Maximizing Lean Six Sigma Sustainability: Secrets to Making Lean Six Sigma Last

Copyright © 2013 Kyle Toppazzini.

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ISBN: 978-1-4497-9568-9 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-4497-9569-6 (e)

Library of Congress Control Number: 2013909261

WestBow Press rev. date: 06/18/2013

Contents

About the Author

Dedications and Thank You

Introduction

How the book is organized

Chapter 1       Blogs From January 1st-13th, 2013

I Want Results Now- Balancing Executive Pressures with Lean Six Sigma

How to Write a Popular and Timeless Lean Six Sigma Blog

How Lean Six Sigma Can Fix Congressional and Senate Indecision?

Chapter 2       Blogs From December 2012

15 Objectives for your Lean Six Sigma Projects in 2013

FUSE - The Next Breakthrough in Lean Six Sigma

The Voice of the Enterprise: Making Lean Six Sigma Better

Incorporating Critical Thinking into Lean Six Sigma

Chapter 3       Blogs From November 2012

How The Concept of Guanxi Can Lead to Enterprise Value Optimization in Lean Six Sigma

Rethink The Use Of Change Management in Lean Six Sigma with a Chinese Concept called Shin

Lean Six Sigma Projects That Last the Test of Time

Chapter 4       Blogs From October 2012

Are recruiting firms making a mockery of Lean, Six Sigma, Lean Six Sigma, and other Quality Management Methods?

Chapter 5       Blogs From September 2012

Shared Services Will Die Unless You Leverage Lean Six Sigma

Lean Without Six Sigma May Be a Failing Proposition

Can a Lean Six Sigma Tax Policy Lead to Increased Job Creation?

Chapter 6       Blogs From August 2012

Are you Defining Change or is Change Defining You? Evaluating Change in Lean Six Sigma Projects

Can We Apply Lean Six Sigma Concepts to Weight management?

Are You listening to the Voice of The Customer On Social Media Sites? Well, You’d Better - A Lean Six Sigma Perspective

Can a Lean Six Sigma Scorecard be the answer to strategy execution?

So Does Toyota Really Have a Quality Issue?-Lean Six Sigma Perspective

Is it really time to rethink Continuous Improvement? Absolutely Not!!!

The Brightest and Best Organizations do this, but Why? Lessons in Lean Six Sigma

Everything C Level Executive Needs to Know About Lean Six Sigma in 670 words

Olympic Athletes and Lean Six Sigma-What do they Have in Common?

Kaplan & Norton Got it Wrong-Lean Six Sigma Balanced Scorecard

Chapter 7       Blogs From July 2012

Two Awesome ways to Use Process Simulation in Lean Six Sigma

Fail to Consider These Areas in a Lean Six Sigma Project and Risk Failure

Process Owners-Your Lean Six Sigma Project is Done But You Are Not

Amazing Tools to Develop Time Standards In Lean Six Sigma Projects

No Data, No Problem (Pt 2) – Your region/division/unit is not special

No Data, No Problem-My Lean Six Sigma Data Collection Secrets

Do we need to go Beyond Lean Six Sigma? Absolutely

Part 2: Without a Great Design Document, Your Lean Six Sigma Project is Doomed

Without a Great Design Document Your Lean Six Sigma Project is Doomed

Bad Communications will Destroy a Great Lean Six Sigma Project

My Interview with A Performance Scorecarding Champ

Telecommunications Companies Meet Lean Six Sigma You Need It

I Challenge Leaders to Take My Lean Six Sigma Challenge

Microsoft Wakeup- You Need Lean Six Sigma Not Stack Ranking

Health Care Needs to Get Better—Here is How Lean Six Sigma Can Help

Does Facebook need Lean Six Sigma? – You Be the Judge

8 Ways To Develop a Winning Lean Six Sigma Business Case

Amazing ways Lean Six Sigma can reduce workplace absenteeism

What to do if performance measures are not being utilized?

Can Lean Six Sigma Help Private Sector’s Declining Productivity?

Chapter 8       Blogs From June 2012

5 activities C-levels must get right when implementing Lean Six Sigma

How to avoid identifying a root cause that is out of your control?

