Companies are often confused between lean vs agile, spending a lot of time thinking which approach to use for optimizing their processes. Both approaches have their own methodologies and frameworks, with significant overlaps and differences.

In this article, we discuss the important differences and similarities between the two approaches and show how the best option is to use both lean and agile for the brightest outcomes that directly translate to higher customer satisfaction levels, improved quality, and reduced costs.

What is Lean?

Lean is a powerful methodology that helps to identify and eliminate waste in processes to improve efficiency, reduce costs, and boost productivity. Wastes don’t add any value to the end user of the product or service. Wastes can take many forms like incomplete work, defects, switching between tasks, waiting times, etc.

Lean helps deliver products and services to customers in the fastest manner possible to achieve higher customer satisfaction levels. Lean focuses on the functioning of teams and the organization as a whole.

What is Agile?

Agile is a project management approach that breaks a project down into several phases and helps manage them in a better way. Agile, at its very core, is based on continuous iteration for improvement. Agile involves small cycles to make constant improvements.

The focus is on small units and on building them. Once that’s done, feedback is sought and the whole cycle is repeated for betterment. Agile is centered on collaboration and encourages team meetings.

Lean vs Agile: What Are The Differences?

There are several similarities between lean and agile. Both are highly flexible approaches that aim to improve quality. Lean focuses on improving processes to deliver higher value to customers while agile works to create small iterations for better products.

Lean teams deliver products without waste, with faster delivery being a key focus. Agile teams create small units and seek customer feedback, which is used to improve the offerings.

Agile places significant importance on collaboration between team members including designers, developers, and customers. Lean focuses on the final product delivered to the customer.

Lean traces its roots to the manufacturing sector while agile has been used for continuous delivery and improvement in software environments. 

Agile is more likely to pick projects that are innovative and need to adapt to new changes. 

Lean and Agile: The Best of Both Worlds

If you’re having a hard time with lean vs agile, know that organizations should ideally be using a combination of both lean and agile for maximum productivity and waste reduction. 

Lean and agile have many similarities and can work hand in hand seamlessly to create a people-focused culture. Both approaches can be used in diverse sectors from manufacturing to software development and focus on delivering the final products to customers in a timely manner with constant iterations to improve the offerings.

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Six Sigma helps streamline processes by identifying root problems and eliminating them. The IT sector can immensely benefit from the approach which makes teams more agile and prepares them to optimize their offerings in tune with the voice of the customer.

The use of Six Sigma in IT management can have far-reaching consequences, as we shall explain in this article.

Understanding Six Sigma Principles

Six Sigma is a process improvement technique that helps bolster quality by reducing defects, i.e. bottlenecks. It helps manage quality and works to reduce variations in processes. Originating in Motorola, the technique rapidly expanded to other domains and is now used worldwide. Six Sigma has its origins in the statistical symbol Green sigma, which stands for standard deviation.

It helps companies with quality management through a well-defined series of steps. Six Sigma includes a DMAIC workflow which includes defining the problem, measuring the current state of processes, analyzing the data to discover problems, improving the processes, and controlling future iterations.

Another method employed in the Six Sigma approach is DMADV, where Six Sigma professionals define the goals, measure project state, analyze the project and create designs to improve processes and shortlist the best one, design and test processes, and finally verify the design. 

Six Sigma in the IT Industry

Six Sigma is a set of tools and techniques which help businesses improve their processes. Six Sigma can improve reliability and speed of operations in the IT sector. The technique helps analyze setups in a consistent manner.

It often begins with a problem statement to understand the root issue and its causes. Six Sigma takes that as the input and works to eliminate the challenges in a systematic manner. 

DMAIC is often used in conjunction with the voice of the customer (VOC). The goal is to understand customer pain points and develop specific solutions, even if they involve the use of existing systems to meet customer expectations.

When using Six Sigma, it is important to leverage the experience of professionals who are trained in the methodology. You might also need to train your internal workforce to prepare them for what lies ahead. It’s a delicate balance as excessive training can actually do more damage than good.

