Six Sigma—The First 90 Days

9. Committing to Project Selection, Prioritization, and Chartering

For any initiative, the greatest challenge is identifying what to work on first. Business success is largely a function of focus and prioritization. From Labovitz and Rosansky’s excellent book, The Power of Alignment, the challenge is, “The main thing is to keep the main thing the main thing!” To make the main thing the main thing comes to play in driving the philosophy of project selection. The dominant strength of any Six Sigma deployment is that it allows you the ability to identify great projects upon which to work.

The old “garbage in, garbage out” adage certainly applies here. Many TQM deployments fell short for the lack of assigning TQM teams something important to work ...