Page 199 - Six Sigma Demystified

Chapter 8 co n t r o l S tag e 179

Training Requirements
While an effective document revision and control scheme is useful for com-
municating new methods and procedures, it is often not sufficient, especially
when procedures undergo the significant changes often resulting from the
DMAIC process. Even when procedural changes are relatively narrow in scope,
training is quite beneficial in communicating the changes and preventing prob-
lems or misinterpretations of the new procedures. This training can be as simple
as a quick meeting with operational personnel at their workstations or a de-
tailed multisession training, such as may be required for new equipment or to
teach customer-friendly communication skills.
Topics for training include the lessons learned during the DMAIC process,
the key process factors, and their interactions, in addition to the new procedures
themselves. Including these lessons learned is really helpful to stakeholders,
particularly operational personnel, so that they understand why the changes
were necessary and how the conclusions were developed.
The training should include operational personnel, process owners, and other
stakeholders (including suppliers, if appropriate). Most, if not all, of these stake-
holder groups were represented on the team and included in data collection or
analysis, so this part of the training will provide a good conclusion to their efforts.
For the training to be effective, it should be targeted to the current skill set of
the audience and include a means of assessing the knowledge transfer to each indi-
vidual. The format of these evaluations depends on the criticality and complexity
of the subject matter. In some cases, workshops are useful for employees to practice
the newly acquired skills; in cases of critical safety or quality issues, employees may
have to demonstrate proficiency through written or on-the-job testing.
Participants should be evaluated immediately at the end of the training and at

a stipulated time later. This posttraining evaluation gauges the longer-term reten-
tion of the material and may demonstrate a need for follow-up training or a change
in training format to target the audience more effectively. Of course, the best
means of evaluating the impact of the training is to measure the changes in behav-
ior resulting from the training. Are people using the new skills? To what degree?

PROjeCT examPle: Standardize on New Methods

a formal control plan was not established given that:
• The monthly marketing campaigns provided a means of regularly monitor-
ing the error rate in order processing data entry.