It’s All About Quality

Six Sigma is a time-tested methodology that works in diverse fields including in the IT sector. Teams should strive to be as agile as possible and understand customer pain points to address them in the best way possible. 

Six Sigma uses the DMAIC methodology to first formulate a problem statement and understand the challenges at hand. Teams will then work to systematically eliminate problems and reduce defects in processes. This has a direct impact on improving quality, reducing costs, and bolstering efficiency. Six Sigma helps IT achieve higher customer satisfaction levels across the board.

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Six Sigma is a highly beneficial methodology for businesses and companies in any industry worldwide. Its purpose is to make a firm more successful by improving productivity and eliminating problems and defects. Although it has many benefits, a company has to have great communication to establish Six Sigma as a culture or strategy. In such a culture, everyone needs to be active and engaged in the processes and success of the company.

Quality and Quantity

Six Sigma requires high quality and quantity communication between employees. To do that, organizations need to fix their issues related to transmitting messages and reports between employee and their managers. Often, workers are overburdened with many e-mail messages, reports, and proposals that lack a key point. This makes it hard for workers to communicate and perform since critical information gets buried under thousands of files.

Implementing Six Sigma will only add more problems to a firm without fixing the communication problems. A company needs to fix those problems first and then implement Six Sigma to highlight the key points. This enables workers to understand and access the information easier and perform and communicate better. 

Companies can adopt communication skills training and protocols to help employees explain and transmit their ideas more efficiently. This training can enable employees to create plans and solutions rather than problems for other employees.

Customer Service 

Identifying the needs and goals of the customers can enable companies to increase their revenues and improve the quality of their products and services. Understanding and identifying them requires good communication between the company and the customer. This way, employees need good communication skills to obtain the information desired from the customer and transmit it further to others at the firm.

A sales team needs to have good communication skills to describe the features and advantages of a certain product or service as well as possible. Doing this can help companies attract more customers. 

Data-Driven Charts and Analysis

Unlike other quality testing initiatives, Six Sigma relies on statistics and mathematics to track progress and improve the processes of a firm. Six Sigma helps companies avoid speculations and useless conversation as everything is data-driven. People who use Six Sigma create graphs and charts to pinpoint problems and illustrate how to solve them. 

Teams need good communication skills to transmit the information well and explain how to implement the solution. This way, everyone aligns with the company’s goal and knows exactly what to do in each situation.

Communication skills training is important in using Six Sigma, as only then can every employee improve themselves and the organization simultaneously. 

For more information on our Lean Six Sigma training classes and services, please visit 6sigma.com.

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Despite all the negativity surrounding stress, it can actually be good for you. It can motivate you to succeed, build resilience, boost immunity in the short term and even make life more meaningful. However, it needs to be managed. 

Unmanaged stress can contribute to many health conditions, including hypertension, insomnia, depression and anxiety. It can also degrade your personal relationships and make you less productive at work, leading to more stress.

While there are many ways to alleviate stress, not many people know that Six Sigma can help. Here’s how.

Increases Your Efficiency

When you have too much to do in a day, you can barely find time to destress. Being efficient means completing tasks on time and with the least amount of effort. Six Sigma has a tool called DMAIC that can optimize processes in your daily life by eliminating efficiencies.

DMAIC is an acronym for Define, Measure, Analyze, Improve, Control. From cleaning the house to bathing the kids and taking them to school to doing your shopping, you can apply DMAIC to these processes and optimize them. In the end, you have less to stress about. 

In a nutshell, with the DMAIC, you can identify unnecessary steps in each process and eliminate them. The beauty is that once you improve one process, you can follow the same steps to optimize others.

Organizing Your Space

Clutter leads to stress because it can be tough to relax when your living space is in a messy state. Every time you sit down, you’re reminded that you have so much to do. The low-grade stress this creates can gradually drain your energy, making you less productive in other areas of life.

