Learnings from 6s for transaction processes

Here are my two key take-aways:

People skills and management the “change process” is more important in many cases than the quality tools.
Depending on how long your processes have been running, many times a process map of the as-is process can lead you to most of the defects in your process. Very seldomly do I need to perform high-level statistical analyses to find the root causes of the defects.
Hope they help!
Beth

I mostly do Transactional, it is the nature of our business.  I make sure to know the ‘s is’so that you know where to improve on the ‘to be’ and what mistakes to not repeat.  Also, it is a must to know your Critical To’s.  If you don’t know your critical to’s you could be spinning your wheels anyway.

My two take-aways:
1) If you are the first person in an area to help them, the define phase is the most important. Simply defining what it is they do- through a top-down chart and process maps in addition to a rudementary baseline measurement.
2) As Beth said in an earlier post–managing the people. This is important for two reasons-

A) general change management you need in any project
B) the process changes will most likely require the people doing the process to do change their behavior (i.e. the way they do things). You’ll be lucky if you can change a computer program or a report to elicit all of the changes you need to make an improvement. You need to make sure that

a) the people you need to change have bought-in to the project and the changes
b) you have changed some structures to ensure that they change their behavior (Measures, performance review, the reports from the system, software, etc.).