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 includes

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.

Learn from the experiences of AlliedSignal, Motorola, 3M, and fifty other Six Sigma leaders

Set aggressive, measurable business goals—and achieve them

Define priorities, organize teams, choose partners, structure enterprise-wide deployments, and more

Using a clearly defined leadership roadmap, align organization structure, compensation, succession planning, IT resources, and more

Why Six Sigma projects fail, and how to keep it from happening to you

Preface  xiii

Acknowledgments  xvii

About the Author  xix

Contributors List  xxi

PARTI: PRE-LAUNCH  1

Chapter 1: Six Sigma—The Initiative, the Deployment, the Technology  3

Chapter 2: The True Nature of Six Sigma: The Business Model  17

Chapter 3: Six Sigma Launch Philosophy  37

Chapter 4: Getting Early Support: Selecting a Six Sigma Provider  55

Chapter 5: Strategy: The Alignment of External Realities, Setting Measurable Goals, and Internal Actions  69

Chapter 6: Defining the Six Sigma Program Expectations and Metrics  87

PART II: THE FIRST 90 DAYS  103

Chapter 7: Defining the Six Sigma Project Scope  105

Chapter 8: Defining the Six Sigma Infrastructure  117

Chapter 9: Committing to Project Selection, Prioritization, and Chartering  149

Chapter 10: Creating Six Sigma Executive and Leadership Workshops  185

Chapter 11: Selecting and Training the Right People  209

Chapter 12: Communicating the Six Sigma Program Expectations and Metrics  235

PART III POST-LAUNCH 253

Chapter 13: Creating the Human Resources Alignment  255

Chapter 14: Defining the Software Infrastructure: Tracking the Program and Projects  285

Chapter 15: Leading Six Sigma for the Long Term  303

Chapter 16: Reinvigorating Your Six Sigma Program  329

Appendix A: RFP Sample Format  357

Appendix B: About the Contributors  367

Index  371