Productivity Planner

Clearly, the New Six Sigma applies more broadly than the old Six Sigma ever did. The New Six Sigma is now poised to tackle these urgent business challenges:

Shareholder value - New Six Sigma can boost confidence in financial reporting.

Building trust - New Six Sigma can drive the development of human resources and other processes to keep executives ethical and reassure stakeholders.

Intangibles - New Six Sigma can drive implementation of new processes that place a value on intangible assets that current financial reporting processes miss or ignore.

Real options - Better decisions result when real option analysis is added to the project selection process.

Six Sigma, a powerful program to improve business, has only begun to tap its potential. Six Sigma can help provide new corporate leadership, enhance value and rebuild trust in business. The New Six Sigma will continue to evolve since new process requirements and skills will be necessary to keep it relevant.

Is there life after Six Sigma, the internationally recognized system for enhancing efficiency, quality and customer satisfaction? The short answer is “yes,” but like any other form of life, it requires adaptation. Companies that have instituted Six Sigma have learned that, as with any other new system, a point comes at which maximum gains have been realized, diminishing returns have been reached and productivity enhancements have begun to level off. Do executives then sit back in their leather chairs and say to themselves, “Well, we had a good run with that Six Sigma while it lasted.” Of course not. Complacency goes against the tenets of Six Sigma.

Instead, executives can now reach new heights by designing for Six Sigma. For the maximum benefit, instead of just practicing Six Sigma, allow it to change your company’s processes. Designing for Six Sigma open [Read more →]

Tags: , , Leadership, Inspiration, Management, Organizational Culture by Chris Russell
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I received a Christmas card from a friend that referred to “hopes of 2008 being a watershed year for me”. Not familiar with that word, I looked it up on dictionary.com. Their definition was: A critical point that marks a division or a change of course; a turning point. So that got me thinking about all of the turning point opportunities that will present themselves in the next year.

As I work daily with clients, it is obvious that not everyone embraces change. In fact, many people resist it with every atom. For people to alter their course or modify their current patterns, change is inevitable. Benjamin Franklin is known for quoting that the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results. Yet millions of people do that all the time.

For 2008 to be a watershed year, change will have to happen. As with every new year, goal setting seems to be inevitable. This is a critical time to ask yourself if what you’re currently doing is working and if you’re not getting your desired results, what steps do you have to take? Brian Tracy states in his book Goals, How To Get Everything You Want Faster Than Possible, that most of your decisions will turn out to be wrong in the fullness of time, thus failure is probable. Your goals need to be clear, but you must remain flexible in the daily process of achieving those goals so when failure happens, you can redirect your energy to more effective actions.

Many take the time to set goals for the year, but often lose sight of the need to review those daily and weekly, altering when necessary. I preach often of the need for personal administrative time, where you clean up your inboxes (computer and physical), determine tasks/to do’s, prioritize your day, file necessary documents, and generally spend some time on personal organization. This is a great time to an [Read more →]

Tags: , , Leadership, Inspiration, Management, Organizational Culture by Chris Russell
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KEY #1: KNOW WHAT PERFORMANCE IS FOR YOUR BUSINESS Sounds kind of basic, huh? But this is the part people don’t want to take the time to do, even though it’s foundational to the rest of the process. And let’s face it: if you can’t define high performance for your business, you sure can’t measure it!

So where do you start? Begin by thinking about the products, or the services, you deliver to customers every day. This is important, because the customers are the ultimate designators of ‘high performance’ for your business’s output. What do they want? (Here’s a hint, listen for recurring complaints when they don’t get it!).

For Products

• Customers want it on time
• Customers want it right
• Customers want the right amount of it

For Services

• Customers want friendliness
• Customers want to be understood, heard out
• Customers want issues addressed the first time

There are others, of course, but you get the idea. The point is that your starting point for figuring out measures is the end of your business’s process - what customers are actually paying your for

KEY #2: KNOW THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN AN IN-PROCESS MEASURE AND AN OUTCOME MEASURE Once you know your customers’ desired outcomes, you can figure out actual measures for them. As already mentioned, that really has to be done first or you can’t come up with the process measures that support the outcomes. It might be a good idea to explain this a little more.

An Outcome Measure is a measure at the end of the process. It is built from the desired outcome the final user of the product or service wants. What are some well-known examples of an outcome and the measure that comes from it?

Wal Mart

• [Read more →]

  Tags: , , Leadership, Inspiration, Management, Organizational Culture by Chris Russell
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