Serious Question From Darth

Darth,
Your organization may lack the necessary resources to implement your suggestions. A good practice is to prioritize the implementations based on what is important to your company, such as hard savings or customer satisfaction.

When organizations are not able to effectively track the projects they take up,when the number of project hold-ups start accumulating, Champions have more projects than they can manage – these are all signs of an organization having bitten off more than it can chew
 
 

Darth,
A few thoughts…
1) Change brings about stress and stress can adversely affect people’s temperament.  A potential sign that too much change is happening is an increase in workplace violence (not limited to fights, but verbal confrontations as well).  This can be potentially minimized through communication – with better communication, the more change an organization (their people) will be able to tolerate.
2) We are going Full Throttle, but we are still tied to the pier…
a) The number of projects being initiated greatly exceeds the number of projects being completed. 
b) The number of projects being completed keeps increasing but the results are never realized.
c) The number of projects in-work greatly exceeds the number of personnel for that area.  Too many priority 1 jobs???
There are probably many others but these were the first two areas that came to mind.  Hope it helps…

Darth:
 
In addition to the feedback you have already received, I would add the following:
 
1.  How can you measure, tell, sense or feel whether you are overwhelming and stressing the organization with the number of projects being launched? 1). Ask the informal leaders within the organization for their view on how things are going. These people may or may not be Belts but are most likely plugged-in to the feelings of their co-workers. 2). Monitor Green Belt resources – how many projects teams are they on? Do they have any time to do their normal job? Are the SME’s spending all their time on projects? 3). Ask your Black Belts about the level of enthusiasm/participation of the key team members on the their respective projects. Do the team members feel energized or taxed? 4). Is the organization taking time to celebrate/acknowledge accomplishments before heading-off to the next project? 5). The number of soft savings projects/$’s exceed the number of hard savings/$’s projects.
2.  Same thing but overwhelming or stressing the organization with the number of improvement recommendations needing implementation. 1). Improvement recommendations can imply that something is wrong/bad with a particular operation/process. Too many projects in one area can be demoralizing to the point where people begin to ask “what if anything do we do right?”.  Spread-out projects. 2). Lower the visibility of easy/quick win projects so that they get done without a great deal of fanfare (but celebrate/acknowledge the accomplishment). Evolution is/should be expected and not every change has to be a project. 3). Lean, SS, Lean SS, Kaizen, etc., (whatever the company calls their efforts) can get confusing to the average employee. Try not to attack on too many fronts at one time. Keep it simple and do it RIGHT!Good Luck!  OLD

Darth,
Decent question, but one that makes me need to ask:
1) How effective are your champions? (do they support your efforts..)
2) How large of a company do you work for? (Are they changes ‘earth shacking’ or merely absorbed…)
3) How many Green/Black belts are there working on projects?
 
Answer these questions to yourself and then let your common sense derive an answer. I normally try not to handle more than 2 projects every 6 or so months. Of course, I am a full time IT project manager and Six Sigma is but a tool that I use to build business cases for change and improvements in our various processes.
If management is not able to see the benefit of your project and your project(s) are not supporting an enviroment of change and improvement, then there are probably too many irons in the fire.
 
respectively,
 
Bob

Hey Doc,
A couple thoughts:

Similar to SPC concepts, look for real change in some output: Are avg project timelines lengthening?  Are BB productivity numbers (project/time/BB) dropping? Are reward and recognition awards slowing/diminishing?  Are gains being sustained? Has the ratio to projects completed v. projects closed changed in a negative sense? etc.
Similar to lean ideas, is the customer (aka process owner, vsm manager, etc) PULLING projects through the pipeline, or are they having them PUSHED upon them?  If process owners continue to submit high quality project charters and clamor for quality resources, keep up the good work.  If mediocre charters are being submitted, changes are not being sustained, or BB are getting pushback from teams, etc then perhaps demand has been impacted
Either way, sounds like a balancedscorecard approach with a handful of both quantitative and qualitative metrics would be helpful
My 2 cents.  Take care doc.

Darth,
Another thought or two on your post…
1) This is not a metric however it would potentially offer a world of insight.  Talking with the grunts…  Communicating with the folks that, day in and day out, do the job may offer the most insight as to how much stress a company, plant, or office is experiencing and if it is excessive or not.  However, to whom one communicates with must be considered.  I had a former Boss that commented that he had one person on the day shift that was his eyes and ears to the floor.  It wasn’t the Day Shift Team Leader (supervisor) but one of the hourly workers.  Over time he had develop a relationship in which he knew the information being provided him was a good gauge for the whole floor, either day or night shift.  He recommended that I do the same.  Like I said, it isn’t a metric.  You can’t tabulate it nicely in a spreadsheet and track it, but it can offer tremendous insight into the health of the organization.
 
2) Just noticed that most of the posts focus on #1.  As for your #2 question, might an indication that the org has been overwhelmed by recommendation is if your capacity to complete improvements is a small fraction of the inputs received.  For example: Given the number of improvements that we can successfully accomplish this year, I won’t need to ask for inputs again until 2012 if we are luckey…
 
Hope this helps…

Hey, let’s chat offline. I can see some of what you’ve asked about here and have actually though through it a bit.
But, since the kids are playing upstairs (“Milton” and “Chuck”), I’d prefer to keep program specifics out of the cheap shot arena.
Hopefully I can address your other e-mail at that time as well.
Luke

Thanks for letting us inquire. I’ll be sure to send an Outlook invitation when I’m ready to do so.
Besides, why sit in a coffee shop when there’s a perfectly good pub around the corner?
Tell me the name of the pub.

One answer with a two-part response to your inquiry.
From my own experience, your question (1) is when the kinds of projects being chartered and agreed upon by Lead and deployment champions are “push-off” projects that at the root are actually “just do it” research projects that have “TBD” as the benefit…and the topic of the project is usually a hot-topic as determined by company leadership.  This keeps the BB’s busy and out of sight from the mainstream workers.
To answer (2), when the organization that chartered the above project hears that there really is no financial benefit or improvement needed, they either give a sigh of relief that all is working as it should (i.e., thank God there’s no improvement I have to implement).  Or, conversely, to keep you busy and out of their hair they will try to expand the scope of the chartered project to include seeing if putting flow meters on the bathroom sinks will help us find ways to cut the water bill.  Which is another way of keeping BBs busy and out of everyone’s hair and avoiding an implementation or control plan.
Best yet, if the organization that successfully got one or both of the above done, they probably also got their “points” for being a process owner for their annual Six Sigma involvement target, and in reality, they didn’t have to do a thing.

In me count….
Yoda

I’d like to join the club if possible.  Maybe Wedge?  I’d also settle for an obscure but recognizable character like Muftak or Sy Snootles?
Luke – I’ll be in town next week for a couple of days if you have some time to get together.
Ritz
 

Use  your  common-sense?