Key Points

• Business cases are critical documents for the success of any Lean Six Sigma project.
• Understanding how to properly structure your document is vital to provide a clear vision of your project’s intended goals.
• Any project should be aligned with your non-profit’s organization mission statement.

How do you build a business case for Lean Six Sigma as a non-profit? You’re not building towards record profits, so the usual business case for pursuing an implementation is out the window. As we’ve outlined in the past, however, Lean Six Sigma is a solid fit for any non-profit organization. While financial goals are always a welcome sight in the non-profit sector, there are other areas where you’ll need to focus your efforts.

Today, we’re looking at how to construct a solid business case for Lean Six Sigma, including some key considerations you should keep in mind. Additionally, we’ll talk about how to structure the document itself before you present it. Making a solid case could see your organization achieving its goals with ease.

Define the Problem

One of the key things you need to do before drawing up your business case is defining the problem. This isn’t a problem solely defined by monetary cost, but rather by other costs. These could include costs of inefficiencies, costs of inaction, or other defined metrics where there is a definite problem. A common example would see the problem defined as a drop-off in potential benefactors and donors for your non-profit organization.

There is a problem of engagement, so you need to address why there is a substantial drop-off of potential donors. Just about any business case for Lean Six Sigma is going to be centered around a persistent, troubling issue with your organization. This is where you need to meet with your team and discuss pain points on a wider level.

Take the time to quantify the impact, getting clear data on the current effects of pain points. If you’re seeing those benefactors have a drop-off of 33%, that’s a goal to pursue, which ties directly into my next point.

Focus on Clear, Measurable Goals

One of the key things you’ll want to keep in mind when constructing your business case is giving a clear, defined goal to pursue. The success of Lean Six Sigma implementation in the non-profit sector isn’t down to the usual suspects we expect from for-profit businesses. Instead, you’ll want to use a method like SMART to define and articulate your central goal.

Returning to the previous example, you’ll want to set a clear goal for serving potential benefactors. By reducing intake time for services, you can improve access by a quantifiable percentage. If you’ve got a 33% drop-off of beneficiary access, you’ll want to target the inverse of that, providing up to 67% of service access for anyone engaging your organization.

Any defined goals should align with your organization’s mission statement. Reducing operational costs is well and good, but being able to align those cost reductions with the overall strategic mission of your organization is going to go a lot further for the successful implementation of any Lean Six Sigma initiative.

Define the Project’s Scope Clearly

You need clear limits for the extent of a project’s scope. Scope creep isn’t unheard of in the non-profit sector, and it’s going to be a lot harder to engage employees and leadership alike without a clearly defined scope. The biggest question you need to ask at this point is: What process or area is this Lean Six Sigma project addressing?

Further, you’ll want to identify the stakeholders involved in the project. These will be members of staff, board members, volunteers, and clients among other individuals your organization interacts with. As with any drastic changes or massive undertakings, resistance is guaranteed.

Managing resistance isn’t a difficult thing to navigate, thankfully, as you can utilize strong change management strategies to ably traverse the transition. Additionally, engaging and empowering your staff will do quite a bit to mitigate any resistance you’ll encounter. These are areas you’ll also want to highlight in your business case, as any potential resistance could be the poison pill for a project.

Justify the Investment

Non-profit businesses aren’t necessarily concerned with return on investment for a given project. Instead, you’ll be focusing on a different sort of ROI, a return on impact. Quantify the positive effects of any Lean Six Sigma project you’re constructing a business case for.

Projected outcomes should have clear, empirical data behind them. This could come down to something like how volunteer is maximized as a result of your project’s efforts. The key thing to keep in mind is that you’re looking to improve quality, one of the core tenets of any Lean Six Sigma project.

How you achieve that quality is entirely dependent on the parameters of a given project. You could be reducing errors, cutting back on wait times, or even providing intangible benefits like higher staff and volunteer morale. The key thing is to justify exactly what you’re doing in your business case.

Deliver a Timeline

A project is useless without a clear timeline. If this is your first time utilizing Lean Six Sigma, you’ll want to outline in your business case the reasoning behind the use of the methodology. Additionally, you’ll want a solid timeline that splits parts of the project into phases.

Additionally, you’ll want to provide resource requirements for each phase. A project isn’t going to succeed without the materials needed to put your plan into action. Any solid business case for a non-profit or for-profit organization needs defined resource requirements. With everything in place, you’ve got solid means to move to the next step.

Highlight the Benefits

When embarking on any sort of Lean Six Sigma project, knowing the positive impact of any effort is a must. This is when you’ll highlight the top results of your project in your business case and explain why exactly this needs to be pursued. You can focus on something like employee empowerment, as you’re ostensibly pursuing certifications, training, and other hard skills that can transfer to their careers.

On the other hand, you can focus on making your organization more nimble and quicker to adapt. Non-profit businesses thrive upon being able to operate with minimal resources and a sense of agility, and showing how you plan to adapt and change with external challenges is a fine way of highlighting the benefits of your Lean Six Sigma project.

Secure Leadership Buy-in

Any project, regardless of methodology, needs leadership buy-in. It isn’t enough to have just you on board, but your managers, board members, and so forth need to be on the same page. With leadership buy-in, your Lean Six Sigma project has concrete support. This is crucial for any non-profit, especially when you consider any potential regulatory concerns and the limited resources on hand.

When constructing your business case, take the time to identify teams and the roles of each team member.

Structuring Your Document

Structuring your business case is one of the most vital steps you can take to ensure the success of any Lean Six Sigma project. I’d suggest the following elements in sequential order per the criteria outlined in the previous steps:

• Executive Summary
• Introduction
• Problem Statement
• Solution
• Goals
• Benefits and Justification
• Scope
• Resources Needed
• Risk Assessment
• Conclusion

Other Useful Tools and Concepts

Looking for something else to go with your morning coffee? You might want to see how some of the leading organizations around the world have made use of TQM. While TQM isn’t quite as popular as other business approaches these days, it is still a highly viable means of increasing quality and building a culture centered around it.

Additionally, you might want to take a look at what role Scrum Masters play. Scrum projects require swift guidance by servant leaders. Scrum Masters are able to easily secure resources, enable teams, and provide coaching and educational resources to guarantee the success of any Sprint.

Conclusion

A strong business case is often all that is needed to get a good Lean Six Sigma project going. Hopefully, you’ve come away from today’s guide with a fundamental understanding of how to construct a solid business case for your non-profit organization.