Improvement Insights Blog
Waterfall or Agile Lean Six Sigma?
Most companies follow the waterfall method of implementing Lean Six Sigma. A Agile approach will deliver results more quickly and help ensure success.
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“Hi, I’m Jay Arthur, author of “Lean Six Sigma Demystified” and QI Macros [software].
“I also wrote books on software engineering; I grew up in the world of software engineering. I actually worked at Bell Laboratories, and the model at the time of software development was called the ‘Waterfall’ model. You start with requirements, and design and code and test, and eventually you deliver a project.
“But if you think about a waterfall, the problem is that you just kind of shoot off the top and smash into the water down at the bottom… and very often this is what happened. You know, we’d do this whole thing, build this whole project and discover it didn’t do what they wanted it to do.
“More recently in 2000, they came out with Agile. Back in the 80s, I called it ‘Rapid Evolutionary Development’ – same sort of concept. The idea behind Agile is you build a little, test a little, build a little, test a little, build a little, test a little, build a little, test a little. Pretty soon you converge on what the customer actually wanted, not what they just hallucinated they wanted long ago. That’s a much more effective way to create software, to grow software.
“I want you to get this idea that that might be a better model for how to approach Six Sigma. You know, ‘Big Six Sigma’: ‘Well, gee, you know, we’ve got to get top leadership to open up the pocketbook so we can do all this training so we can get all these Black Belts and Green Belts and start all these teams and do all this stuff…’ Then you discover that your teams aren’t producing any results and you start to get annoyed, right? Leadership starts to get annoyed, right?
“But what if we took an Agile approach? We trained a few teams, got some results, trained some more teams, got some results, trained a little, did a little, trained a little, do a little, right? Build on the momentum, find people that are good at Quality Improvement, have them go do more advanced training, right? And eventually, you discover through the diffusion of innovations that somewhere around when 16% to 25% of the population have been successful at doing this, it will take off and run through the whole company. That’s an Agile approach to implementing Six Sigma, and I can tell you it’s going to be a lot more effective.
“Now, I actually saw Dr. [Winston W] Royce when I was at Bell Laboratories and he said I came up with this thing called the Waterfall model, but his whole idea is: it’s iterative. And I said, yeah, well, the barrel’s rolling as you go down the waterfall. But his idea was iterative. His idea was Agile, but the waterfall metaphor stuck in the minds of everyone everywhere and it became overriding.
“So… Agile: Build a little, test a little, build a little, test a little. Train some teams, do some projects, make some improvements. Train, do… right? Eventually you’re going to build some momentum, and that momentum will carry its way through the rest of the company as needed. Now remember, you don’t have to fix everything. As little as 4% of what you’re doing is producing over half of the mistakes, errors, waste and rework. Maybe all you got to do is fix that.
“That’s my Improvement Insight. I have a free Agile Lean Six Sigma Trainer Training out on the website, and you can go learn how to do this in one day.
“Let’s go out and improve something this week, like how we implement Six Sigma.”
