There are as many ways of addressing business challenges and issues as there are consultants working to fix them, and there is an arguement that it would be pretty much impossible to find a way of approaching issues that fits with a wide range of businesses. I'm not sure that this is the case, because I am becoming increasingly convinced that there are underlying fundamental causes to a many business challenges. Let me give you a couple of scenarios. Lets say that you have a medium size manufacturing business of say 75 people producing a component for the aviation industry. Now in an industry of this type, quality is critical as is consistency of product. It is at the root of what the company does and the business stands or falls on this mission critical aspect. Now lets consider a small web development company. If a website doesn't work quite right planes don't fall out of the sky and lives are unlikely to be lost so it can be argued that production quality is not the mission critical factor, perhaps customer service or communication service is of higher priority. These are clearly quite different businesses but both can be faced with similar business challenges, particularly those around how to operate with maximum efficiency and to maximise productivity whilst minimising costs.
In the first case it may be possible to use something like six sigma process transformation, six sigma being a process management technique pioneered by Motorola in the 1970's whereby the maufacturing process was studied at each stage of the process and teams were established to statistically monitor each part of the process to find areas of improvement and reduce failures and faults to the extent that under a normal distribution curve failure rates would be reduced to 3.4 per million or a success rate of 99.999966%, which is where the name six sigma comes from. There has been a lot of contention over this well respected transformation technique, although it is still very popular amongst many consultants and there are a wealth of courses and resources for the green belt and black belt pseudo-qualifications associated with it. I'm pretty certain that this same process would not be effective when applied to the small web design company. The major criticism of six sigma is that it is too dogmatic and too restrictive to be broad brush applicable, and there has been a tendency to suggest that all analysis and transformation methods will, almost by definition have the same downside, i.e. that they will work in specific cases, but not be universally applicable.
I think that this misses a point. In the two cases layed out above, two quite different situations, there are still some similarities. In order to address the two challenges there is a requirement to properly understand the challenge in the first instance. By this I mean not simply being aware of an issue, but quantifying the issue in terms of cost to the business in time, productivity, financial costs, resource costs and so on, really getting to the heart of the issue. Having established the root causes it is then a case of addressing them effectively and to this end I am coming round to the thought that the eight discipline problem solving method may be successful where other methods may not. It is interesting that this method was again pioneered in a large corporate manufacturing environment, in this case Ford Motor Company, and that it was further developed by the American Military as a technique for dealing with non-standard operational situations, and so could suffer from the same non-translatability issues as six sigma, but for me there is a crucial difference.
As with six sigma the eight discipline method is focused on quantifying both the problem and the results but rather than becoming tied in to the dogma of fixing each step, step by step there is the flexibility and team orientated approach that allows a more holistic view of how changes in that process will affect the rest of the operation. Going back to the original two examples, for the engineering company there is the quantified approach and structured outlook that allows the precision required for a manufacturing process and at the same time it allows for analysis of the more person centric processes of the web development company whereby as each part of the process is analysed refinements can still be quantified but in a more collaborative way. The eight steps in the process lay out a clearly defined structure that, if followed well will lead almost inevitably to a successful resolution.
I feel there will be more to come on this theme......
In the first case it may be possible to use something like six sigma process transformation, six sigma being a process management technique pioneered by Motorola in the 1970's whereby the maufacturing process was studied at each stage of the process and teams were established to statistically monitor each part of the process to find areas of improvement and reduce failures and faults to the extent that under a normal distribution curve failure rates would be reduced to 3.4 per million or a success rate of 99.999966%, which is where the name six sigma comes from. There has been a lot of contention over this well respected transformation technique, although it is still very popular amongst many consultants and there are a wealth of courses and resources for the green belt and black belt pseudo-qualifications associated with it. I'm pretty certain that this same process would not be effective when applied to the small web design company. The major criticism of six sigma is that it is too dogmatic and too restrictive to be broad brush applicable, and there has been a tendency to suggest that all analysis and transformation methods will, almost by definition have the same downside, i.e. that they will work in specific cases, but not be universally applicable.
I think that this misses a point. In the two cases layed out above, two quite different situations, there are still some similarities. In order to address the two challenges there is a requirement to properly understand the challenge in the first instance. By this I mean not simply being aware of an issue, but quantifying the issue in terms of cost to the business in time, productivity, financial costs, resource costs and so on, really getting to the heart of the issue. Having established the root causes it is then a case of addressing them effectively and to this end I am coming round to the thought that the eight discipline problem solving method may be successful where other methods may not. It is interesting that this method was again pioneered in a large corporate manufacturing environment, in this case Ford Motor Company, and that it was further developed by the American Military as a technique for dealing with non-standard operational situations, and so could suffer from the same non-translatability issues as six sigma, but for me there is a crucial difference.
As with six sigma the eight discipline method is focused on quantifying both the problem and the results but rather than becoming tied in to the dogma of fixing each step, step by step there is the flexibility and team orientated approach that allows a more holistic view of how changes in that process will affect the rest of the operation. Going back to the original two examples, for the engineering company there is the quantified approach and structured outlook that allows the precision required for a manufacturing process and at the same time it allows for analysis of the more person centric processes of the web development company whereby as each part of the process is analysed refinements can still be quantified but in a more collaborative way. The eight steps in the process lay out a clearly defined structure that, if followed well will lead almost inevitably to a successful resolution.
I feel there will be more to come on this theme......
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