Improvement Insights Blog
Lean Six Sigma Startup
Ever wondered if there might be a better way to start a Lean Six Sigma initiative? There is. 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 Demystified” and QI Macros [software].
“Back in 2011, Eric Ries launched a book called “The Lean Startup” which was about how to start a startup business, basically. There were some rules behind it, but one of his rules was to have a “Minimum Viable Product”… Minimum Viable Product. Now, in 1997 when I launched QI Macros, it was a Minimum Viable Product but now it’s grown into all kinds of things.
“One of the things I want you to think about is “What if we had a Lean Six Sigma startup?” How do you start up a Lean Six Sigma program?
“Well, I think you want to consider another acronym: I call it MVT, which stands for Minimum Viable Training, which is what I describe in my book “Agile Process Innovation – Hacking Lean and Six Sigma for Results” and you can find a link to that and you can download it for free from our website. The idea behind Minimum Viable Training is you only teach people the things they need to know to solve problems that they have today. You don’t teach them everything in the Six Sigma handbook, you don’t teach them the entire Green Belt or Black Belt body of knowledge, right? That’s overproduction: you’re teaching people stuff they don’t need yet. Unfortunately, when you do that they quickly forget it. Now, if they learn something and apply it, guess what? It sticks.
“So think about Minimum Viable Training. I say there’s seven key tools to make that happen: Pivot tables, Value Stream Mapping, Control Charts, Pareto charts, Histograms, Fishbones, Action Plans… that’s about it. If you learn how to use those tools you can solve most problems that are out there.
“I was reading an article in Harvard Business Review and they talked about Lean and Six Sigma training, and they called it “the Great Training Robbery”… Great Training Robbery. People are spending two to four weeks in training and learning all this stuff and spending a lot of money and not getting any results.
“I once saw Michael George at a presentation; he was talking about some company that had spent like $4 million with his company training people and after $4 million they still didn’t have any results to show for it and he didn’t know how that was possible. I do. You didn’t start with a Minimum Viable Training and get people focused on a problem with data. If you have a problem and you have data about that problem, you can solve it. If you don’t have the data and you don’t have a problem, don’t train anybody. Don’t just train people at random, that’s a total waste of time and money. Start with a problem to solve and data about that problem: Minimum Viable Training. You can train people in a day and get results: I’ve done it, other companies are doing it.
“So that’s my Improvement Insight: Let’s improve something this week, like how we implement Lean and Six Sigma with Minimum Viable Training focused on problems with data and people that know something about that problem. Let’s go out and improve something this week.”
