Page 176 - The Six Sigma Project Planner

Business Process Control Systems

You’ve met the project’s goals and the customer and sponsor have accepted the
deliverables. The project has finished successfully! Or has it? Don’t be too quick to
declare victory. The last battle is yet to be fought—the battle against creeping disorder,
the battle against entropy, the battle to ensure that the gains are permanent.

How Will We Maintain the Gains Made?
All organizations have systems designed to ensure stability and to protect against
undesirable change. Often these systems also make it more difficult to make beneficial
change; perhaps you encountered an example or two while pursuing your Six Sigma
project! Still, once you’ve created an improved business system, these “anti-change”
systems can be your friend. Here are some suggestions of ways to protect your hard-
won gains.

• Policy changes. Which corporate policies should be changed as a result of the
project? Have some policies been rendered obsolete? Are new policies needed?

• New standards. Did the project bring the organization into compliance with a
standard (e.g., ISO 9000, environmental standards, product safety standards)? If
so, adopting the standard might prevent backsliding. Are there any industry
standards that, if adopted, would help maintain the benefits of the project?
Customer standards? Standards from ANSI, SAE, JCAHO, NCQA, ASTM, ASQ,
or other standard-making organization? Government standards?
• Modify procedures. Procedures describe the way things are supposed to be done.
Since the project produced better (different) results, presumably some things are
being done differently. Be sure these differences are incorporated into formal
procedures.
• Modify quality appraisal and audit criteria. The quality control activity in an
organization exists to ensure conformance to requirements. This will work for
you by ensuring that the changes made to documentation will result in changes
in the way the work is done.

• Update contract bid models. The way product is priced for sale is directly related to
profit, loss, and business success. Because of this, project improvements that are
embedded in bid models and price models will be institutionalized by being
indirectly integrated into an array of accounting and information systems.
• Change engineering drawings. Many Six Sigma projects create engineering change
requests as part of their problem solution. For example, when a Six Sigma project
evaluates process capability, it is common to discover that the engineering
requirements are excessively tight. Perhaps designers used worst-case
tolerancing instead of statistical tolerancing. The project team should ensure that
these discoveries result in changes to engineering drawings.

159