Episode 26 — Lean Six Sigma

ANDY CROWE ● BILL YATES ● NICK WALKER NICK WALKER:  Welcome to Manage This, the podcast by project managers for project managers.  We get together every two weeks to talk about what matters to you as a professional project manager, whether it’s certification issues or creating and implementing successful projects.  We draw on the expertise of experts in the field and share their challenges and successes. I’m your host, Nick Walker, and beside me are the two in-house experts who guide our discussion, Andy Crowe and Bill Yates.  And Andy, you know, folks go online, they look at your bio, and they see all these letters behind your name.  And probably most of our listeners are familiar with most of those letters, those acronyms.  But there’s one, a Black Belt Six Sigma.  Should I be dodging blows here?  What is the Black Belt Six Sigma? ANDY CROWE:  It’s funny, Nick.  It’s a Six Sigma Black Belt.  What it is, Six Sigma has different levels of credentialing.  And there’s Yellow Belt, Green Belt, Black Belt, Master Black Belt, and Master Black Belt Trainer.  So I’m somewhere in the middle there in terms of that. What it is, it’s funny, there’s a lot of project management certifications out there.  We’ve talked about the PMP before.  We’ve talked about the PMI-ACP.  And we’ve probably touched on the Program Management Professional and Portfolio, the PgMP and the PfMP, and certainly the Certified Associate in Project Management, the CAPM.  A lot of alphabet soup there. And it’s really funny because, even when I go do project management conferences, and people introduce me as a Six Sigma Black Belt, a lot of people in the room don’t know what that is.  They think it’s some martial art.  It’s not.  It’s related to quality.  And it’s a quality certification.  And it’s really the topic of today’s podcast is about Six Sigma, about Lean Six Sigma – which is something a little bit different – and how those work and how they can benefit. NICK WALKER:  Is this a certification that’s been around a long time?  Or is this something that’s fairly new? ANDY CROWE:  It’s been around a while.  Now, what happened with that, when it first came out, there wasn’t a lot of structure as to who owned the certification.  It was one of those things that a lot of different organizations were able to give that.  And then that’s changed.  We’ll talk about that later in the podcast a little bit, about how that’s evolved, who’s vying for kind of control of that certification, what that looks like, as well. BILL YATES:  There are a couple of key components here that I want Andy to explain to the audience, Nick, because if there’s a Lean component, then there’s a Six Sigma component.  And I like where we’re headed with some background here, where this thing, where this movement began because it is all related to quality.  And so Andy, what about Lean?  When did that really come into play? ANDY CROWE:  Lean is an amazing philosophy by itself.  So it’s a series of practices.  And what Lean is trying to do is get rid of waste.  Now, this is useful in a bunch of organizations.  But it’s really, really useful in manufacturing projects.  So if you have a project that has manufacturing, this is where it comes in.  Lean really came into vogue at Toyota.  And so it started after World War II.  It really picked up steam in the ‘70s and ‘80s.  And this is when Toyota started surpassing, and Honda and some of these organizations started really surpassing U.S. manufacturing. And I’ve lived through it.  I watched it firsthand, that it absolutely did.  You know, there were times when, if you got 80,000 miles out of some U.S. cars, that was good.  And then, you know, some of the Toyotas were getting 200,000 miles.  And it was just astonishing what they were able to do.  Well, they got there through a number of things.  Lean was part of it.  So Lean really talks about – the acronym we use in Lean is TIMWOOD, T-I-M-W-O-O-D.  And what it is, is it’s where you look for,