We don’t use it at my work, but in my quest for a new job I keep coming across jobs that, at the least, have an interest in my Six Sigma level.
I’ve noticed there are some free* online courses I can take to get an introduction to Six Sigma and get a yellow belt certification. I can tell a potential employer that while we don’t use it in my current job, I have taken the initiative to learn on my own.
What is the benefit of Six Sigma? Are these online courses credible, or does it need to be an in-person certification class to be taken seriously by potential employers? *Is it worth it to lay out the $79 to receive the actual certificate once I complete the “free” training?
In my humble opinion, it is a cross between a religious cult and a pyramid sales scheme, but that’s just me. If your new employer has drunk the Kool Aid, that certificate could be helpful.
Don’t get me wrong, statistical process control is a good thing, for a restricted class of problems. Other aspects of six sigma are common sense management principles, but the marketing of this thing is over the top. I’m glad the religion is on the wane in my company.
In my experience, effective use of any of these popular methodologies (Six Sigma, PRINCE2, ITIL etc) typically involves cherry-picking the bits that work and assembling them into a procedure that properly fits the business context.
That being the case, many employers are looking for experience of using the methods, rather than qualifications.
It matters if prospective employers think it matters.
I worked for a major cell phone manufacturer for a decade. They were big into Six Sigma. Everyone did the basics and got a yellow belt certification. This basically meant we understood the value of statistics in various aspects of work. Some people went further and got black belt certification, which involved some real world projects.
IMHO, the underlying ideas are valuable. The real trick is knowing when it makes sense to use them. I got into a discussion with one of the black belts who was insisting that I could test two things at once by properly planning out the experiment and balancing the various independent variables. His point was good, except for the part where we couldn’t even quantify the number of unknowns, and thus didn’t know which parts were dependent and which were independent.
I’ve dealt with Six Sigma and it does work, but it was originally developed for things like factories, where you can clearly apply it to tangible and definite goals, such as “get 100 boxes out per hour.”
And you can see if the goals and procedures are working. It worked well for that and many tried to apply it to service and office economies. And while it “can” work in those types of workplaces, it does have to be adjusted a lot to be successful.
Although I agree with your first statement, the sad fact is that many employers are looking for those specific qualifications as some kind of proof of expertise in the methodologies.
When used appropriately in the correct context, Six Sigma methodologies can be useful in using quantitative methods to put experience and data into a framework where root problems and corrective actions become evident. The classic case is Motorola putting this methodology in used in its semiconductor microprocessor manufacturing to identify the key areas to reduce the incidence of defects to less than 3.4 per million units. Because of the high volume of manufacture for this type of product, statistical analysis was used to identify specific processes and procedures which were resulting in unnecessarily or unexpectedly high numbers of defects which could be addressed easily. At lower volumes, or in the design phase prior to manufacturing, other more qualitative methods are used to assess the sensitivity and likelihood of a process or design feature to result in defects so the problem can be fixed before finish tooling is made or a production line set up. ‘Lean’ Six Sigma methods, designed to be used by non-statisticians in more informal contexts, were created to give the system more flexibility.
Unfortunately, since Six Sigma was so successful for Motorola and a handful of other companies in a few areas, big corporations like General Electric, Hewlett Packard, Northrop Grumman, and Johnson & Johnson, just to name a few, decided to implement it as a cure all for all quality and process control problems whether it made sense or not, and ‘train’ the entire workforce in an abridged version that was simple enough for managers and secretaries to understand. And of course, everyone has to work on a “Six Sigma project” created specifically to meet the certification. The result: a jumble of nonsense make-work that rarely does anything to solve a real problem and often creates more useless documentation or reporting. Even the US government has gotten in on the act, and the results that I’ve seen have been spectacular (for ironic values of ‘spectacular’), suggesting that they should abandon long-used inventory and configuration management systems in favor of unworkable crap that was an improvement only in the sense that passing out after getting drunk is a relief, if but temporary.
