My 2018 survey showed there’s a lot of interest in reviewing Lean Six Sigma case studies and examples of techniques. That’s understandable; case studies are an incredibly helpful teaching tool.
The problem is that there’s not a lot of Six Sigma case studies freely available! And many of the ones that are available are locked behind paywalls because they are so time-intensive to make. Additionally, many companies don’t want to freely share their data because the information is proprietary and/or the results are a huge competitive benefit for them and they don’t want their competitors to have access to the results!
So, it’s up to us to make our own. Challenge accepted!
Let’s Get Started!
An exercise I find valuable is to imagine the kinds of Six Sigma projects that might come up in companies that I interact with in real life. Trust me, there’s never a lack of material.
We are going to create a case study together in the following way:
I’ll set the table for a Six Sigma and ask the audience for input on what to do next.
Once we have a few responses, I’ll publish the results of the actions and prompt the audience for next steps.
Note: Interested in a different type of case? Leave me a note about what you’re looking for in the article comments.
Background
AAF, or the American Automobile Federation, is a fictional nation-wide car service provider that operates hundreds of car repair stations across the company, but they have their hands in everything related to travel. They offer a robust membership program that gives discounts to their centers as well as emergency roadside assistance. Additionally,they offer insurance, vacation planning, and an affiliate program largely powered by credit card sales.
Leadership has identified improving bottom line results for their vacation business as a strategic imperative. That particular line of business can be very lucrative as AAF is simply a packager / re-seller of travel experiences that other companies provide. To that end they’ve spent hundreds of thousands of dollars on adding marketing into their lagging travel business. Specifically, executives are upset that their key 2018 addition of voice marketing has been yielding poor results.
Voice marketing is defined here as playing ‘educational messages’ about various products company AAF offers while customers wait on hold. Due diligence indicated that many other business-to-consumer companies that handle vast inbound phone calls have used this technology to successfully increase brand recognition. And, in the past AAF has experienced excellent correlation between brand recognition of their various services with profitability & growth.
Your role is that of the entire Six Sigma team. Your team was assembled and trained last year. It’s comprised of a a Black Belt, and several Green Belts. For the purposes of this exercise we’re going to treat the team as a single unit.
While your executive sponsor successfully ‘sold’ the company on the idea of Six Sigma, it hasn’t really taken hold yet. This would be your first chance to demonstrate benefit to the company. While you know that it’s unlikely your team would be disbanded if you can’t solve the problem, you know that many of the leadership team believe Lean Six Sigma to be a fad and are eyeing your operational budget for their own pet projects in future years. It’s imperative that your team make an excellent impression.
What’s the first thing you and your Six Sigma team does? Leave a comment below.
You can read the next articles in the case study here:
- Kicked off the project.
- Secured sponsor support.
- Started creating the project charter. (Problem statement, goals, business case.)
- Defining the process (High level process map, SIPOC)
- Odds, ends, and stakeholders (RTY, Stakeholder analysis, RAPID)
Comments (25)
Get the executive support. You will need resources to get it done.
I would do some benchmarking as to the voice marketing programs that are ‘so successful’ and find out why. Then brainstorm/affinity diagram/nominal group technique , put together data and visual aids like a histogram to present to the AAF to really get that necessary ‘buy-in’ from executive management through presenting data. Given the situation, starting off strong with leadership support extremely important. Get them off the fence.
Excellent ideas, Dana. You certainly need executive support. And I like your ideas of gathering data and visuals to help persuade.
I see gaining executive support as the domain of the Project Sponsor supported by the Six Sigma team. Here’s an excellent article on building executive support and the critical skills a sponsor needs. Tools like stakeholder analysis can help prepare for winning the executive team over.
Assuming executive support is achieved, and the project is validated, having a tollgate review at each phase of a DMAIC process (or even more frequently as a pulse check if the phases take a long time to complete) is a good way to package efforts & results and communicate with busy sponsors / stakeholders.
There’s a lot of work to be done before our first Tollgate review, however. Documenting and socializing project aims in a Project charter is critical for large / high-profile projects. This enables a clear understanding among all parties about the problems we are actively trying to solve.
What do we need in order to create a good charter?
