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Armed with certification as a Project Management Professional (PMP), I took on a consulting assignment to manage projects in a Six Sigma environment in a large, well-established global company. This was my first exposure to Six Sigma Change Process (SSCP) and after the introductory training, I was initially very excited to be a part of an organization that fully supported a methodology—any methodology. In previous engagements, management was often resistive to project management processes and I was encouraged to see that that was not the case at this company. Everyone seemed to “walk the talk.” Projects were up and running and each project team had a Black Belt, Master Black Belt, or Green Belt that seemed to function as the Project Manager. In a very short period of time, though, it became clear that the color of one’s belt, while significant in the world of SSCP had only an incidental relationship with project management.
Management’s push for conformance to the SSCP methodology and their support for consistency was, at the outset, a good thing. Team members worked to develop specific deliverables in clearly defined steps that resulted in the product or process. Where the system began to break down, however, was when the requirement for those deliverables leading to the Six Sigma “gate” reviews were declared as completed project process steps. There was a gate review for each of the DMAIC phases, which are Define, Measure, Analyze, Improve, and Control.
Contrary to good project management practice, each DMAIC phase acted as a specific project milestone to be passed only one time and viewed in one’s rear-view mirror from that point forward. Consequently, projects lacked a tightly scheduled plan that could prevent them from stretching into extra months and costing far more than necessary. To be fair, the effort resulted in high quality deliverables. It’s just that absent good project management discipline, the results were very time consuming and costly to achieve. My challenge at this company was to impose project management processes that would not threaten the well-entrenched and enthusiastically supported SSCP methodology.
Just how big is this conflict between good project management discipline and the guidance that Six Sigma espouses? Surprisingly, there doesn’t have to be any conflict at all—they can be complementary if applied correctly. What does that mean, “applied correctly?” Simply put, it means that a certain synergy can exist only if we don’t try to make one or the other something it isn’t.
Looking back, it appears that I was successful on this assignment. The project was completed on schedule and within budget with no scope changes. The project team freely focused attention on their assigned SSCP deliverables in pace with the project schedule. Stakeholders openly commented on how well informed they were which was a result of the PMI methodology being used. The team was aware of the smooth progress of the project but it wasn’t clear that anyone fully realized why things were going so well.
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