When it comes to organizing spaces, whether at work or home, Six Sigma has 5S, which stands for Sort, Set, Shine, Standardize, Sustain. Suppose you wanted to make your home a more organized space for relaxation. Here’s how 5S would help:

• Sort: Go through all your belongings, including furniture, appliances, electronics, clothes and other equipment. Find out what needs to remain and what needs to go.
• Set: Find a logical arrangement for the remaining items. For example, you can arrange them by type, how often they are used and where they can be stored to reduce unnecessary motion.
• Shine: This step is about putting everything in its place and then cleaning the house.
• Standardize: With everything in its place and the house in a clean state, keeping things this way needs to become a habit. For example, you can create cleaning schedules and a list of tasks, along with instructions
• Sustain: Sustain is maintaining order. The idea is to involve everyone by communicating that 5S is long-term and motivating them to get involved and keep it going.

Conclusion

Making you more efficient by streamlining your life processes and organizing your living space are just some of the ways Six Sigma can help you manage daily stress. As you can see, the methodology isn’t just for the workplace, but everywhere there is a process, including your everyday life.

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DMAIC, which stands for Define, Measure, Analyze, Improve and Control, presents organizations with a data-driven, customer-focused approach to process improvement. Each letter is a phase, and it must be completed in sequential order before moving on to the next one. However, there is still confusion on when exactly the method should be used.

When looking at a complex or high-risk issue with a process, bring out the DMAIC. The method has seen a great degree of success because it ensures that no critical process improvement steps are skipped. That means when looking to increase customer satisfaction or your bottom line or get rid of bottlenecks from time to time, the DMAIC is a no-brainer.

2 Ways DMAIC is Implemented

Another thing that causes confusion is how the methodology is used. For that, there are two major ways.

1. Team Approach

This is where the team leader is well-versed with the method and its tools. The team members still perform their regular duties in the organization while working on the project part-time. The leader, however, can be working on multiple long-term projects at any given time for months on end.

2. Kaizen

If the team approach isn’t for you, then Kaizen is next. Here, the DMAIC steps are usually carried out in a single week. The organization appoints a specialist to help with the process improvement, particularly in the first two phases. After those are complete, the organization organizes a team of people to focus on the rest of the phases until the Kaizen is complete.

Usually, improvements are given a trial run during the Kaizen before they are fully implemented. During the trial run, the impacts of the improvements are monitored carefully, even if the outcomes aren’t particularly good. This allows the team to course correct rapidly before finalizing everything.

Why Control is the Most Important Phase

The biggest challenge that teams often face, even after the improvements produced the desired results, is the difficulty of smoothly implementing the process in its improved state. Time is of the essence here, so there’s pressure to act, but this forces the team to forego any semblance of smoothly transitioning the gains. This makes sustaining the results challenging as well, considering the people haven’t really had the time to buy into the changes – there may even be resistance.

During the Control phase, the team suggests an implementation strategy that will lead to long-term gains. Basically, the team members come up with a set of standard operating procedures that will guide all future process improvement endeavors. That way, results are measured on a constant basis to ensure that all beneficial changes don’t revert to their previous state, and any potential problems can be handled proactively. This is essentially where the plan for continuous improvement is set in motion.

Conclusion

Knowing when and how to use the DMAIC method is key to ensuring that your process improvement efforts are successful. Not only that, but it also ensures that they are standardized for future process improvement projects and that the results are sustained through continuous improvement. As long as the problem is complex and high-risk, you shouldn’t think twice about using the DMAIC method.

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The impact Six Sigma has made outside manufacturing – in industries and sectors such as construction, health, hospitality, service, management, human resources and more – has not gone unnoticed. This leads us to the question: what about the education sector?

There is so much potential, diversity and significance attributed to the education sector. However, it is one field that seems to have the most problems and inconsistency. Traditional methods of trying to generate consistent and quality output in all areas of the education sector have proven to be difficult (borderline impossible).

Six Sigma could be the methodology the education sector needs to succeed where traditional methods have failed, even though it has been around since 1986. It is a methodology that can work in this field, despite what many people believe. 

