If you want to carry out a successful Six Sigma initiative, especially if it's applied to IT, you need to be aware of the challenges you face and to call on some experts. For example, internal IT groups need to first align the business solution with the business process; however, many IT people aren't trained in business process performance. To determine if customers will be happy with the products being developed, IT must move beyond counting errors in lines of code, to apply quality management to the product being developed. Moving to this level, however, is often hard for IT to do.

All of these observations come from Joe De Feo, CEO and executive coach at the Juran Institute, a quality management consulting firm funded by J. J. Juran, the founder of quality management. In this podcast, De Feo talks about how IT organizations and IT service companies can prepare for Six Sigma, and how organizations can correct what he says are the four common Six Sigma project mistakes. De Feo also dispels the myth that Six Sigma stifles innovation. Says De Feo, "Dr. Juran told executives that if they wanted to meet their customers' requirements, they always had to be planning for continuous improvement. You have to be thinking continuously about how to make the existing product better and to be planning for the next new product. Innovation doesn't just happen. It has structure, which is the design piece of Six Sigma."

Resources

Hospital  Performance Improvement through a Business Model

Juran  Institute's Six Sigma Breakthrough and Beyond

Juran Institute  Gives Advice for Getting Lean with Six Sigma

In  His 100th Year, Juran Still an Advocate for Quality

Bio

Joseph A. De Feo is president and executive coach at the Juran Institute. His areas of expertise include: coaching executives to understand key factors in driving enterprise-wide change programs, and developing and deploying breakthrough management principles like Lean and Six Sigma, strategic quality planning, and business process improvement. Mr. De Feo is the co-author of two books. Six Sigma Breakthrough and Beyond,  co-authored with the late Dr. William W. Barnard, and Quality Planning and  Analysis for Enterprise Quality, co-authored with the late Dr. Frank Gryna  and Dr. Richard Chua.

Production Credits

Elizabeth Ferrarini, Producer
Dana  Farver, Executive Producer, Communities Editor-in-Chief
Tom  Parish, Audio Producer, Show Host