Page 191 - The Six Sigma Project Planner

Figure 33. Linkage Between Six Sigma Projects and Stakeholders

Project Department Differentiator Strategy Stakeholder
Plan Matrix Satisfaction

The “Project Impact Score” row is useful in much the same way. The column scores can
be rank-ordered to see which projects have the greatest impact on the strategy. It is also
useful in identifying irrelevant projects. The project Mike L is pursuing to improve “pin
manufacturing capability” has no impact on any of the departmental plans. Unless this
project has an impact on some other strategy support plan that isn’t shown in the QFD
matrix, it should probably be abandoned as a Six Sigma project. The project may still be
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something the manufacturing or quality department wants to pursue, perhaps to meet a
goal for a key requirement. However, as a general rule, Six Sigma projects requiring a
Black Belt should focus on plans that have a direct linkage to differentiator strategies.
The role of Black Belts as change agents requires that they limit their scope accordingly.

Using Customer Demands to Design for Six Sigma
Once customers have made their demands known, it is important that these be
converted into internal requirements and specifications. The term “translation” is used
to describe this process, because the activity literally involves interpreting the words in
one language (the customers’) into those of another (the employees’).
For example, regarding the door of her automobile, the customer might say, “I want the
door to close completely when I push it, but I don’t want it swinging closed from just
the wind.” The engineers working with this requirement must convert it into
engineering terminology, such as pounds of force required to move the door from an
open to a closed position, the angle of the door when it’s opened, and so on.
Care must be taken to maintain the customers’ intent throughout the development of
internal requirements. The same concept applies to service and transactional operations.
For example, customers might say, “I want my call answered quickly” or “I want
convenient parking.” Customer requirements should drive management systems
development. The purpose of specifications is to transmit the voice of the customers
throughout the organization.
In addition to the issue of maintaining the voice of the customers by tracking their
demands as they flow through the system, there is the related issue of the importance
assigned to each demand by the customers. Design of products and services always
involves tradeoffs: as vehicle weight increases, gasoline economy suffers but safety
improves. The importance of each criterion must be determined from the customers’
perspective. When different customers assign different levels of importance to the same
criteria, design decisions are further complicated. It becomes difficult to choose from
competing designs in the face of such ambiguity and customer-to-customer variation.
Add to this the differences between internal personnel and objectives—department vs.
department, designer vs. designer, cost vs. quality, etc.—and the problem of choosing a

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