5 Easy Steps to Creating and Implementing an A3 report

Powerful Techniques for Identifying Process Issues (Part 3 of 3)

Powerful Techniques for Identifying Process Issues (Part 2 of 3)

Powerful Techniques for Identifying Process Issues (Part 1 of 3)

3 Steps and you have Performance Targets

The forgotten C in Lean Six Sigma Engagements –– Compassion

Five Amazing Ways for Banks to Use Lean Six Sigma

Lean Six Sigma-3 Awesome Strategies to Reduce Hospital Wait Times

Lean Six Sigma: Five Incredible Benefits for Medical Insurance Companies

Five Applications of Lean Six Sigma in Hospitals

Five Powerful Ways to Integrate Change Management into Lean Six Sigma

Three steps and you have a Balanced Scorecard

Two More Awesome Methods to Identify the Voice of The Customer

Two Awesome Methods to Identify the Voice of The Customer

Performance Measurement: No More Excuses; Just Do It!

Why Government Needs Great Key Performance Indicators? Top Five Reasons

Why Lean is Becoming the Top Process Framework? Top Five reasons

Five Reasons Organizations that Use Big Data & Advanced Analytics Win

Five Secrets to Putting in Place Great Performance Measures

Chapter 9       Blogs From May 2012

Top 5 Signs that it is time to Hire a Lean Consultant

Top Five Reasons Why Performance Reporting is a Priority

Three Powerful Lean Six Sigma Consulting Tools Rarely Talked About

How Can Government Benefit From Lean Six Sigma Consulting?

How Lean Sigma Consulting Can Drastically Improve Your Results

Using Lean Six Sigma to get frontline employees focused on strategy

About the Author

Kyle Toppazzini is the president of Toppazzini and Lee (T&L) Consulting, and an international leader and consultant in Lean Six Sigma. He publishes blogs and articles in Bloomberg Business Week, Digital Journal, Quality Digest Magazine and Social Media and is the author of the CFO Scorecard published in Exchange Magazine. (A global magazine produced by the Association of Financial Professionals).

Kyle is a Six Sigma master black belt and Lean Six Sigma black belt receiving his training from the University of Notre Dame’s Mendoza College, a certified Balanced Scorecard Trainer.

Kyle has conducted more than 30 performance and process improvement projects across the public and private organizations in government and health care yielding millions of dollars in cost savings and 80% improvement in performance.

Dedications and Thank You

This book is dedicated to my wife Kathy and son Haydn who has given their unconditional support throughout this year which has enabled me to write these articles and this book.

I want to also say thank you to all the people all over the world who read my blogs on a regular basis. It is your support that keeps me continuing to write these blogs.

Introduction

I have to admit that I am a latecomer when it comes to blog writing. I have only started becoming a blogger focusing on the Lean Six Sigma community in 2012.

I never would have thought that blog writing could be that challenging for whom I have been a consultant in Lean and Lean Six Sigma, as well as in the area of operational excellence for 20 years. I underestimated the challenges in finding topics to share. Therefore, the next logical step I did was to read blogs about process improvement and Lean Six Sigma from popular blogging sites, e.g. Harvard Business Review, Forbes and LinkedIn. To my surprise, although some blogs were great conversational pieces; however most of them tended to regurgitate the same old idea.

That is when I decided to write practical blogs so that readers can learn about Lean Six Sigma and how to apply it. After posting regular blogs for about one month, I was surprised and grateful that people from the six continents (no one from Antarctica unfortunately) emailing and telling me how much they like these articles so that they were able to apply in their own work settings. These people worked in different sectors, such as large health organizations (hospitals), financial organizations (e.g. ING, Royal Bank of Scotland, Citibank), and manufacturing companies including Fortune 100 companies (e.g. General Electric, Motorola, Microsoft), as well as government organizations.

This book is comprised of my popular blog articles from 2012 up to and including January of 2013. Aristotle once said For the things we have to learn before we can do them, we learn by doing them. No matter how much knowledge or experience you have about Lean Six Sigma or process improvement, this book is intended to give you ideas on how to turn these theories into practicality. Hope you enjoy it.

How the book is organized

There is no cohesion or flow to this book or blook as some may call it. It is organized by month in which the blog was written between January 2013 and May of 2012 with the latest blog as the first one in each of the chapter, unless the same topic was divided up into multiple blogs. In this case, they are kept together.

These articles are presented in raw form as they were produced with the exception of some minor changes.

These articles will serve as a great reference, especially when you are facing challenges implementing Lean Six Sigma or organizational change. By selecting an appropriate article(s), it is likely that you will find the solutions to your unique challenges.