We need to create a problem statement and then a goal statement. We then need to determine what is in scope and out of scope. Lastly we need to state our primary and secondary metrics; primary to determine how we will track our progress and secondary what we want to prevent from going wrong. Once we have the “contract” completed we need to get the company or stakeholder approval to move forward as outlined. It’s also important to note that the charter is considered a living document and can be adjusted as needed throughout the course of the project.
Excellent points, LJ! Let’s assume you’ve met with all stakeholders, what’s one possible problem statement that could come out? (feel free to use imagination & artistic license here.)
Selection of a project team. ( with do’s and don’ts)
Hi Jaques,
By do’s and don’ts, do you mean team rules?
Also, how would you go about selecting your team?
Best, Ted.
In order to have a good charter, I suggest to:
– Define the problem by writing a good problem statement (SMART)
– Set a baseline and create a metric to evaluate the scale of the problem (current and targeted performance)
– Try to calculate the Costs of Poor Quality
– Determine roughly the cause of the problem (it will be fine-tuned later)
– Try to estimate the time for each steps of the DMAIC to create a project plan
– Present the Project Charter to the stakeholders in order to have their agreement
You both are spot on. To get this project off to a good start, the support base and structure must be there, else willingness and appetite for sustained project finance wouldn’t be there – especially when the vultures are waiting to get their hands on the cash pot set aside for the project!
For the charter, you would require the standard stuffs…obviously the business case, key project resources (preassigned?), key stakeholders & the known requirements, what the project set out to achieve (in brief), assumptions, constraints, measurements (benefits?), high level risks, likely budget.
Hah! Chuks seems you’ve seen a few budget conversations in the past!
Let’s assume we have about 6 months runway before the vultures would start to circle. To keep them at bay we need to make progress.
If you had carte blanc, what would your resources be? (feel free to use imagination & artistic license here.)
Begin documenting information stated in a project charter, hone in on the problem statement and business case and once completed, get sign on by leadership or maybe they are the ones completing the project charter.
Good thoughts, Antonia! Let’s assume as the leader of the project you are responsible for the creation of the project charter. How would you go about honing in on the problem statement? Let’s assume you’ve met with all stakeholders, what’s one possible problem statement that could come out? (feel free to use imagination & artistic license here.
it is very good way to use six sigma tool.
thank you
Glad you’re enjoying, Ehab!
Get the project justification first and proceed to project charter as “Leadership has identified improving bottom line results for their vacation business as a strategic imperative”
Voice marketing has been yielding poor results in a market that strategically yields X
Project charter should set a target to achieve from the baseline by identifying a key goal
The directors are bought in to allocate time and focus on the ROI.
Nice answers, Chris.
How could we write the target of this project so that it is at minimum self-funding?
My contribution:
Firstly one would need to define the project’s purpose & scope and obtain background info about the process and its customers.
Then develop a charter that includes the estimate of benefits, a high-level process map.
Understand the voice of the customer (VOC) and obtain buy-in from the relevant parties, i.e. project sponsor, process owner, team, etc.
Then:
Create a problem statement as well as a project goal & objectives statement.
Create a business case.
Define the primary, secondary & tertiary business measures and derive the business case components.
Great answers, Nicole. Care to take a swing at writing a problem statement or brainstorming a few hypothetical business measures?
Cases to understand the charts which can green Belt use it in DAMIC APPROACH
Gaser, I’m not sure what you mean here. Can you elaborate?
Ok…here goes my try at the problem statement:
The AAF is involved in various travel related business and offerings and has spent hundreds of thousands of dollars on adding marketing into their business.
Executives are upset that their 2018 addition of voice marketing has yielded poor results.
My Comment
First have to do SWOT analysis with Project team, than apply the PDCA approach
Great suggestion, Parmod! How would you set up the SWOT?
Hi Ted,
First we will need to do stakeholder analysis , then stakeholder power interest matrix.
Power interest matrix will help in defining the communication strategy of that particular stakeholder.
Hello Ted,
In order to have a good charter, I suggest to:
– Define the problem by writing a good problem statement (SMART)
– Set a baseline and create a metric to evaluate the scale of the problem (current and targeted performance)
– Try to calculate the Costs of Poor Quality
– Determine roughly the cause of the problem (it will be fine-tuned later)
– Try to estimate the time for each steps of the DMAIC to create a project plan
– Present the Project Charter to the stakeholders in order to have their agreement