A commitment to training, and went down this path subsequently
employing the best people: discontinued this approach?
As the most complex problems are being
tackled, the best people must be commit-
ted to the challenge. Also, considering it
costs about £10,000 to train a Black Belt
alone, and the rest of the organisation also
needs to get orientation training or green
belt training, the initiative requires a big
commitment of money and resources.
A new corporate attitude/culture:
Implementation of Six Sigma creates a new
environment that naturally promotes Not achieving expected results:
working across process boundaries to Initially, Six Sigma may have been launched
improve performance and the creation of a without a clear understanding of how it
continuous improvement culture. It would be used and where it would add
demands development of a process mindset value. And if the initiative is not clearly
and an openness to embrace change and thought through, the organisation may
strive for breakthrough improvements. target the wrong areas, may not commit to
high quality people or may not adequately
A commitment to metrics & support the initiatives. Some organisations
measurements: may decide to try out a bottom-up approach,
Six Sigma uses metrics like never before. which may further exacerbate these issues.
These metrics not only tie in to key All of this could lead to underachieving
customer and business requirements but results.
cascade down the organisation through a
series of interlinked and dependent measures Unfavourable cost-benefit:
that link up eventually to top level business It costs a lot of money to commit to an
and customer measures. Improvements are organisation-wide initiative like Six Sigma.
then targeted around these measures. And if the organisation is already managing
If Six Sigma is so powerful, why then is to improve performance using less
it still not universally adopted today? And sophisticated techniques, then it may feel
why have some organisations which initially the incremental benefit obtained by
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