Six Sigma management for IT projects

Six Sigma management is significant in IT implementation, mainly reflected in the following four aspects.

First, Six Sigma management can effectively measure the value of IT implementation. Through the Six Sigma method, each process in the project should reach a level 5 level, that is, there should be no more than 1 million defects in 230 repeated monitoring.

Second, Six Sigma management is customer-centered, which can improve the service quality and operational efficiency of the IT department and reduce IT implementation costs.

Third, Six Sigma management promotes organizational performance by improving the service quality and operational efficiency of the IT department.

Finally, Six Sigma management can help enterprises build a first-class corporate culture. The Six Sigma Code aims to achieve perfect quality. Its superiority lies in improving and ensuring quality from the IT implementation process, rather than testing and controlling quality from the results. This not only reduces the quality of prosecution, but also avoids the resulting rework costs. More importantly, the Six Sigma management has cultivated employees' quality awareness and integrated this quality awareness into the corporate culture.

Establish long-term organizations

Six Sigma management is more complex than other management methods. Therefore, establishing a long-term Six Sigma organization is very important to the successful implementation and application of Six Sigma.

The Six Sigma organization is generally composed of advocates, directors, black belts, green belts, and project team members. The Six Sigma Promotion Committee is generally composed of senior company leaders who regularly assess the process of IT implementation projects and identify advantages and problems. Advocates are generally held by senior executives to provide various resources for projects. The director selected from the management and technical personnel of various departments to organize, coordinate and promote IT implementation projects. The black belt is selected from the middle-level management and technical personnel, responsible for project implementation and promotion. Green Belt and project team members are generally composed of backbone personnel at the grassroots level.

After an IT implementation project is completed, the Six Sigma Organization continues to monitor the operating status of the IT system and the effectiveness of IT implementation to achieve continuous improvement.

Six Sigma is another powerful management tool that helps enterprises improve their core competitiveness after balancing the integration method, benchmarking, and customer relationship management, and has achieved great success in the practice of many companies. Current potential or hidden problems and pre-processing are the advantages of Six Sigma management. Six Sigma is no longer simply a quality management method for manufacturing business processes, but has gradually become an effective management method and strategy for improving service business processes. Using Six Sigma management may be a new way for the current enterprise IT management.

Six Sigma in six steps

Implementing Six Sigma management consists of six steps: establishing operational problems and metrics for improvement, establishing a lean Improvement Team, identifying the potential causes of the problem, and exploring the root cause, implement long-term improvement measures to present and celebrate the results of improvement. These six steps also apply to the implementation of it.

Step 1: Establish problems and metrics

First, we need to clarify what operational problems will be improved for IT implementation. It should meet three criteria: identify the impact of IT implementation on things to be improved, define the scope of things to be improved for IT implementation, and communicate consensus.

Taking the implementation of enterprise ERP system as an example, first of all, it is necessary to clarify what improvements the implementation of ERP system will bring to enterprise operations, and find out the ERP implementation methods that can improve customer satisfaction. Second, we need to determine metrics to measure the gap between the current situation and customer requirements, and find out key metrics. Once again, it is necessary to inform business departments of the effectiveness of ERP implementation and reach consensus with them so that they can understand and support IT systems.

Step 2: Establish an improvement team

After the Six Sigma project is established, an effective improvement team must be established immediately. At this time, the original team was assigned to solve the problem and changed to arranging the problem for the team members to solve the problem.

Before establishing a team, the IT department owner must be recognized by managers at all levels. In addition, the enterprise leadership should realize that supporting team collaboration is to support the construction of corporate culture. Managers must consciously reflect on how they lead their subordinates.

When building a team, you should pay attention to the combination of people with different educational backgrounds, experiences and knowledge, and train team members to master the improvement tools in Six Sigma and the method of successfully using Six Sigma tools.

Step 3 identify potential causes

After identifying operational issues that require improvement and establishing Improvement Teams, it is necessary to determine whether all steps, policies, and initiatives are in place in one step to create services or products for customers. In addition to improving quality, eliminating unnecessary steps can also reduce implementation costs and shorten the implementation cycle. To identify the potential cause of the problem, draw a flowchart. There are two basic flowcharts: Linear flowcharts and inter-department flowcharts. Both methods first propose the existing situation and then determine the situation. Then, the system should be reorganized to convert it from the current situation to the expected situation.

Step 4: Find the root cause

The Action Plan to be explored consists of four components: what needs to be done, who should do it, when should it be done, and what is the status of action items, especially those that are out of date.

Six Sigma projects often take months to discover all the root causes, implement solutions, and get the desired results. As the search process goes deeper, more new things and new information need to be collected will be discovered. In this way, the action plan becomes a historical record.

Step 5 extend the improvement measures

Six Sigma management will not end with the completion of the IT implementation project, and requires enterprises to form a specific culture, so that the improvement measures can be extended and continuously improved.

The key to successful implementation of Six Sigma is to take the customer as the center, and internal conflicts will gradually disappear, and everyone will try to do things better. This will become a new way of thinking to promote cultural changes. With the cultural atmosphere of encouraging employees to execute commands without thinking about it, the working environment will also change positively to encourage them to use their skills to constantly think about a better way of working.

Step 6: Present and celebrate the results of Improvement

The IT implementation team should promptly demonstrate the contributions made by IT implementation to enterprises. Throughout the IT implementation process, leaders should always affirm the work of the team.

Three key points of application

When applying Six Sigma management, enterprises should pay attention to the following three points.

First, qualified Six Sigma management personnel. Currently, there is a shortage of Six Sigma talents in China. Therefore, before starting six sigma management, enterprises must ensure sufficient full-time staff. At the same time, the help of professional consulting companies is also an effective method.

Second, communication between the IT department and the business department. To successfully use the Six Sigma method in IT implementation, you must precisely define the IT implementation process, the IT implementation evaluation process, and the improvement measures obtained during the implementation process. This requires a lot of communication between IT staff and relevant business staff.

Third, transform an enterprise culture incompatible with six sigma. The famous management scientist hod Gates once pointed out that when the strategy and culture conflict, the culture will always win. When the spirit of enterprise culture is incompatible with the spirit of change, the efforts for reform will fail. Applying Six Sigma Management in IT implementation is not only a strategic action of the company, but also a change. This requires enterprises to use six sigma to improve the efficiency and quality of IT implementation, while transforming the unsuitable corporate culture to ensure the success of Six Sigma management.