Selling Lean Six Sigma to HR groups – Examples

George:There are three major issues with respect to the involvement of HR in Six Sigma. First is the organizational aspects of any major initiative.https://www.isixsigma.com/library/content/c030414a.aspThe second emerges as the culture of Six Sigma envelopes the company and HR becomes more of an owner of a programme that may have started in Operations.https://www.isixsigma.com/library/content/c070507a.aspUsually the very last effort emerges as HR is seen as a business unit and starts to conduct projects within the organization. This goes far further than the frequent iSixSigma threads on retention and recruitment.https://www.isixsigma.com/library/content/c040816a.aspDon’t use a list of projects from someone else, unless you really need to see an example of successful projects to convince a group of the applicability. I have seen this fail when people take the easy route of, “We’ll just do that,” without gathering their own data and conducting their own projects.Start the team working on business processes they own and what effect these processes have on the metrics of the strategic plan of the business as a whole. Present the list of candidate initiatives and projects to the team and use it as a jumping off point. Focus on the metrics that are important to the business.Cheers, Alastair

George:My credo is to teach you to fish. This is what I’d like you to do.1) Make a list of the ongoing problems in your business that are costing you (metrics here) money, lost opportunity, lengthy review. “This is the way things are right now.” Be as realistic although gloomy as you wish.2) Get the team to build the vision; your perfect world. How will this look? Change management tools are such things as the “elevator speech”, “15 words”, “More of, less of” Focus on aspects of the programme (ongoing and strategic), not the projects(finite and tactical).3) Outline your strategy for getting from point (1) to point (2). Six Sigma is a well recognized execution strategy once you know where you want to go and have a way of measuring it. Read Bossidy’s book on “Execution”. The execution of your vision might be Six Sigma in HR, or something else. Cheers, Alastair

While presentations from other benchmark companies sometimes help, unless it is a company your SLT is really linked to, it will not help. Comments like we are different, we don’t have the same infra-structure, or we have tried to do this before come to mind. Another more important question and example, as stated by others, is your own internal process review. I always ask hr and safety leaders how do you know you were successful today? If they answer with a lagging metric lag no attrition or no injuries, then they have missed the picture. You need to do a risk assessment that ties hr processes with the business’ leading indicators. HR is a key part of the operations of any organization but still think of themselves as outsiders… think about it did your hr training department start tracking cost of quality and defects when the training budget was cut? If not why not?HF Chris Vallee

Nice HBR article Steve.
HR’s alignment to the organizational strategic objectives is arguably one of the biggest milestones in identifying the Six Sigma projects for the domain. Typically quoted as ‘Third Generation HR’ it has become the new wave of consulting where improvement methodologies ranging from Six Sigma to Triz are focusing on.
 

Dear All,
I was wondering if there is any article or white paper in this site/or in the entire web on Software Testing and Quality Assurance just like the one written by Alastair for HR Operations : –
https://www.isixsigma.com/library/content/c040816a.asp
I did google, but in vain. If anybody knows or has it, please post it in the forum, it would do a great deal for SS novices like me. My organization has embraced SS enterprisewide. So I am looking for some possible projects that I can think of and that is feasible for my team, that can be completed in a span of 3-4 months…
thanks a lot for your contributions…