Key Points

• Lean Six Sigma is an organization-wide change to make.
• If you’re ill-prepared for the change, expect quite a few growing pains.
• Confer with a change manager before you make the switch to guarantee the transition is an easy one.

The common mistakes found when implementing Lean Six Sigma are all too common for many businesses. When it comes to adopting a new methodology, it can be difficult to stick the landing as it were. Some of this can be attributed to resistance to change and a lack of proper change management behind the effort. However, this isn’t all you’ll need to consider if you’re hedging your bets on implementing Lean Six Sigma.

Today, we’re taking a closer look at the all-too-common pitfalls of Lean Six Sigma and how to circumvent them. With luck, you’ll have everything you need in place to make the most of your Lean Six Sigma initiative and get to work on the more important tasks at hand. This is a guide primarily intended for organizations that are on the fence about using this methodology, if you’re an LSS organization, this might not apply to you.

Lean Six Sigma: An Overview

At its core, Lean Six Sigma is a hybridization of Lean manufacturing principles combined with Six Sigma’s attention to quality and consistency. This creates a flexible and nuanced approach that boosts quality and reduces inefficiency on the whole. Lean Six Sigma has become a popular choice in part thanks to how it shapes a business.

Rather than organizations being concerned with addressing quality and the bottom line at the same time, LSS takes the time to establish a pipeline that emphasizes quality at every turn. It is also different from many other methodologies in that it focuses heavily on the customer experience.

When properly implemented, Lean Six Sigma allows an organization to remain flexible and take the time to address new technologies and trends as they emerge. By emphasizing an environment focused on learning, quality, and continuous improvement, it is a recipe for overall success.

Why Businesses Use Lean Six Sigma

This hybrid approach has proven to be quite popular since its introduction, primarily in manufacturing. However, LSS has become a popular choice for just about any industry you can imagine. Any organization can benefit from focusing on quality, continuous learning, and the drive to constantly improve processes regardless of the business sector.

Common Mistakes in Implementing Lean Six Sigma

Now that we’ve spent a bit of time discussing the particulars behind the discipline, it’s time to talk a bit more about the common mistakes in implementing Lean Six Sigma. Often, these are attributable to a lack of commitment on the organization’s side, rather than individual employees. While they can certainly have an impact, LSS is very much an organization-wide change to make.

As such, it can lead to some stumbling blocks as you try to find your footing with the methodology. That said, these are easy enough concepts to navigate, and ultimately find a working solution to remediate. Many of these would be common issues with any other methodology you’re looking to adopt like Agile, Waterfall, and so forth.

With that in mind, making a big change like the use of Lean Six Sigma is quite the undertaking. Before making the next steps toward implementing this at an organization-wide scale, it would help to talk to your change manager to devise a working plan to make navigation easier. Something as simple as analyzing your corporate culture with Lewin’s Change Model might help to devise a working plan to get things rolling.

No Support from Leadership

As with any major changes, one of the common mistakes seen in adopting LSS comes down to a lack of support from leadership. Often, when making drastic changes at least, leadership embodying the principles helps the rest of the workforce fall into line. If the leadership isn’t committed to doing things the Lean Six Sigma way, then the execution can falter.

When it comes to remediating this, there’s only one simple solution: get everyone on board. Leadership has to be on the same page and act as a guiding beacon for the rest of the workforce to fall behind. If you have management that is sticking to the status quo way of handling projects, then you’re destined to fail when it comes to properly sticking the landing with LSS.

You’ll want to get leadership on board right from the start while highlighting the benefits of LSS. If they understand the stakes at play when it comes to efficiency, cost-effectiveness, and overall ROI, they’re likely to stick to the plan.

Lack of Solid Metrics

LSS is all about data, but what if your organization isn’t used to developing metrics? Well, you’re likely to fall victim to one of the most common mistakes surrounding Lean Six Sigma. Data is the lifeblood of decision-making when it comes to LSS, and not understanding what you need to gather is going to severely hinder things.

Now, you could spend weeks and months faffing about and looking for ideal metrics to measure things. Then you’d ideally have the right mindset when it came to data collation and analysis. However, there is a far easier solution you can implement if you want to make the most of the data at hand.

My primary recommendation is going to be training. You don’t necessarily need to go out and higher data scientists to make this process work. However, getting someone well-trained in the art of data collection and analysis is going to pinpoint areas where you can collect data in no time at all.