For the o.p.: Six Sigma can be a useful methodology when applied by people who understand the methods and can gauge the applicability to a specific problem pertaining to process control or something similar. It is not a catholicon for all business problems, even legitimate ones such as poor market research or misgauging production quotas, and does nothing in the case that your chief director on a major program is a blithering idiot or your CEO is committing a bit of ‘light treason’. (I always felt that Arrested Development could have made a good running gag out of a Six Sigma like improvement process, which of course would be headed by G.O.B.) The reality is that Six Sigma methodologies only work for process improvement if the people using it are already competent and are just using it in a conscious, directed way to identify root cause and correction opportunities. Using the process blindly will achieve the same kind of results as driving down the highway at eighty miles and hour in blizzard conditions. The online course may introduce you to the basic terminology but will not equip you with any of the skills you’ll need to learn how to appropriately use it. Your prospective employer should be more interested in your applicable skills, with Six Sigma certification as a “nice to have” (at best) but something they can provide as training if it is really necessary. Otherwise, if they just have a box to tick in order to assure that X percentage of the workforce is Six Sigma certified, well, you know what kind of den you’re walking into.
Don’t get me started on project management certification from PMI. Jesus, there is an entire industry that exists to convince complete idiots that success is just following some flow diagram and brainlessly regurgitating acronyms that should remain meaningless to anyone who enjoys sanity.
My current employer flat out said they would never use Six Sigma since we’re not a manufacturing company. I did a little of the online training, and it does seem to have some useful concepts, but in my current job, flexibility is key. We have too many variables to plan for them all, and have to be able to think of solutions when what we have planned doesn’t work.
Nothing is more annoying than a bunch of people running around with no formal knowledge of statistics, but touting their green and black belts, acting like they are experts because someone has paid good money to get them certified. These people wouldn’t know the difference between a complementary error function and a basketball hoop. We had one of them claiming a great success for a project, which actually accomplished nothing. The problem is that they are taught a variety of techniques that can be useful in a factory, but they apply it to an internal process for which most of the techniques are useless.
This person created a questionable metric, then showed dramatic improvement over the course of the project. I told this person repeatedly that the key chart that showed great success was a complete red herring. The “green belt” took my comments to the “black belt” who sanctioned it as good stuff, even though I could show with two lines of mathematics that the chart couldn’t possibly have done anything other than display the effect they both interpreted as wild success. Actually no mathematics at all was required, since it was obvious by inspection.
Later they gave talks at “six sigma” conferences, bragging about the dramatic success, which was total nonsense. My company went through a phase where everything under the sun had to have a six sigma improvement project. The religious fervor got pretty intense. There were high priests, sacred texts, inviolable dogma, true believers, etc. It took about five years for this to run its course and now you never hear about six sigma any more. Thankfully, the prophets and missionaries who are selling this stuff to the heathens have moved to greener pastures elsewhere.
Perhaps these techniques have worked with greater success in other companies, or elsewhere in my own company. I’m skeptical by nature and your mileage may vary.
I worked for a large MNC, which got the six sigma bug under their bonnet and made all their PMs take the training. Of course, the division I worked for was a software division, where the total number of tickets for the system I worked on (which was canned later, unrelated to but symptomatic of the thinking that brought us six sigma) was less than 10,000. That means if even one ticket had come back from the customer as problematic, the work had failed because our error rate was greater than “six sigma”. Anyone that has thought about software at all knows this is a ludicrous goal to achieve.
The one six sigma project I saw that actually had some benefit was from the only PM there that was smart enough to pour piss out of a boot with instructions on the bottom. He actually took the time to think if there was anything we did that ran into the millions, and eventually came up with … printlng. Yes, despite being a software company, people printed things into dead tree editions all the time. This PM had the brilliant idea of… not printing cover sheets anymore. Apparently, we printed so much crap that this was a $400,000 savings per year for the company. Not, mind you, that figuring this out took any of the statistical knowledge that six sigma is supposed to impart, but it was the only project that actually saved the company money or made things run more smoothly.
There are certainly use cases for six sigma that make sense, but I feel like the majority of the time it’s a buzzword that gets misused and just makes things worse. It’s to the point that I’ll refuse to apply to a workplace that touts it’s six sigma processes, because I know that place will be a clusterfuck.
Well written post by Stranger On A Train. I picked these two pieces out to point out that Six Sigma was successful in parts of Motorola and a handful of other companies. A company like Motorola is (was…) huge. The direct manufacturing part may have benefited from Six Sigma, when properly applied. Surrounding parts of the company probably had varying levels of success.
Even within manufacturing, you would have to be careful. For instance, it’s important to figure out what the right definition of success and failure is. Say you are looking at a PCB working when it comes off the line. Is that one opportunity for success/failure? Is it one per IC? One per solder ball?