The Importance of Six Sigma in the education sector

From a glance, Six Sigma and education may look incompatible. Six Sigma needs outputs, stock, physical inputs and outputs, equipment and other targets to succeed. These are missing from the education field. The sector is famous for being largely influenced by human factors, which are unpredictable and hard to control.

Besides that, the stringent, data-driven and statistical approach of Six Sigma seems ill-suited for education’s softer side, such as individual learning outcomes and student satisfaction.

However, all hope is not lost since there are some parts of education that mesh well with the methodology. Education, like any other industry and sector, still has processes that are identifiable and repeatable. These are what place education in the realm of Six Sigma’s influence. These processes can be improved, which will, in turn, also improve the learning outcomes of students, as well as their satisfaction.

Greater efficiency is a trend that is sweeping through the educational world, making it more aligned with the goals of Six Sigma. There are several factors contributing to this trend, including:

• Academic excellence is becoming critical due to the intensifying competition on a global scale.
• Secondary and elementary schools are receiving increased pressure from the government to improve the performance of students.
• Tertiary institutions are expected to provide high-quality coursework by students and their guardians due to the rising tuition costs.

Increased efficiency can be achieved through the elimination of waste. And waste can be eliminated by shedding more light onto the root causes of waste. Six Sigma has tools, such as the Five Whys and Fishbone diagrams, that can help institutions identify root causes and remove anything that doesn’t add value to their processes (waste).

Six Sigma tools and techniques can also increase the efficiency of school districts in a number of areas. These include teaching techniques, safety, absenteeism, textbook purchasing, supply cost reduction, energy costs reduction and many more.

Conclusion

Many people will say that Six Sigma and education don’t work well together, but this is just a myth. There is so much pressure being placed on the education sector to improve its processes. The pressure comes from students, guardians and government, as well as global social-economical factors. Moving forward, the educational sector will rely more on Six Sigma.

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4 Myths About Process Improvement

Six Sigma is one of the most popular process improvement methodologies in the world, despite there be a number of them. However, process improvement itself is one term that many people have strong feelings about. Depending on how it is perceived, those feelings can range from good to bad. Ultimately, perceptions are influenced by what one has heard about process improvements.

This brings us to the myths that surround this concept. Many people know that when it is done correctly, optimizing a process to be better than it previously was can reap numerous benefits. Among these benefits is increased customer satisfaction and revenue. But some people are either reluctant to try out process improvement or want to try it for the wrong reasons because they have heard unhelpful myths.

Here are four myths that you will hear when it comes to process improvement and why you shouldn’t believe them.

1. There’s only one way to improve a process

Many industry professionals have one methodology of process improvement that they champion over others. But process improvement transcends such dogma. As mentioned earlier, there are a number of process improvement methodologies out there, including Six Sigma, Total Quality Management (TQM) and Toyota Production System (TPS).

The methodology you ultimately use depends on the process you are trying to improve. While the underlying principles of the methodologies are the same, the inner tools and techniques are different. There’s no one-size-fits-all methodology that you need to follow to make it a success.

2. Process Improvement is only for manufacturing

Since process improvement is popular in manufacturing, many people believe that is the only place where it belongs. Indeed, companies that champion process improvement include the likes of Toyota. But one does not need to have an assembly line if they wish to reap the benefits of process improvements.

In order to ascertain if a process can benefit from process improvement, you need to ask yourself if it creates value. If the answer is in the affirmative, then that process is a great candidate for improvement efforts. And doesn’t matter if you’re in the technology, health or non-profit sector.

3. You need to improve a process once

What happens after the process improvement efforts have become a success? Many organizations usually forget to make continuous improvement part of their organizational culture. This means people don’t know what to do after the process has been optimized. Eventually, the initial benefits are lost and the process can revert back to its former self.

Improvement is an ongoing process, and most methodologies usually stress this in the last step. While doing it once might sound like an attractive selling point, but without continuous improvements, the results won’t stick. Workers will no longer identify defects in processes and fix them to keep things running smoothly. You need to make sure that everyone, from the janitor to upper management, knows that continuous improvement is their responsibility.

