Six Sigma—The First 90 Days

6. Defining the Six Sigma Program Expectations and Metrics

With Joe Ficalora

You’ve assessed your external realities and have a clear understanding of your company’s gaps in performance with your customers. You’ve done the research and decided that Six Sigma is the next major initiative. Now, before your official launch of Six Sigma, your leadership team must develop a clear and easily understandable set of expectations and metrics for the new Six Sigma program. This is to certify that internal actions associated with Six Sigma will be linked to financial targets and corporate strategies.

The metrics are sometimes the tricky part because sometimes we track the metrics of interest and sometimes we don’t. For example, a prominent metric associated ...