Tuesday, November 18, 2008

Harvesting The Benefits Of Both Lean And Six Sigma 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 IT industry is a lot like the manufacturing industry, in that it doesn't see many challenges. The largest problems they may have is project length extending beyond a deadline. Sometimes, businesses are not able to use the DMAIC methodology appropriately in software development projects. After the completion of the projects, the teams are scattered, leaving the Six Sigma limited in the use of that project only.

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.

The best way to bring about improvements is to use Lean concepts and tools to assess such concern areas of the project that are responsible for the drawbacks. By undertaking such an assessment, or in other words "leaning out" the processes, it becomes easy to analyze and examine the quality issues using Six Sigma tools and techniques. The causes for variation can be figured out with the help of various Six Sigma tools. This approach of leaning out projects to be taken under the Six Sigma scanner yields good results in the selected process areas.

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. - 15478

About the Author: