Belt Capacity?

How long is a piece of string?

When I did my first deployment the biggest problem was the amount of time we took staff away from the day job to work on Projects. We had plenty of enthusiastic involvement but had to schedule very carefully to avoid taking multiple people away from core tasks at key times.

Better to start with a small number of key projects where you know you can make a difference to the organisation than to saturate the organisation with lots of teams working on minor improvements.

Its going to depend on the size of the organisation, the availability of Project managers (Black belts etc.) and the day to day requirements of the business.

Just an opinion!

I agree with some of the other sentiments. Often the limiting factor is the organization you are supporting. I lead a crew of about 12 Black Belts. What we’ve found is that a department (75-150 people) can only really take on 1 major continuous improvement effort at a time. But to answer your question, our Belts support multiple departments and their workload is typically 1-2 large DMAIC projects at a time and 3-6 smaller job assignments. I’ve found that if we load them up with too many DMAIC projects, one gets the priority and the others get back-burnered.