Chapter 1

Blogs From January ¹st-1³th, 2013

I Want Results Now- Balancing Executive Pressures with Lean Six Sigma

January-03-13, 3:24:00 PM | kyle toppazzini

For projects involved with Lean Six Sigma, it is not uncommon for the project team to face a challenge of balancing between realizing short-term results (e.g. cost reduction) demanded by Executives and to achieve sustainable long-term benefits by implementing a Lean Six Sigma framework. Change principles are simple but change is not easy, and it takes time. And here is how to strike this balance.

Golden Fruits

This can be done through the Define phase, i.e. first Phase of the Lean Six Sigma framework. During this Phase, you identify the burning platforms of the organizations and define the projects that will result in break-through performance.

When you conduct the preliminary value stream mapping and data analysis, you are likely to come across issues that are relatively easy to fix in a given process and result in immediate pay back, which I refer these issues as Golden Fruits. However, you should do your due diligence by avoiding applying a Band-Aid solution that results in temporary relief. For example, I have seen people attack a backlog in one area by assigning a crew to work over-time in that area and clear the bottle neck only to push the problem to another area.

Classifying Short and Long Term Performance Improvement

I recommend that you should begin by classifying performance improvement projects as short- or long-term in the Define Phase. Your short-term projects should be a strategic project that will address a pain point in the process that generates immediate relief but also can be used for long-term change.

For example, perhaps we have a backlog and processing delay in a particular value stream. Rather than conducting a full-scale assessment and implementation across the organization, we can simply implement it in a single area within the organization that is keen on using Lean Six Sigma and use it to demonstrate the improvements. We can also have the staff in the pilot area to advocate and educate their colleagues in other areas about Lean Six Sigma and the benefits they realized from it. This will result in buy-in and longer lasting change.

Stroking Everyone’s Egos

The advantages recognized through the demonstrations conducted by the pilot area staff to their peers are two-fold. The peer employees can relate the benefits from its results in a way that is most meaningful to them, as well as the pilot area staff is able to establish credibility and recognition to its peers. This approach results in a win-win for everyone.

Concluding Thoughts

Change takes time; however, if we leverage our resources in the right way we can generate short-term wins that contribute to long-term sustainability. This is only one of the approaches. Share with me what other approaches that worked for you in terms of satisfying executive demands and establishing a stable process improvement process.

How to Write a Popular and Timeless Lean Six Sigma Blog

January-02-13, 12:00:00 PM | kyle toppazzini

You want to write a Lean Six Sigma blog that people love and will always love. It is not easy, but not impossible. I wrote many blogs in 2012 and many of those happened to be more popular than I thought, while others were a bit of a flop. I’m going to use one of each of my previous blogs as a case study for each of the scenarios, i.e. a successful blog and less successful one.

What matters are what others are interested in terms of blog writing and not what I think their interests are, as I have discovered. I have also come to realize some of the key success factors are in writing a timeless and popular blog about Lean Six Sigma and are as follows:

1.   An Interesting title – You probably only have a few seconds to grab readers’ attention to persuade them to start reading your blog. A great title is one of the attention grabbers. When I first started blogging, many bloggers suggested to use blog titles that start with 10 amazing ways to …, Why … is the only way to….., which becomes old and boring fast. My suggestion is to keep the title short, interesting, relevant and new. It does not have to be controversial or have to be peppy to grab readers’ attention; but it should tell the readers that they are going to read about something that is interesting to them and is new. Newdoes not necessarily imply new invention; it could be a new way of looking at a topic/idea, solving a problem etc.

2.   An introduction that gets the reader to want to read more – Now the title grabs your readers’ attention; you have another four to five seconds to convince the reader they should start reading the rest of the article. For me, topics related to interesting quotes or survey results, and new/interesting concepts seem to work well in terms of extending readers’ attention spans.

3.   Introducing social media – Learning more about classical Lean Six Sigma tools are likely to be interesting to those involved with Lean Six Sigma; however, learning about how to apply or use social media in Lean Six Sigma and process improvement is of interest to other types of audiences. By discussing how social media can be used in Lean Six Sigma, you are likely to interest those that have heard of Lean Six Sigma and would not normally read about it but do so because they are interested in social media.

4.   Introducing innovative concepts/ideas – Don`t be afraid to introduce innovative