Agile Process Innovation: Hacking Lean Six Sigma to Maximize Results

Book excerpt: This book is about how to hack Lean Six Sigma to get better understanding, retention and results in hours or days, not months or years.Faced with continuous, accelerating, disruptive change, businesses have had to find ways to respond. Surprisingly, they found a faster, better, cheaper path in Information Technologies (IT) of all places. Yet Lean Six Sigma is anything but agile. Spending months training Black and Green Belts and then waiting months or years for results is no longer acceptable. This might have been possible in the last century, but it won't work for 21st Century quality. We need to adapt Agile to Lean Six Sigma.Unfortunately, the old trial-and-error, gut-feel approaches to improving performance are too slow and error-prone to deliver anything close to perfection. The only hope any business has is to adopt the methods and tools of Lean Six Sigma to simplify, streamline and optimize performance.Lean Six Sigma can be fast, affordable and flawless, maximizing results while minimizing costs. Agile Process Innovation will focus on the Magnificent Seven "Money Belt" Tools necessary to achieve stunning, breakthrough results. Training doesn't have to take weeks or months; it can be done in a matter of hours. Projects don't have to take months or years to complete; Jay has done million-dollar projects in five days or less. The actual analysis can be done in a matter of hours, but sometimes implementation can take longer.Companies don't need more Green Belts or Black Belts. They need more Money Belts-people who can quickly find ways to save time and money to boost productivity and profitability. They can learn how to eliminate the Three Silent Killers of productivity and profitability: Delay, Defects and Deviation.Lean Six Sigma needs to pivot to a new way of achieving desired results. Integrating Agile into Lean Six Sigma is an easy way to do it. What is Agile? A method that "is characterized by the division of tasks into short phrases of work and frequent reassessment and adaptation of plans." Agile focuses on speed and adaptability, not rigid adherence to archaic methods.Is it possible to accelerate the adoption and use of Lean Six Sigma by hacking how it's implemented? Absolutely.