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Testimonials
A Day in The Life of a Black Belt
A typical day in the life of a Six Sigma Black Belt, leading a project team based in different locations Managing a Six Sigma DMAIC project can sometimes be difficult enough, but when you add in the complexity of running a project with a team that is spread over different locations, with different functional responsibilities and, with conflicting business objectives and associated time commitments, taking a different approach to the way you run your project is the only way of delivering the project objectives on time and within budget.
Managing a disparate team has been a learning curve for me as a Black Belt and finding a way of satisfying the needs of the project without impacting business as usual has helped me to deliver great results with the minimum of disruption.
Today is an important day for my project team. It is our Project Kick-Off meeting and we have planned in an "All Day" session - Starting at 8.00am and finishing "on-the-dot" at 5.30pm
When forming the team I had discussions with all of the team members individually and the one stumbling block to success that came up from all of them was the time commitment for project meetings, when most of the time would be taken up traveling to and from a single location for the meetings.
We agreed to schedule in these "All Day" meetings and get a lot of work completed during the meeting to push us aggressively through the five DMAIC phases.
The Plan for this kick-off meeting was to complete most of the DEFINE phase of our project. The following Agenda was developed as a result.
DOWNLOAD : All day DMAIC Meeting Agenda
We start the day extremely well, everyone (all 6 people on the team), arrives on or before 7.45am as planned for tea and coffee and we start the meeting, as planned at 8.00am.
We rattle through the first two agenda items, Team Introductions and Roles and Responsibilities. A couple of people in the team have never met or worked with each other before so this is always a useful exercise to go through.
It's now 9.00am, we are still on time in accordance with our Agenda and the focus of the meeting now switches to "ACTIVITY".
I present the details of the draft "Project Charter" that has been written with the Project Sponsor. The team is keen to understand more detail about the project and provide me with some good clarification around the proposed scope of the project. I agree to take this back to the Sponsor for approval.
We've run a little bit over the time on the Project Charter but that's OK as it generated some good discussion within the group and we end up with a better Project Charter as a result of it.
The atmosphere in the room changes, we're starting to feel like a team. The team agreed with the project Plan timings put forward and feel it's aggressive, but achievable.
After the break (everybody's back on time - amazing) it's time to get them up and out of their seats to conduct the next activity. I've printed off some A0 size Stakeholder Analysis templates for the team to complete together.
DOWNLOAD : Stakeholder Analysis Template
We have an hour and 20 minutes scheduled for this activity. We're getting some fantastic brainstorming going with the team, someone's got the pen and is writing on the flip chart
Everyone is getting involved, I've just stepped back a little to let them get on with it, throwing in a few thought provoking questions along the way.
We work through our high level risks at a quick pace, at which point lunch arrives and everyone takes 10 minutes to stretch their legs and catch-up on voicemail messages.
We're mapping the "As-Is" process, using a post-it note for each individual step and separating activities into functional departments or "Swim-lanes". Using post-it notes pays dividends as we move post-its around as we get more clarification on the process, We decide to do the "Quick Wins" (team decision) as we build the process map and this works well, we now have a list of quick win actions we can implement straight away.
Time for another break - when we return we work through our SIPOC, again there's great interaction with the team as they conduct the activity, all learning things from each other and contributing to the discussion.
We finish the day on a high and an activity that the whole team agrees is up there as a learning experience along with the process mapping exercise - planning the capture of the Voice of the Customer.
The SIPOC has already helped us to identify who our customers are - the research plan and VOC questionnaire are completed slightly ahead of schedule.
We are at the end of our agenda items and are all pleased that we've got so much done within such an aggressive timescale. We take the next 10 minutes just to review our learning about the process we've just gone through and to review the action items that have come out of our various discussions.
The team all agree that these one day meetings are the way wee want to run this project for the next four phases. There's work to be done before our next all day session in terms of capturing and analyzing the voice of the customer responses. We agree that this should be the first agenda item for our second meeting.
Key learning from the team include:
- Agenda setting and time management are key to getting things done
- Time restriction is no barrier to quality and volume of output, we just remained much more focused on the task that in normal meetings that don't have this kind of structure
- It's the team that does the work; the Black Belt is a facilitator and expert on the toolkit.
- All Day meetings are easier to manage with Business As Usual, less disruptive and attendance percentage is almost always 100%.
- Flip Charts, post-its and brown paper help the team environment and thought processes.
- A geographically split team is always a challenge, but with any challenge, we have to think slightly differently.
- The All Day Meeting was a concept developed by the team, for the benefit of the team. However, I am 100% convinced that this idea was floated and accepted by the rest of the team because they all had a very clear understanding of what we were looking to achieve and how we were going to go about it.
- This clear understanding came as a result of the three day Green Belt course that all team members attended. The Black Belt leading the project can then focus their attention on the project rather than spending time training team members. During project meetings.
Author
Paul Martin - Six Sigma Master Black Belt
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