The Corporate Culture Isn’t Structured Around Improvement

When you’ve been running a business for a while, you get settled into a status quo of sorts. Things are comfortable, even if you aren’t seeing excellent ROI in the long term. Adopting LSS can come across as quite the culture shock under this line of thinking. This leads directly to one of the most common mistakes in LSS implementation that you’ll find.

If the corporate culture isn’t built around improving quality across the board, then LSS projects are doomed to failure. There are a few ways to remediate this thankfully, and they’re relatively simple fixes in concept.

When looking to adopt LSS, you want to lay the ground work by fostering an environment centered around improvement. This is done by opening pipelines for feedback, recognizing victories and success, and adopting LSS principles in daily operations even if they aren’t the core focus of the work at hand.

Scope Creep

Inevitably, any project without proper management is going to bloat up and suffer from scope creep. This isn’t just one of the most common mistakes in implementing LSS, but in general with projects. I get it, it’s enticing to add everything and the kitchen sink, especially if it’s viable and cost-effective to do so. However, this is one area where you’ll want to avoid the potential for delays and added complications.

Scope creep plagues countless projects, some I’ve personally been involved with, and it can easily fall out of the view of those in charge of the project. That said, this is an easy one to mitigate.

How do you prevent scope creep? With clearly defined goals, deadlines, and milestones. Essentially, the customer requirements should inform the choices you make with the features added throughout a project.

Not Capitalizing on Continuous Learning

It hurts your organization quite a bit when continual learning isn’t on the table. The simple fact of the matter is that taking the time to emphasize a culture of learning at an institutional level is going to make the adoption and championing of Lean Six Sigma that much easier. Going back to that point about the status quo, that seems to be the real bugbear at play when discussing common mistakes in LSS implementation.

If your employees, management, and so forth aren’t encourage to learn, you’re doing a disservice to your entire organization. LSS doesn’t necessarily require a learning organization in place, but developing one alongside your adoption efforts is going to accommodate some of the bigger changes to come.

Take the time to dissect former projects, look over case studies, and develop other data points to analyze in the post-mortem. This gives you ideas on where to adjust and refine processes and highlights what you’ve done well. Sometimes it’s just a lack of understanding, but other times it can be something that is missed entirely.

Poor Project Selection

What makes for a good project in Lean Six Sigma? Ultimately, a successful project is a good return on investment. Poor project choices do not add value to your organization. The most effective solution is to vet your projects and make sure they align with your organization’s goals. Further, you should have data points that influence these decisions, rather than just flying by the seat of your pants.

No Documentation

I feel like at once per piece I’ll talk about documentation, but there’s merit to this, I promise. One of the most common mistakes of any new methodology is a lack of documentation. This serves multiple purposes, it gives a history of what has been done and provides transparency and accountability about who is responsible for the choices made. A lack of documentation is one of the most common mistakes in any methodology, and I’ll keep harping on about it until I see it is a widespread practice.

Lack of Training

LSS isn’t just something you commit to and dive in headlong. As we’ve discussed at length at iSixSigma, there is quite a bit of learning material to cover with the methodology itself. That said, it doesn’t come as a surprise to see many early attempts falter due to a simple lack of knowledge when it comes to the subjects on hand. The most effective solution to counter one of the most common mistakes you’ll find is to invest in training resources.

Resistance to Change

People don’t like change, that’s just part of human nature. However, one of the most common mistakes you’ll find in implementing LSS is not preparing your workforce for the change to come. Change is a delicate thing to navigate, especially when it is a complete paradigm shift for your workforce. As such, the most effective thing you can do is to work closely with a change manager to develop a plan that makes the transition a piece of cake.

Difficulty Completing Projects

So you’ve taken the steps to implement LSS, but you can’t seem to stick the landing in regard to completing a project. So, what do you do? Well, this is where the rubber meets the road when it comes to developing solid operational procedures. SOPs and guidelines should be in place when starting projects, alongside clearly defined milestones and goals.

Other Useful Tools and Concepts

Looking for a little extra material? You might want to take a closer look at how artificial intelligence ethics come into play with Six Sigma. AI is a growing technology, and before standards and best practices are developed there are some real concerns you’ll want to keep abreast of.

Additionally, you might want to take a look at how FMEA can be applied to IT projects. FMEA is a natural fit for use alongside other frameworks for managing any IT deployment.

Conclusion

The common mistakes of Lean Six Sigma come about more because of inexperience than anything else. Before you make the plunge, make sure you take the right steps to ensure your deployment is a smooth one.

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