Improvement Insights Blog
Will It Work Here?
Agile Lean Six Sigma approach will rapidly answer this question. One-day Yellow Belt problem solving will get results where Green Belt and Black Belt training may not.
“Hi, I’m Jay Arthur, author of “Lean Six Sigma for Hospitals” and the QI Macros [software].
“I was out at the Lean Six Sigma World Conference in San Antonio there was a very interesting presentation about Yellow Belt trainings. What they found was that if they did it a certain way (which is the way I’ve been doing it for the last twenty years) that they got better results. Well, that’s kind of cool, right?
“The big difference was they started out with data, figured out what problems needed to be solved, and then they got a team together and brought them through some training, and then got them right into improvement so that they could answer that question that everybody’s asking on the team (or the management team): “Will it work here?” Well, yes; if we analyze the data, get the team together, solve the problem, implement the solution… guess what? Everybody [says], “Oh, that’ll work here.”
“This goes along with another thing I saw at the Lean Six Sigma conference that ASQ had down in Phoenix where they talked about “minimally invasive training,” so just a little bit of data analysis, you bring a team together that actually has something to work on, you give them a little bit of training, and then you throw them right into problem solving and root cause analysis and get them into implementation, and out of that comes improvement. It happens quickly, and this can be done.
“I saw another improvement project last year by one of the health care companies down in Texas. They were trying to do Green Belt and Black Belt training and that wasn’t working, and so they started doing one day Yellow Belt trainings focused on improvements. All of a sudden that started getting lots of traction, and out of that they discovered who should be the Green Belts and out of the Green Belts they discovered who should be the Black Belts. This was Christus Health – and so they went all the way back to doing one day Yellow Belt trainings focused on getting results and having teams working on real problems.
“ That’s how you answer that question, “Will it work here?” As soon as the people figured out that it will and the management figures out it will, it will stick.
“That’s my Improvement Insight for this week. Let’s go out and improve something.“
