Page 239 - Lean six sigma demystified

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Chapter 6 Tr anSa C TionaL Six Sigm a 217

want to stay on your customer’s good side, you’d better honor them. There’s no
guarantee that an error like CheapTickets will garner the same kind of publicity.
You may just have to eat the loss, but it still makes a good story that customers
will tell to others. Haven’t you waited long enough to find ways to mistake-
proof changes to your financial systems?
? still struggling

electrical cords have a wide prong and a narrow prong to fit into matching out-
lets. This is a form of mistake-proofing. any process, including software, can ben-
efit from mistake-proofing to prevent errors. my wife just went to the post office
and used the automated machine to send a package. after she completed the
transaction, the system thanked her, returned her credit card and then asked her
if she would like another transaction. if she’d left without pressing “no” the next
person in line could have used her credit card to send their package. a mistake-
proof system wouldn’t give back her credit card until she was done.

Information Technologies (IT) organizations have resisted process, mea-
surement, and improvement with a passion. A culture obsessed with the new-
est, most innovative technology has a very difficult time valuing customers,
procedures, and consistency. But in many ways, process improvement is the
one innovation that most software developers have not yet tried. There are,
however, some IT departments trying to move up the improvement ladder of
the Capability Maturity Model (CMM), especially companies contracting

with the Department of Defense (DOD). The evolution of a CMM IT depart-
ment consists of five steps.

1. Chaos. Totally unpredictable software development and maintenance
processes.

2. Repeatable. A few gurus have figured out a repeatable method for deliver-
ing software. The process is still unstable and not capable of delivering
software on time and on budget, but does deliver software. At this level,
software doesn’t release; it escapes.
3. Defined. The wisdom of the gurus is captured and formed into a method-
ology. Six Sigma also refers to this as the Defined step—the D in
DMAIC.