How Project Managers Can Benefit from Knowledge Management Systems
Project Managers Have to Learn to Deal with Uncertainties and Risks Project Management is the art and science of balancing competing interests, prioritizing the resources and their deployment, and is also situational in nature meaning that project managers often have to respond to evolving situations and circumstances. This means that uncertainty and unpredictability are the […]
Disaster Recovery and Crisis Management
When we talk about Disaster Recovery and Business Continuity plan for any business or organization, we need to necessarily plan for Crisis management too. Though the objectives of all these plans might vary, they are all interlinked, interdependent and mutually inclusive. In large scale business organizations as well as high technology organizations with large operations, […]
Information Systems vs Information Technology
Introduction It is often observed that term information system and information technology are used interchangeably. In a literal sense, information technology is a subset of information systems. Information systems consist of people, processes, machines and information technology. The great advancement in information systems is due to development in information technology and introduction of computers. Information […]
Step 3: Defining a Project Problem Statement
The next step in the Six Sigma journey is to have a clearly defined problem statement that will guide the team throughout the execution of the project. Here are a few tips which give us an insight into how a project problem statement must be developed. What is a Problem ? As per a layman’s […]
Conducting the Knowledge Transfer
The Six Sigma project is not complete until the concerned personnel who have to operate the process have the know-how to do so. Many Six Sigma projects have failed because the project team was overjoyed at achieving success. However, one must not forget that improvements are only on paper until they are implemented. And there […]
The mention of the Measure phase of the Six Sigma module brings into mind pictures of statisticians performing complex operations on data to derive meaning out of it. While this is true to some extent, the complexity of the process is highly over-rated. True, that there is a tremendous amount of statistics involved. However, in recent times, the statistics part is being taken care of by the software. Humans need to understand the logical part of the process and provide input to the software and interpret its outputs. The major objectives of the Six Sigma module are mentioned below:
The Six Sigma project team needs to come out with an explicit list of vital inputs, desired outputs and process metrics that they are planning to track. The fact that there are probably hundreds of metrics makes it important to identify and list the vital few. This decision has large scale implications on the performance of the project and is usually taken by the Project Lead on the basis of data provided by the Six Sigma team and the Process Owner.
There have been many cases of measurement bias in Six Sigma history. The bias may have its roots in the complexity of the calculation, the wrong method of data collection or the bias of the person performing the exercise. However, methods have been developed to get rid of all these errors. Measurements are taken automatically, calculated automatically and sent to the concerned managers automatically who use pre-defined rules to make a decision.
One of the biggest challenges of this phase is to validate the fact that the measurement system in place is good for the purpose. We have discussed this challenge in detail in the section titled Management Systems Analysis.
Measure phase also includes collecting the measures that the current process has. This includes measuring the defects per million. Once the defects per million are calculated, the current Sigma Level of the process is found out. This gives the team an idea of the effort that may be required out of them.
A common practise in the measure phase is to put a figure in front of the losses that the organization is currently facing due to inefficient processes. This helps the management valuate the process and the Six Sigma team can bargain for more resources to successfully implement the project. The financial numbers help re-iterate the project value in front of the Project Champion and the Senior Management.
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Characteristics of Data – Central Tendency and Dispersion
February 12, 2025
Steps Involved in Conducting a Measurement System Analysis
February 12, 2025
