Kaizen and Six Sigma in Project Management

Good day...

Picture credit: PeteLinforth

As a project manager, I believe you must have heard about Kaizen and Six Sigma. As a certified Six Sigma green belt, I will try to elaborate further on both techniques and the relationship with project management.

For you who are not familiar with Six Sigma, it is actually a quality assurance technique by standardizing all of the process involved with aim to have a standardized result across different production teams and production lines. When six sigma is reached, the probability of defect is only as big as 3.4 per million opportunities. The technique was first introduced by Motorola in 1986 and widely used by Jack Welch at General Electric.

While Kaizen is literally translated to "change for better" or continuous improvement. In practice, the PDCA (Plan, Do, Check Act) method is widely used to achieve the desired continuous improvement.

Now, what do Kaizen and Six Sigma have to do with project management? As you would understand that the objective of a project management is to deliver a high quality project at the desired timeline, budget, and other constraint. In order to achieve the desired quality, a concrete tool and measurement needs to be in place to ensure a proper quality management process (both quality assurance and quality control).

With that in mind, Six Sigma is highly relevant to quality assurance and quality control of a project. How a testing scenario, test plan, and test cases are defined and standardized, in order to minimize any possible defect in production while aiming for zero defect. In this case, Six Sigma tools, such as 5 Whys, root cause diagram / Ishikawa diagram, pareto chart, and the statistical methods (mean, median, modus, standard deviation) are applicable to plan for a thorough quality management.

On the second topic, the PDCA cycle of a Kaizen technique is highly relevant to project life cylce, As with any project, the main responsibility of a project manager is to plan (Plan), execute the project (Do), monitor & control (Check) and do the necessary adjustment and re-planning (Act). In addition, I also found that we can apply Kaizen method to capture, document, evaluate, and improve from the lesson learnt of a previously completed project. This will allow subsequent project to be delivered with better quality and better managed.

So, I can say that both Six Sigma and Kaizen, along with other standards, tools, and methodologies, can help a project manager in better manage her project.

Edwin