Lean Six Sigma – First Take

I just finished a two week course and now possess a certification known as the Lean Six Sigma Green Belt. I’d been running into a few people with Lean Six Sigma backgrounds while networking in the last several months, but didn’t really understand what it was all about until I took this course. I now have a much better appreciation for what I’ve been missing and am amazed by the degree to which this particular cluster of methodologies winds like a river through many different elements of my education and career.  

Lean Six Sigma is a combination of two movements. Lean is an approach to improving processes by analyzing and removing various types of waste. But that’s not all. It can also be used to assess a product or process and determine which elements provide value for customers. I’d been thinking Lean Six Sigma was just a manufacturing thing — a common misconception — but here they were talking about the customer value and the Voice of the Customer. So Lean is relevant to customers and therefore, might also be highly useful for people in marketing and product positions. Okay, so Lean is relevant for product and marketing people like me. What about Six Sigma?  

Six Sigma dates back to the Seventies, when Dr. Mikel Harry of Motorola put together a variety of quality and statistical approaches aimed toward helping organizations greatly improve the quality of their processes. The term Six Sigma derives from the statistical world, where sigma is another word for standard deviation. A six sigma process is highly accurate and produces on average only 3.4 defects per million. At one time, Six Sigma and Lean were separate movements, but organizations soon saw the value in using Six Sigma techniques to improve the quality of their processes and Lean to reduce wastes, eliminate unnecessary process costs and in general, have much more efficient processes.  

It turns out there’s a lot to learn. Green Belts get introduced to the smorgasbord of Lean and Six Sigma techniques, but true mastery of the tools takes more learning and experience — hence the use of the term Black Belt.  The overall Lean Six Sigma philosophy and collection of tools strikes me as being valuable for people in a wide variety of disciplines.  I’ll talk more about how Lean Six Sigma relates to my own background and today’s business needs in my next post.