And those are the questions that someone familiar with the actual processes has to address. One of the key problems with many applications of Six Sigma methodology is that it is often perfromed by a “team” of individuals only tangentially involved or knowledgeable about the process in question, often producing a result that is worse than useless. The seeming answer is to train everyone in the methodolgy, but in such a way that it is dumbed down to the point of being worthless, and often taught, as JWT Kottekoe notes, by people with no formal training in statistics, so they are basically teaching by rote. Six Sigma is not a rote process; it has to be applied mindfully or else it produces the kind of useless metrics and anti-solutions mentioned by several posters above.
By all means, get the cert to populate your resumé with a critical buzzword that resumé scanning software searches for. But don’t think it means anything unless you can demonstrate technical aptitude at applying it to real world problems in a worthwhile manner.
I would be seriously concerned about the future of any company that still thinks Six Sigma is a workable concept. Maybe it is a trick interview question.
What is a Motorola grandpa? Isn’t that the company that originated the Six Sigma idea and ended up being sold into individual parts and essentially destroying itself? Sure the brand name Motorola still exists but the thriving company that started Six Sigma doesn’t. It is gone, parted out like a dysfunctional family that no longer speaks to each other. They could have owned the cell phone and electronic gadget world, instead they spent much of their productive time in quality management meetings. And many US companies followed them right down the same path.
The business world would be much better without the billions of dollars spent on such quality management systems. You can spend a lot of money on meetings feeding donuts to accountants, administrative assistants and other team members who have no idea about the efficient operations of manufacturing. Get on your Iridium phone and pass the word.
Just cancel the meetings and buy them the donuts anyway.
I would brush the question aside as a reference to past business concepts, say you are familiar with the process, and move on with the interview.
Did you get a copy of the memo announcing the we are no longer printing the cover sheets on the TPS reports? We sent out 3 copies. I’ll have another copy printed and put in your IN basket. Initial it and return the original to me. Be sure to keep a copy for yourself. We are going paperless!
I once worked at a company at which the management announced their intention to “go paperless”. The result was that everyone printed out their own personal copy of all critical documents and drawings (which of course were not under subsequent configuration control) which proved to be fortuitous when the online documentation system didn’t work or wasn’t available to people working on the manufacturing floor.
Re. Six Sigma’s context: they way it is taught, with the Gaussian as the Only Statistical Function Ever, there are whole industrial sectors and cases where it can’t be used. Any case where the desired function is skewed (such as when you’re checking impurities or biological contamination), any case where the function is qualitative, won’t work.
The ideas are good, concepts such as “you can’t decide if something is broken without checking it, you can’t decide if there has been change or not until you let the new process stabilize” are very important, and they’re things that way too many people still don’t know. But when it’s applied blindly by people who don’t know their Fs from their E. Coli, it’s crap.
A super fast-talking, alpha, sales-military guy tried to implement Six Sigma in an IT company we were working with in 2000.
It was a document conversion project, and unfortunately the documents themselves were of poor quality (onion skin, red ink, carbon copies, etc.) and the pig-headed guy still pitched and promised that close to 100% of the resulting images had to be under a certain filesize, and be readable.
The actual operators were close to revolting, and the middle managers were muzzled at the meetings.
And yes, he also pitched “go paperless” and that paper would be gone by 2012.
That’s not strictly true. Six Sigma has methods for measuring and estimating failures that are measured in frequency per period or as a function of unit lifetime. In fact, there is no reason you could’t apply essentially any probability density function using the Six Sigma methodology, although obviously with other distributions you’ll have more parameters than just mean and variance. However, for estimating the number of purely random failures of one variable across a population without regard to duty life, the Gaussian distribution is a good first approximation, and deviation from a Gaussian curve often indicates an undiscovered variable or systemic bias.
However, in order to use the techniques intelligently, you have to understand basic statistics. The training (or, at least the training I went through) does not due that to any useful degree. You are presented with a series of steps and you just crank through the steps to do the analysis, which doesn’t give you any insight into how well or poor a fit your estimation is. There is some cursory discussion about goodness-of-fit tests but when I started asking detailed questions about how to assess fit with low populations or using resampling techniques to improve the fidelity of the estimate, the “Black Belt Trainer” gave me a blank look like I had just smacked her upside the head with a statistics textbook (or maybe that was just what I was imagining doing) and said that this was “outside the scope of Six Sigma”. Right, don’t look for insight or use critical judgement, just turn the crank and get the answer.