Sep 29 2007
Improvising Yellow Belt
Preparing new employees for Six Sigma may sometimes be a challenge. Before you can mobilize their skills and talents towards Quality Improvement, you must first align them to the philosophy of the firm, and to the improvement goals. Not everyone comes to the client with the same background in Quality, and if they have previous experience, they may already know more than the minimum.
The real challenge as a facilitator of an introductory class is, assessing the room and learning who’s ahead and who’s just starting out. And then getting them all to work together, with the experienced folks helping out. Sometimes even as “junior facilitators.” Without them quite figuring out how you got them to lead.
It’s a lot of fun, but not an easy assessment to do. And you often have about ten minutes to get that evaluation done and make a plan. In your head.
Yellow Belt Training isn’t something that every Six Sigma firm does, but a number of firms see value from such an introductory workshop. This time, I had a relatively homogeneous group, in terms of exposure to Quality and in work history. The problem this time was, a batch of training materials didn’t arrive. And to complicate matters further, my main contact at the company was away on a trip, taking a class in China. Time to improvise!
As always, I have a few items with me. After explaining the issue to the attendees, I told them how they were going to work around and through this minor setback. It didn’t take long to convince them that we’d actually have more fun than expected, and maybe more learning.
We dove in. We ran through the first section of materials, then got to experimenting with a simple process. They set up their “R&D,” collected data, and then analyzed using the simplest assessment: Pass-Fail, and overall failure rate. After that, they realized they needed to improve some things, and they immediately had ideas. At this point, the challenge became restraining them from implementing “improvements” immediately.
We worked through the remainder of the DMAIC cycle, exploring a few key tools and and then applying them to their process. The day closed with another “data run” and analysis. Each team improved dramatically, and the real moral of the story was, few of their initial ideas for improvement were retained in their actual implementations. One team implemented only two simple concepts and took their failure rate from 97% to 3% in one improvement cycle, and they had ideas for “future projects.”
Success. They’re primed, they feel capable and empowered; all they need is a real target and they’re off…
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