Anyone who has ever led a manufacturing project can attest to the fact that they have unique challenges. Nearly all projects iterate through some version of the “planning, execution and control” cycle, but manufacturing takes that to new levels. This is particularly true when you are going to be churning out a high volume of the same thing, such as an automobile part or an electrical component.

Watching the end result of a project manifest itself as thousands (or millions) of an item rolling off of a conveyer belt can elicit an almost Zen like pleasure. But it also can be accompanied by a sinister side effect: variance. Variance is the enemy of production, but the trouble is that virtually everything varies somewhat in this universe if you measure it carefully enough. There are simply tiny fluctuations present in everything we see and touch. This includes even the most precise goods made today. Addressing variance is where the processes of Six Sigma shines.

What’s a “Sigma”?
Six Sigma is a group of processes that were born at Motorola and made famous at General Electric. Now it is used in many of the best manufacturing companies around the world.  Before we get into the specifics of what Six Sigma is and why it’s important, let’s discuss what a sigma is and why it matters.

When you are manufacturing a product, standardization matters. In fact, whether or not the product is a “quality” product depends upon the product falling within a certain range of specifications.

As stated earlier, everything deviates from a standard if you measure it carefully enough. The goal is to take measurements that are fine enough to capture these fluctuations. You average these measures together to determine the mean, and then you can calculate the standard deviation of all of those numbers. This simply tells how diverse your data set is. Diversity can be a good thing but not when you are dealing with products that are supposed to be standardized!

Ideally, your measurements should be grouped very closely to the mean. This would indicate a low standard deviation, which is desirable. On the other hand, a high standard deviation indicates a lot of variance, which means your processes are probably not under control.

This is where we get the word “sigma.” A sigma, abbreviated as “σ“, represents a distance on either side of the mean.  A single standard deviation from the mean is called “one sigma.” So one sigma quality means that only the items with measurements that fell within one standard deviation passed quality inspection. Unfortunately, this only equates to about 31 percent. Three sigma quality is much better since it means that many more passed through quality. That gets us up to over 93 percent quality.

If you have achieved six sigma quality, you have only 3.4 defects for every one million products that your organization produces. This is considered to be world class.

What Six Sigma Looks Like in the Real World

One way it has been described is that one sigma quality equates to an error per page in a book. Three sigma quality equates to a single error in the whole book. Six Sigma quality would have only a single error in the entire library. When you achieve the level of six sigmas, you have essentially removed most of the things that can be controlled. Remaining defects will fluctuations in line with the nature of materials, etc.

The 5 Steps of Six Sigma

But the goal is not simply to achieve this quality. The goal is to be able to achieve it repeatedly and predictably every time you manufacture the product. This generally involves not only the organization performing the project but also the entire supply chain.  So Six Sigma has a series of steps to help you achieve world class quality and sustain it. This family of steps is abbreviated as DMAIC. If you work around Six Sigma, you will see DMAIC a lot. It is an acronym that stands for:

(D)efine
(M)easure
(A)nalyze
(I)mprove
(C)ontrol

Here’s a look at each step:

• Data: The steps that make up DMAIC are based on hard numerical analysis and not simply observation. The team gathers data and those data are used to understand and make decisions. As W. Edwards Deming famously stated, “Without data you’re just another person with an opinion.”This data-driven approach begins with the step of Define. In other words, define the problem, define the scope, and define what success would look like. Steven Covey urged us to “Begin with end in mind”, and this is simply an empirical understanding of what that end should look like.

• Measure is where you take very specific measurements of your current reality. This starts with the output but may grow to include measurements about how the output is being produced.

• Analyze is about coming up with a plan to move from the current measured state to the desired state. It commonly involves root cause analysis so that you are not simply dealing with surface issues.

• The step of Improve takes action to move the current state to the desired state. The previous steps of Define and Analyze are to gain an understanding of what is wrong and how to fix it, but this step takes real steps to bring the product into quality tolerances.

• Control is about making your change consistently repeatable. This is not about a one-time fix. It is about putting the right change policies, and processes in place to produce consistently better products. This can be the most frustrating step in the entire process.

Prevention Over Inspection

A common reaction when looking at this list is: “What happened to inspection?” In other words, how can you have high quality if product inspection is not an integral part?  The answer is that Six Sigma, like most modern quality programs values prevention over inspection. It is based on the principle that quality cannot be inspected into a product after it has already been manufactured. Instead, quality is all about prevention. When it comes to delivering quality products, planning always wins over inspection.

The art is to learn to identify, measure, and ultimately eliminate variances. And this is not a one-time activity. It has to be done throughout the project and into subsequent operations, because waste is like weeds in a lawn or garden. You get rid of the undesirables but then they inevitably and relentlessly come creeping back in.

Is Six Sigma Right for Your Project?

You can best answer this question by looking at the type of manufacturing or service delivery involved in your project. In cases where the manufacturing is not highly consistent, it may be best to try a different approach. A great example of a Six Sigma project includes Motorola manufactured circuit boards and silicon processors and chips. This was highly repetitive and did not vary much within a product line. On the other hand, consider an aircraft manufacturer that delivers a relatively small quantity of planes that are each configured differently—not a great candidate for Six Sigma?

Taking the steps to achieve world class quality can be intimidating, but it brings big rewards. If you are ready to learn more about Six Sigma and what it can do for you, the American Society for Quality could be a great place for you to begin.

Did you know that only 2.5% of companies successfully complete 100% of their projects? That’s sign of a bad project management process. How would you rate yours? Take our Project Management Health Check, a 9-question multiple-choice assessment of your project management process.  

