Tuesday, November 18, 2008

Making the Most of Lean and Six Sigma Together in IT

By Craig Calvin

The IT industry is usually looked to when companies need solutions. But, IT companies themselves have situations when they need to make use of improvement methodologies, such as Six Sigma. IT companies love Six Sigma and for good reason. It allows them to find solutions to raising their levels of services and capabilities.

The manufacturing industry and IT industry have similarities, being that they neither one face many challenges. The biggest one they may see would be deadlines being missed in lengthy projects. Many instances leave Six Sigma limited to a single project alone.

The solution comes in the form of using Lean tools with Six Sigma. They are very complementary, especially in instances of high variations and wastes. These result in defects, which Six Sigma helps attack. It can be difficult to see where total wastes may be, but Lean can help with this.

A good way to improve is to use Lean tools and methods to identify what is creating the drawbacks. This is referred to as "leaning out" the processes, which in turn, makes it simpler to use the Six Sigma tools and concepts. Figuring out the causes of variation can be done using the Six Sigma tools. The end result is very good.

Analyzing a larger scope of the project allows movement towards cost reduction by seeing where quality is poor, thus lowering costs. There is not a one size fits all solution. With Lean and Six Sigma working together, problem areas are taken care of and overall success can be seen. - 15246

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