Chapter 10: Basic Six Sigma Team Management
Building a Six Sigma Team
Teams should include a six sigma leader, process owner, expert on process, and someone to manage budgeting and accounting
Three Types of Team Members
1. Regular Team Members: participate in all activities, include project leaders, process owners and experts
2. Ad Hoc Team Members: provide expertise on an as needed basis, subject matter experts who work directly with process
3. Resource Team Members: included when project team leaders feel they are needed in a meeting to provide expert information or help accessing resources, usually members of ancillary departments such as accounting, HR, or compliance
Tips for Selecting Team Members: 5 team members is a good number, too many team members can create communication problems
Choose employees who are knowledgeable, show willingness and ability to work towards improvement, have access and understanding of data, can attribute 5 hours of work/week, match skills of project at hand, remove political obstacles
Team Member Roles
Sponsors and Champions: Senior-level leaders who oversee projects at highest level, responsible for final result of project, coaches team, handles matters of politics, and works with other managers within organizations to help succeed in improving process
Business or Process Owners: someone who is responsible for process in a leadership capacity, receives solution implemented by six sigma team once solution is rolled out to team members
Six Sigma Leaders: Led by certified black belts, holds responsiblity for regular work performed by team, creates rationale for project, provides input, leads team through DMAIC, educates team, providers oversight, maintains schedules, provides documentation
Project Manager: offers leader support to black belt by keeping up with documentation and timelines,
Timekeeper: Help keep meetings on track, reduce chance of scope creep, and increase overall productivity, expected to keep eye on agenda and time, let members know when agenda time is almost up, signal time is up for a certain discussion
Scribes or Minute-Takers: create notes or minutes of meeting in typed format and disseminate notes to all team members, can be project manager or team member
Team Members: participate in brainstorming sessions, collect data and analyze, perform work between meetings, report results, and review work perfromed by other team members and team as whole offering feedback
Timelines, Scheduling, and Milestones
Phase-Based Timeline: following specific series of phases in DMAIC, leaders can assign certain amount of weeks to each phase, benefit is you can generate a timeline quickly
Critical Path Method: detailed way of defining timelines for various elements of a project
Creating.a Critical Path Diagram: 1. Identify critical needs or activities to complete project or phase of project 2. Put critical activities in order 3. Assign a time to each task 4. Create diagram of task, stacking simultaneous or parallel process and including time figures 5. Draw a critical path through diagram 6. Add up longest times from each section
Milestone Meetings: once timeline is established set milestone meetings to help keep team on track and notify sponsor of progress, for DMAIC milestones are set at end of each phase
Budgets: success is measured by time and budget, financial drivers must be considered, budget concerns can include team expenses- new equipment, new personnel, products, software, etc.
Defined Measure of Success: Leaders should ensure all team members, leaders, and sponsors agree on what success means, if not scope creep is at risk and project can not be defined or end