4. Process improvement is time-consuming

Another myth that is often repeated about process improvement is that is a very slow process. When it comes to anything in an organization, it requires resources mainly time and money. This means that the longer something drags on, the more resources need to be poured into it. Thinking like this can make one dread undertaking process improvement, making it appear time-consuming and costly.

But saying process improvement is slow in and of itself is false. If an organization shows a strong commitment and drive to process improvement, it can be carried out pretty fast. Many organizations spend time on implementing specific methodologies instead of getting stakeholders on board and building the right team to push the agenda, even after it has succeeded. In the end, process improvement takes longer than it needs to.

If you want something to work for you, you have to know what is real about it and what is false. Unfortunately, even things like process improvement, with its proven track record of success, are not immune to fables. Luckily, with any false thing that is said about methods that produce positive results, the truth can be easy to uncover.

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How to Speed Up Lean Six Sigma Implementation

The Lean Six Sigma toolkit is a very versatile and potent technique for process improvement. The tools help users understand the process and increase their productivity. Used the right way, the methodology would help reduce costs and increase the quality standards of the products and services offered.

The Cost of Poor Quality

This is a great tool to figure out the improvement areas. The number adds up all of the inefficiencies that are related to any process. It includes unnecessary waste; making up for the defective products produced by running the plants for longer times, additional costs incurred in waste disposal, reshipping products to the clients, warranty issuance, redundant audits and checks, etc.

Consider the cost of poor quality and figure out the expenses that will be incurred in continuing the current way. The Lean Six Sigma methodology can help with minimizing defects. It can drastically improve the effectiveness of business processes. The main purpose of the technique is to enhance the customer experience by eliminating all variations in processes.

Consistency is critically important for any business as it allows customer trust to build up. The tools help cut costs by cutting down on the different waste types.

Realization of the challenges and problems is the first step towards solving them.

Speeding Up Lean Six Sigma and Process Improvement

Process improvement is a critical component in organizations of all sizes. A number of factors prevent people from using the Lean Six Sigma methodology in their day-to-day activities. It is human nature to resist change. Teams might not be very comfortable with adapting to change. Budget constraints too play a role.

At times, organizations do not have the desired skill set or possess no one to take the lead. Often, teams believe they do not have the time. It is important to adopt a proactive methodology in order to increase quality.

• Lean Six Sigma is a defect-based methodology but it is important to approach it from an appreciative perspective. There are a lot of defects in business processes but teams must also appreciate things that have been working well and leave them unchanged.
• Focus on quick wins. These are opportunities that can result in fast success in the Lean Six Sigma framework. Quick wins also help accelerate further wins.
• It is important to take advantage of opportunities as and when they present themselves. Identify the opportunities and evaluate them.
• Identify the bottlenecks and suggest potential improvements. It is recommended to use business process management software.
• Businesses should compare the processes when it comes to efficiency. Softwares could be used to automate process enforcement. It can keep a track on the deadlines and assign the relevant tasks to appropriate employees.
• Users should consider their first quick win projects as the workable models. Once a few initial quick wins are complete, you should begin publicizing your team’s progress.
• Quick wins can help initialize processes quickly and help determine the speed with which the project will progress. They also provide a strong foundation on which to work. It is imperative to consider wisely your selection criteria for choosing quick wins.
• Trace and identify the most productive employees in your business. Driving quick wins is easier if you already have the most productive employees ready.
• Seamless communication is the key to a speedy implementation of Lean Six Sigma. Inspire your staff and publicize your successes with quick wins. Speeches and literature are a great way to spread the word and motivate your workforce.

Conclusion

Lean Six Sigma combines the strengths of the Lean approach focusing on waste reduction with the defect elimination and problem-solving strategies of the Six Sigma methodology. In order to ensure a speedy implementation of flawless processes using this technique, businesses must focus on quick wins and identify the right opportunities. In the end, it’s a collaborative team effort and relies on the support of your teammates for long-term success.

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