Enterprise Technology By Phil Edholm

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Lean Six Sigma - A Realists View

By Phil January 22, 2008 5:19 pm

This week we have both the Nortel Global Sales Conference and the Leadership Forum. As it turned out, I sat at dinner last night at a table with all Black Belts and Master Black Belts. As we talked through the evening, I described how I related across Nortel the impact of Lean Six Sigma (LSS). As we talked I realized this might be a good blog topic.

As Nortel has introduced LSS into our organization, I have been through the LSS Champions training and Leader training, so I have had some exposure to the process without the intense detail of the underlying statistical analysis tools. As an aside, I started my career working for GM and before moving to EE and ME, I took most of the Industrial Engineering curriculum, so I have a reasonable exposure to process.

As I went through the LSS training, I came away convinced that the process of improvement is a really good thing. The way I explain it simply is that if you had a sheet of paper with a thousand points on it, there are a few (very few) people who can look at the paper and see a pattern in 20 dots. What LSS does is use a series of tools to eliminate 960 of the dots so the pattern in the remaining 40 is clearly visible. The key values to the LSS process is both repeatable and usable by people who are not savants.

As we have introduced LSS into Nortel, I have clearly seen how it has enabled teams to identify primary issues in processes and improve them significantly. As both the number of LSS Black Belts and the number of projects increase in Nortel I believe it will have an increasing positive impact both on the companies financial performance and ou ability to delight our customers.

So a quick view from a realist, someone who came into Lean Six Sigma with a critical eye is that it really works and can have a great impact. I am excited that we are applying world lass tools to the company and look forward to great results and impact.

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Comments

  1. As an outsider, I think that nortel management still relies on fads and for outside management consultants to do their thinking.

    Six-sigma is a rehash of all kinds of other systems from “Quality Circle” to “Process Re-Engineering”. All had the same claims and clever analogies. All based on Deming “PDSA” They also were commercialized and trivialized and had the same promise and effect.

    I submit to you that nortel is once again trying to solve the same problem in a different incarnation without recognizing the base problem. Which is; the rules made “to catch” bad people/process/behavior are easier to measure, but counter productive. To change profoundly, you must change the rules encourage good people/process/behavior.

    I think you may be confused at a much higher level, but to me, all this hype reveals is how far we haven’t come since the 1980’s.

    January 22nd, 2008 at 9:14 pm by many

  2. I agree with Many. I’ve seen the t-shirts for TQM, Excellence!, etc.. These process doctrines are not to be taken lightly but they are business efficiency tools, not business growth tools. I can’t give Nortel kudos for LSS because I believe they have the cart before the horse. First figure out what your business is, then become good at it. Nortel is focused on being efficient with yesterday’s business. Not good.

    But maybe I’m wrong…and I’m open-minded. Phil - how is LSS helping you develop a growth business plan? Did your dinner conversation include dialog on where Nortel should be placing its bets?

    January 23rd, 2008 at 12:51 am by Nortel Watcher

  3. BTW Phil,

    Have you read the Harvard Business Review article “Seven Transformations of Leadership”? I think that the fifteen pages of that article is more valuable to nortel than another iteration of Deming (especially since the culture of Deming never took hold at nortel). It would be interesting to understand where nortel senior leadership falls on the seven types of action logic?

    IMO nortel let go some of it most important, innovative and entrepreneurial in favor of its embedded BaU management. The equivalent of a revolution that executes the intellectuals. I think nortel continues to suffer from that leadership purge today.

    January 24th, 2008 at 10:09 am by many

  4. Phil, process is good but action is better! You still have 10,000+ people continuing to do the same actions they did yesterday, last month, and last year! Change the people, and their responsibilites in order to really chance Nortel, then dump the statistical oriented blackbelts in exchange for people who execute and you’ll have a great company.

    January 27th, 2008 at 7:55 pm by J Staylor

  5. LSS is of unquestionable value as were TQM and Re-Engineering. Yet, they are popularly discounted, as ineffective and the latest fad. However, that assessment is often found in firms that are high performing. They are not high performing because they fail to see people at work as socio-technical. “Technical” is usually the biggest gorilla in the corporate room and the social dimension (i.e. communication, motivational systems, committed teams, purpose, trust) is relatively small.

    Pragmatically, a review of the 100 top rated companies will show the way to go.

    Donald Miklas, SPHR
    Former IEEE Director of Continuing Education, VP and Director of Continuing Education, OD in Financial Services, Director of Leadership and OD, Rutgers U, et al.

    January 28th, 2008 at 10:08 am by Donald Miklas

  6. (corrected submission)
    LSS is of unquestionable value as were TQM and Re-Engineering. Yet, they are popularly discounted, as ineffective and the latest fad. However, that assessment is often found in firms that are not high performing. They are not high performing because they fail to see people at work as socio-technical. “Technical” is usually the biggest gorilla in the corporate room and the social dimension (i.e. communication, motivational systems, committed teams, purpose, trust) is relatively small.

    Pragmatically, a review of the 100 top rated companies will show the way to go.

    Donald Miklas, SPHR
    Former IEEE Director of Continuing Education, VP and Director of Continuing Education, OD in Financial Services, Director of Leadership and OD, Rutgers U, et al.

