Effective Lean and Six Sigma implementation is about behaviour as much as the tools
When Six Sigma first came on the business analysis scene it seemed like a new era in environmental assessment of organizational performance. We were all seeking lean and agile solutions to the rapidly expanding global business picture. The advent of multinational enterprises in the 1980s accelerated the need for efficient and effective models of analytical instrumentation. Feasibility studies to strategic forecasting would never be the same.
Instrumentation of Six
Sigma tools soon became a cult as much as it was a measure to
benchmark findings. How Six Sigma would transform the world of business
from everything from acquisition to planning was essentially a toolkit
to change management. A 'total' organizational approach to incremental
knowledge sharing had found its logic.
Once a company Charter was put into comparative axis with: 1)Quantitative statistical analysis tools (i.e. Chi-square, Co-efficient and Trend Analyses), and 2) Qualitative SWOT (Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, Threats) and PESTLE (Political, Economic, Social, Technological, Legal, Environmental) assessments analysts proposed that they had true insight into the values, practices and challenges of an organization. On evaluation, however, many wondered if behavior could be better measured?
Add artificial intelligence to human intelligence and what gets noticed gets computed. Quantitative tools like co-efficient analysis are better measures of cognitive deployment in partnerships, policies, processes and procedures than qualitative criteria. Still, statistical models have their limits. In sum, some statistics are better than others.
Six Sigma tools intended to capture relational factors, are in fact somewhat unwieldy as forecasting agents. Situation analyses that deploy the two most used qualitative instruments, SWOT and the more lengthy PESTLE, fall a bit short in terms of decisive valuation. Implementing data outcomes from Six Sigma qualitative instruments in strategic planning activities must inevitably supported by 'in such case' scenarios.
One vital proposition is the inclusion of behavioral simulation in Six Sigma. Although statistical probability is part of the analysis applications to the framework, the potential of adding simulations beyond current methods (i.e monte carlo) would exceptional in returns.
If Six Sigma is about behavior as much as the tools, than some would argue that virtual simulation of human/user interactions in business management systems is truly the next frontier. A resource beyond anything ever deployed in environmental analysis, we can see that without reinserting behavior back into Six Sigma in a more thorough way, the impact of current tools in forecasting may continue to fall a little short.
Categories: Six Sigma Certification