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In the mid-90s, I managed a project for a utility company that included a team of 20+ people. I have always liked to start my workday early, and one particular Friday, I was already hard at work when my team started trickling in around 8:30 a.m. About 90 minutes later, the CIO, (earning leadership bonus points for this classy move), had the power cut to the entire floor. Everything but the emergency lighting instantly went out, and at this point he announced that his budget had been cut in half by the CFO, thus our budgets were going to be cut by at least 50 percent. Everyone sat there stunned, while he briefed the project managers on the floor on how layoffs (euphemistically referred to as “resource actions”) were to be carried out. My team lost 10 people that day alone, and after the shock of the personnel changes we had to come to grips with the fact that our budget was also basically cut in half. Of course, the scope and schedule were barely changed at all. Early in a project’s lifecycle, constraints usually become firm and visible. Sometimes this will confirm that the project should be able to glide across the finish line on time and within budget, but how do you handle the situation where it becomes clear that the budget is unrealistically tight or even downright impossible? The example above was a particularly painful one for me, but I did learn some strategies that helped me with the all-too-familiar mandate to do more with less.

1. Prove it.

As a sponsor, when I am funding a project and the manager asks for more funding, my first response is usually the same: “Prove it.” This is not so much a tightfisted move as it is an opportunity for the project manager to demonstrate his or her understanding of the scope and the risk factors. The truth is, nothing speaks louder than data, and your mastery of these facts will help your case.

2. Understand the constraints.

A successful project is a solution that fits somewhere within a set of given constraints. Everyone has a finite amount of time, money and resources to work with. This concept is famously described within project management as the iron triangle (a.k.a. the triple constraint). Constraints limit your solution in some way since they restrict the choices you can make. They are like boundaries that you have to operate within in order to deliver the project successfully. The key is that all of these may not be set in stone. The budget might be tightly constrained, but the schedule could have flexibility. Many times the scope is the most flexible aspect of the project. Understanding your budget and the other constraints that border your project is an important step to finding a way to deliver it successfully. One complication is that some project managers tend to inflate their budgets and estimates beyond reasonable padding. While this appears to make sense from the project manager’s perspective, it’s a real problem for the performing organization. If the organization accepts unrealistically inflated estimates, they’ll tie up capital that they could invest in important projects. From the enterprise perspective, unnecessarily tying up capital is universally a bad thing. Also, sandbagging your estimates erodes trust. Do this a few times, and stakeholders won’t take your numbers seriously anymore.

3. Provide options.

Frank Sinatra famously crooned “All or Nothing At All”, but most projects fall somewhere between those extremes. Very few stakeholders get everything they want, but that doesn’t mean they can’t be satisfied with the outcome. The question becomes: “What can you do within the constrained budget?” Creative solutions in a crisis are where professionals can stand out. A great technique here is to let key stakeholders vote on functionality or attributes of the product to help understand their importance. If you can estimate the effort and cost required to complete each item, then your stakeholders can make decisions just like someone trying to maximize their grocery budget.

4. Focus on the critical success factors.

Accurately identifying the critical success factors (CSFs—the things that will actually make or break your project) falls somewhere between art and science. The reason this is challenging is that you have to look beyond what people say is important and see the factors that truly influence success. In other words, you have to really understand the underlying needs that drive the project. By prioritizing the CSFs, you should be able to focus on delivering more value earlier on, which only helps your chances of success.

5. Tap into your informal networks.

When researching my book, Alpha Project Managers: What the Top 2% Know That Everyone Else Does Not, I was struck by how the most effective managers were often able to get things done outside of official channels. They found a way to beg, borrow and barter resources to accomplish their project goals. For example, one project I managed needed a database expert for about two weeks. We did not have the budget for this, but we were able to barter with another department by doing a tricky piece of development for them in exchange for the resource we needed. Everybody won, and it really did not increase our costs at all.

6. Work what you have.

One trap to avoid in your thinking is that more funding will solve your problems. This is what I refer to as “lottery mindset.” It’s no secret that people who win large lottery payouts frequently end up in bankruptcy. In fact, the numbers suggest that the bankruptcy rate for these winners is approximately double the rate for the general population. Bottom line: More funding does not automatically make things better. In fact, it can have the unintended consequence of leading to more waste. Once you set aside the automatic assumption that more money is absolutely necessary, you can start to implement Lean thinking. The idea behind lean project management in general is that you seek to eliminate all waste and focus (ruthlessly) on activities and processes that deliver value. Lean gives you a new set of optics with which to view your project. The point is not to slash spending, although Lean is a wonderful approach to that. The ultimate goal is to deliver maximum value with maximum efficiently. Lean changes the conversation. Another great way to work with what you have is through value engineering. This is where the team looks at a solution that explores all the ways to get the same overall value for less money. This doesn’t mean the solution will look exactly the same after it has been value engineered. It means you’ll explore every angle to see how you can work within the budget constraints.

7. Understand that resources don’t compensate for low motivation.

Using an example from history (or from Zack Snyder if history is not your thing), in the battle of Thermopylae, 7,000 Greeks defended their homeland against a Persian army that massively outnumbered them. Whatever the factual figures might have been, the Greeks were hugely overpowered—but their dedication and motivation won in the end. As the project manager, you have an opportunity to lead and inspire your team, and this ability separates the great PMs from everyone else.

Summary

There are a lot of challenges that come with project management—it’s one of the occupational hazards! When one of these challenges involves having too few dollars to complete your project, take heart. This is not an automatic project death sentence. Keep in mind the unofficial Marine Corps motto: “Improvise, adapt and overcome.” The best managers can do amazing things in the face of adversity, while others will complain and make excuses.

If you liked this article and would like to master some of the most common project management challenges, download our eBook, “How to Solve the Top 9 Project Management Challenges.”