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Trained With An Expectation of Project Work

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In November, we added 26 newly trained green belts to the program. All students entered the training with the expectation that they would follow through and complete two green belt projects to complete green belt certification. In theory, that should mean that 52 green belt projects will flow out of this one green belt class. In reality, only about 40 percent of the students (10 of the 26, in this case) historically follow through to complete projects. Some of the reason for the project deficit are (1) the rotational nature of our workforce (i.e., green belts move on to new assignments before completing projects), (2) our "bottom up" deployment strategy that relies on green belts to generate project areas, and (3) our strategy of conducting projects with collateral duty green belts (i.e., project work is voluntary extra duty).

MAES Workshop at the 40th Annual Symposium

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I recently presented an overview of Lean Six Sigma to a group of engineering professionals and students at the 40th Annual MAES Symposium in San Diego. Our Creative shop put together a nice posterboard to put on the eisel outside the event. The idea was to promote attendance at the event by the symposium attendees.

When to Take Credit for Improvements?

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From August of 2012 through August of 2014, we initiated 50 projects in our relatively modest Continuous Process Improvement (CPI) program. Some of those projects resulted in significant improvements and big financial savings. Some resulted in marginal improvements. And a few had no impact, were never completed, or were cancelled. However, every single one of the 50 projects had collateral benefits and training value to the organization. By collateral benefits, I mean three types of improvements that are not typically attributed to a CPI program. 1. The first type of improvements are undocumented changes that result from focus on a problem. Whenever I initiate a project and start asking questions about data availability, the process changes for the better. It happens every time. Scrutiny of a process leads to undocumented process improvements. 2. The second type of improvements are documented changes that are not called CPI. These improvements would not have happened if the C