: Creating Six Sigma Executive and Leadership Workshops  185Chapter 11: Selecting and Training the Right People  209Chapter 12: Communicating the Six Sigma Program Expectations and Metrics  235 PART III POST-LAUNCH 253Chapter 13: Creating the Human Resources Alignment  255Chapter 14: Defining the Software Infrastructure: Tracking the Program and Projects  285Chapter 15: Leading Six Sigma for the Long Term  303Chapter 16: Reinvigorating Your Six Sigma Program  329 Appendix A: RFP Sample Format  357Appendix B: About the Contributors  367Index  371