I would agree with a general guideline of .5-1% of the population for BB. Most companies are hitting the BB’s for $500,000 in saving per year and use an average cost savings of $120,000 per project. If you are really concerned with the success of the program you need to look at how much CHANGE can your company absorb.
If you are a company of 1000 employees you might train 10 BB’s. If they all do 4-5 projects per year they your company will be involved in 40-50 change implementations over the next year. Does your company have a change policy? (GE has a Change Acceleration Program -CAP) What is your companies success record on executing change? If you haven’t done well in the past and have not done anything about it adding 40 projects to it will not improve your record.
Do not strand a BB in afacility by themselves. They will get pounded by the general population to behave. It helps if they have a fellow BB to comiserate with. You really should be considering gepgraphic dispersion and change.
You should really see most of your change come from Green Belts. They should be about 30% of your population. Your BB’s should support them (not consultants – you want the GB’s to look to your internal resources as experts – not outsiders – this is part of the process for passing ownership from the consultants to the company). If a consulting company wants to do your GB training you might want to be very careful with them. Check out the book “Dangerous Company”, it was written by a couple guys from a Chicago newspaper. It wiill help you deal more effectively with consultants.
As far as the expense of a deployment. Unless your Quality person has been a SS consultant I wouldn’t worry to much about what they say. If you want to know the cost call some of the companies up and see what they charge. We bid a job just like any other company.
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