Success Rate for First Wave of Projects; First Wave MBB

Our first wave of projects had about a 70% success rate--the other 30% were "rejected" or "put on hold."  The focus on the first wave of projects was on achieving hard savings >$175M.  No other type of projects were allowed.

I had MBB responsibilities for the Black Belt projects, as well as completing my own projects and training.  The home-grown approach is recommended, because it is important to understand the company's culture.

If you were MBB and first wave BB at the same time, how did you develop the expertise to serve as the former? How many BBs did you concurrently guide? Were you 100% dedicated to 6 Sigma implementation?

Joe,

I'm new to Six Sigma but as part of my first BB project I'm starting find that the expectation of cost saving isn't always the true deliverable. In the 'transactional' environment in which my project sits it seems to me that the benefits are associated with improving productivity.

OK I accept that that there's a direct link between improving productivity and cost of quality, however what needs to be borne in mind is that it may actually cost more to deliver to a higher level. What I've found is that, whereas the 'customer specification' was peviously hidden, post the project this specification has taken on a whole new meaning.

Hope this helps,

Mike Harry

Our situation may have been a little different from yours. We were trained by an outside consultant who made us work to set a goal that was a stretch but also attainable. All five projects (manufacturing - not transactional) met their goals. We have since trained in-house a Green Belt wave of four individuals and have had good success with that as well.

Being the first one trained as a Black Belt, I became a mentor for the next four but in no way consider myself a MBB. Would prefer to obtain additional training and run more projects before taking the step to MBB.

No one works full time with Six Sigma so we have pooled our resources and are working on two important projects, splitting the resources. One of those projects is transactional which is more of a challenge since we did not receive specific training in that area.

I was a blackbelt for the first wave here.  Here's what I experienced.  My first project was successful, but it took longer (1 year) than it should have.  This partially stemmed from I was still learning, but also from the fact that we (the BB) were REQUIRED to work on hard dollar savings in our manufacturing facilities.  By the way, I am in research engineering.  The most important learning?  Buy-in, buy-in, buy-in!  I spent God knows how much time just trying to get information or cooperation from different parts of the company because they saw this as another TQM-system that would go away with time.  This is actually getting better now.  This is improving the success rate of the second wave significantly.

Probably one of our biggest deficiencies was our MBB.  He was just another employee who went through MBB training in addition to BB training.  He had never completed a project before the training classes and did not know any more than us.  This resulted in form letter-type anwsers out of the Six Sigma manual rather than actual help when we had problem and issues. 

My two cents worth - if you want to start a Six Sigma program, hire some outside people as MBB's and higher.  They may not know the business, but they understand the process.  Combined with the BB's business specific knowledge, you can get a lot farther, a lot quicker.

Joe, My first project was successful in saving my operation $800,000. The project though took 10 months to complete due to me learning along the way and recovering from mistakes that I made. There was a great deal of frustration experienced as I worked through my project.

1. How successful were your first projects?

About 85% success.

It is taking BB´s 5-6 months to complete their projects (they were simultaneously taking the training) and "hard" economical benefits are still to be validated.

2. If your success was not complete, what was the most important lesson learned from the first wave?

Adecuate project scope is essential. Even though we have had a champion work-out for project selection and definition, since they were in a learning  process too, our experience was that the project definition was too broad so BB´s had to re-define project´s scope and "original" economical benefits were cut down as did the scope of the project. 

We had some set-backs with measurement phase since measurement systems for transactional processes was almost non-existent so BB had to design and implement measurements for their projects. In the future, if measurement system is non-existent we will add at least 2 more months to project completion date.

3. Did your organization's success rate improve for the second wave?

We don´t have a second wave of BB yet.

4.Given a standard approach of developing a home grown MBB from that first group of BBs, who served as the MBB during that development period?

During this first BB wave, the "MBB" role was performed by 2 employees who had previously taken BB training and had a limited experience in Six Sigma projects. They had also trained some GB internally.  

Aditionally we hired a team of professors from a local university as consultants.

Joe:

In my case there was a 70% of success in the first wave, we could save 80,000 with a 8 months duration project. In my company I was the first person who was trained for BB and I faced the problem that some of the support departments didn't give the importance to this project. The lesson learned is buy-in, we realized that we would never get the desired numbers if there wasn't commitment and support to this. Now we changed the implementation strategy and current projects are well driven with a different approach and with some other persons trained, one Champion acting as an obstacles remover and a full time GB leadering the core teams. Although we still don't have a 100% project success we feel we go on the right way. 

Six of us began black belt training in March '01 and expect to complete 'certification' in January '02.  We are all full-time black belts reporting to a centralized process improvement group, supporting 4 operating divisions of a 3,000 employee company.

By the end of December we will have handed-off 13 projects to the divisions that we support for an estimated annual savings of $5.2 million.

Relating to project mix, 9 were manufacturing related and the remainder were transactional.  There were two additional projects that were halted during this 10 month period, primarily because they were not properly scoped.

We utilized an external consultant for on-site training of this first wave of black belts, and plan to use them for a second wave which we hope to start next summer.  We are considering an in-house MBB, and if so part of his teaching requirement will be met by participating in the training of our second wave.

Joe,

Our company was very successful with wave 1, and 2 as well. I think the greatest contribution to the success was two-fold: 1) Ensuring that the BB and team scope the project in order to be successful both for time to implement, and to ensure adequate improvements. 2) Our BB's are full time. In reading some of the other replies, I'm thoroughly convinced that there is a direct correlation between BB dedication and project completion and success. Speaking for myself, there is absolutely no way my team could have been as successful as we were if I still had my other job responsibilities - obviously I'm a full time BB.

I hear what everyone is saying about correlation of success between BB dedication (regardless of full or part time) to sucess, but the BB is not alone on the project team.  You also need team members to get things done. 

Are your team members as dedicated to the project?  I believe they are, but do they have the time to spend on the project? or do they have their other responsibilities to perform as well.

I look forward to everyone's response.

I'm a BB. My projects have all been very successful so far; I love Six Sigma. I've seen a lot of projects fail, though. I think the reason for most of them is because they didn't do the necessary legwork in Define. If they had, they probably never would have started measure with a better project charter and goals. I also think that too many projects ignore the process that that leads to failure. If you aren't measuring the process, you aren't doing Six Sigma; most teams I've seen that failed, are only measureing the product and ignoring the process.