Flow Problem Hinders CPI Program

It was the height of General Electric’s (GE) Six Sigma program. Jack Welch was preaching the Six Sigma Gospel to anyone and everyone. And I was lucky enough to land a training job with GE-Healthcare.

Immediately I signed up for the Green Belt program. I attended any and every additional Six Sigma workshop offered. My boss was wonderfully supportive and let me run with what I was learning. We got to do some amazing things…from revising our processes for collecting Voice of the Customer to incorporating Design For Six Sigma principles into our training development.

The work got me interested in becoming a Black Belt.?But I found out there was a catch.

Back then, GE would not allow you to stay in your job and earn a Black Belt. Instead, you had to leave your role and join the Six Sigma Group to get a Black Belt.

The thinking was that you would become a full-time Six Sigma asset, able to work on anything, anywhere in the company. Then, after 12 months of this, you would go back to your job with a treasure trove of Six Sigma knowledge and experience. It would be a win-win situation.

Except it wasn’t.

In a bit of process improvement irony, the company did not look at the big picture and realize there was a flow problem. You see, the company valued Six Sigma experience so much, that it required managers to have a Black Belt to be promoted. So the demand to become a Black Belt was quite high.

But GE ran a tight ship; it could not leave jobs open for a year, awaiting the return of workers from their Black Belt tour.?Once people left, they were replaced, or their duties were absorbed by others.

The results? Folks flooded into the Six Sigma Group, but as their 12 months come up…there was no job to go back to. The 12-month tours turned into 18 months…22 months…24 months…as Black Belts had to find new jobs.

The magnitude of this problem hit me one day as I was walking into the Education Center.?There was a large banner in the foyer. It proclaimed congratulations to a Six Sigma team on the successful rollout of Windows XP (yes, it was that long ago). The team consisted of two Master Black Belts and 10 Black Belts.

We at the Ed Center collectively rolled our eyes. As we dealt with technical training, we all knew the Windows upgrade was a foregone conclusion. All our diagnostic and imaging systems required XP. There was no other choice than to move to XP.

The team of 12 highly trained, and highly paid, Six Sigma experts spent an inordinate amount of time doing…well...we weren’t sure what they did. But they had an 8-foot banner congratulating them for it.

We felt like we were living in a Dilbert Cartoon.

GE, unfortunately, has become a paradoxical story when talking about quality. On one hand, Jack Welch almost single-handedly made Six Sigma an international phenomenon. And I saw (and did) some amazing work that reduced costs and increase efficiencies. But given GE’s recent track record, it also showcases that Process Improvement programs are just one small cog in an organization; they cannot save an organization by themselves.

Have you ever lived in a Dilbert cartoon and seen something similar? Please share in the comments…