Managing Leadership^®

The Six Sigma quality program is built on basic principles that are elaborated into a sophisticated and effective system. However, the key to the whole thing is those principles – the system developed to give them expression can and should be varied and adapted to the specific nature of your business and a practical assessment of the resources you have available for this purpose.

For the integration of a quality improvement and assurance program into ongoing operations, the steps to be taken are in the mnemonic DMAIC: Define, Measure, Analyze, Improve, Control. A concise description of these is available here, and an easy-to-follow example of how to employ them can be found in this article on the same general topic from Inc. Magazine.

As you look at the terms, you can see that they are really quite straightforward. Define your quality problem, collect information to help you get a precise grip on that problem’s dimensions and then analyze that information (this is where the statistics-heavy part comes in for companies like GE and Motorola – the latter being the company that developed Six Sigma), figure out how to improve the discrepancies, and control for the effectiveness of your applied remedies.

And that’s all very well. The most important issues, however, are in the first and last steps.

The DMAIC method assumes that you have a basic understanding of the problem, but asks you to clarify its nature by answering certain key questions, such as who the customer is of the process involved, and the details of that process. Moreover, it is important to identify elements of this process that contribute to the quality problem and that can be controlled. Focusing on this will force you to drill down to the seemingly arbitrary factors that are inserting the quality-degrading discrepancies into the process so that you can bring them under control. If you don’t take the time to get this right, you will be wasting the time you spend on the rest.

The final step, to control the implementation of the results of the previous steps, might seem a bit obvious. But it’s often another area where managers drop their guard. Similar to the design and manufacture of a new product, it is assumed that everything has been thought of and will be fine, and that any checking will be redundant and inefficient. However, the integration of a regular control function right in to the process both ensures that you have, in fact, not overlooked anything, and also enables you to identify and rectify any new arbitrary or destabilizing factors that introduce themselves into the process. Most importantly, it instills a sense of quality being built in to every step of production by everyone involved in it.

That’s when you’ll see returns and complaints fall, and sales and profits rise. Still think quality control is an unproductive use of time and managerial attention?