    January 28th, 2008 at 10:20 am by Donald Miklas

  7. Phil…have you gone on vacation again? Or trying to figure out something positive to say at the sales conference?

    I have a suggestion. Open source software development is powerful because it draws on the intellect of a broad base. The same principle can be applied to strategy. Why not create a thread that supplies a structure for constructive input on Nortel strategy. You can ask questions to direct the input to hit topics and you can moderate debate. Of course there will be some cranks who will deposit noise, but you can use the marketing people who run these blogs to filter that. You might be surprised at the input you get. There are a lot of people out here who want Nortel to succeed. You can use the input to test current strategy or you can throw it away if it doesn’t help. It’s free and it can’t hurt. Go for it. Show us Nortel can still do innovative things.

    January 28th, 2008 at 9:06 pm by Nortel Watcher

  8. Is LSS being incorporated into all areas of the organization? How do you prevent LSS from stifling innovation in your research areas?
    http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/content/07_24/b4038406.htm?chan=top+news_top+news+index_best+of+bw

    January 29th, 2008 at 2:00 pm by moosebump

  9. I don’t know if it was created by LSS but whole The Own It! initiative disappeared rather quickly…
    For instance, cleaning up the labs was one such effort initiated by those who wanted to please. Sadly it negatively effected some employeses’ meticulously kept and scrutinized unit output, so it the chore was passed on to contractors. Pwned!

    January 30th, 2008 at 11:05 pm by Whutever

  10. I was traveling in Europe and have had zero access time. The challenge with 7AM-5PM meetings and then a 9PM-11PM plane flight and repeating the next day. I am currently on a trip to London, Oslo, Copenhagen, Amsterdam, Leeds, Dubai, New York, and Dallas. This last week has been hectic.

    Great comments. I definitely did not say that LSS is the answer to all issues and it is a process oriented practice, but can be applied broadly in an organization. While LSS can be applied to the processes, innovation continues to rely on a combination of great individuals, insight into issues that need to be solved and interaction and idea exchange. As I said at the beginning, I came into this with a big dose of skepticism, but have come to believe that LSS is a valuable framework to improve the processes in Nortel and therefore strengthen the business, regardless of overriding strategies. Regardless of delivered product, solution, or service, the organization needs world-class processes to deliver and having a focus and methodology is critical to achieving that….I believe LSS fits that bill.

    I agree that having 10,000 people do the same thing will not change, however LSS provides a format to define the change. Alone it cannot transform Nortel, that requires leadership, strategy and execution, but LSS will provide critical value in assuring that the execution is possible. I do not think you can wait to improve the operations of the business until you have achieved success, it needs to be done in parallel.

    Many, I really appreciate your comments on leadership. I reread the HBR article (it was awhile back when I read it), and I agree that the points are critical. We are definitely both challenged to and actually moving our leadership from some of the less desirable categories to more desirable. The evaluations of leadership that are done do encompass many of the characteristics discussed and there is a culture of driving to the Achiever level of leadership or better. I agree that during the incredible challenge of 2002-2006 there may have been a tendency to have leadership in the Diplomat space, I believe that is being changed. I can tell you that there is much emphasis on both leadership and management as core competencies and individual evaluations in Nortel.

    Finally, a comment on Own It. For those not familiar with Own It, this is an initiative to encourage employees to use a “LSS Light” approach that could be learned in a few hours to solving problems they identified in their work environment. There have been hundreds of Own It sessions and projects, many with great results. As with any program, the initial noise has died down, but it continues to be a part of providing employees the tools to be a critical part of changing Nortel for the better. I am not familiar with the specific instance Whutever sited, so I cannot explicitly respond.

    Finally, as the person who had had much of a hand in driving our enterprise strategy, I can tell you that, while we have used some consultant input for thought processes, the strategy has come from the synthesis of our view of the market, transformations, and where we want Nortel to drive to be a market leader. While projects that have been assisted by consultants have been critical to the development of the strategy, it is dominated by Nortel people and their thinking. I need to think a little about having a strategy section and how much to document here, but it is an interesting idea.

    Well so much for this comment, I have to run to a meeting.

    February 1st, 2008 at 4:13 am by Phil

  11. Phil,

    Thank you. I think the paper is accurate in the way it categorizes behavior in a large organization. It was interesting to me to look back on myself and notice the times I had acted in accordance with one or more of the “logics”.

    Good luck in Dubai, my friends in that area tell me it is positively “weird” without reliable internet access. What an opportunity to observe the effects and coping mechanisms of no internet on a society that is a relatively heavy user.

    I think the push back is that people might be getting ill about constant “latest sliced bread” while watching the leadership still make decisions in their “old comfortable place” and that appear to run counter to the basic message.

    I would be interested in your thoughts on:

    The spectrum auction
    The bid for Yahoo by MSFT
    Observations from Dubai

    February 1st, 2008 at 10:50 am by many

  12. I will comment on Yahoo in a future post, lots of talk on that…and on Dubai, overall amazing.

    February 5th, 2008 at 6:59 pm by Phil

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