Improvement Insights Blog
Control or Sustain to Ensure Improvement Sticks
Teams often fail to implement the Control Phase of DMAIC. That results in waste on a grand scale. Here’s why:
Download my free ebook, Agile Process Innovation-Hacking Lean Six Sigma for Results.
“Hi, I’m Jay Arthur, author of “Lean Six Sigma for Hospitals” and QI Macros [software].
“I don’t know about you, I talk to people all the time and they say “Jay, I made this great improvement and 6 months later it was gone…” Made this great improvement; six months later, it was gone. I say, “Did you implement the Control phase of DMAIC? Did you put in control charts and corrective actions in case it starts to go awry?” “Well, no,” they say. I say, “Well then, you didn’t complete your Six Sigma project.” Right? You shouldn’t even have done DMAI if you’re not going to do the C part; that’s just dumb.
“I think the real problem we have is nobody likes the word ‘control’ and nobody has charts. Most people are still doing line charts; you need software to build control charts (mine or somebody else’s, I don’t care) but you’re going to need something to monitor that process and make sure it stays at the level you’ve adjusted it to.
“I think… I was in between PDCA and DMAIC and so I came up with my own acronym which was we want to Focus, Improve, Sustain the improvement, Honor your progress… and rinse and repeat. That’s FISH, right? Sustain. I think if the last word in DMAIC had have been ‘Sustain’ that might have worked better because people don’t like control.
“But we want to sustain that improvement, right? We want to stay at that new higher level or lower level of defects or higher level of productivity and profitability. We want to stay there, but without control charts you can’t do that. Just be aware that if you don’t do the final step (whether you call it ‘control’ or ‘sustain’ as I do), if you don’t do that final step you probably shouldn’t even waste your time doing the first part, because 6 months later it’ll be gone.
“That’s my Improvement Insight. Let’s go out and improve something this week.”
