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Six Sigma-fying Your IT Department?
Saqib Ali asks: "These days all the major corporations are looking at Six Sigma methodology to improve their processes. I am planning to take a Six Sigma Green/Brown belt class in March. I work for the IT department, I have a statistics background, and I've studied statistics in university as well. I can understand Six Sigma being used in Production/Manufacturing facilities, but it is hard for me to figure how to apply Six Sigma in IT. Are any other readers using Six Sigma methodology for IT? If so what are some of the things that it can be applied to? As part of the training class, I have to come up with an idea for a Six Sigma analysis project. Though the project doesn't have to be IT related, but I would like it to be, so that I can see its application in real life. Any ideas for the project?"
I've alway been of the opinion project and processes methodologies are the last resort worthless middle management use to justify their existence. Leadership, aptitude and competence being fearsome skills they prefer to outsource.
Should your institution decide on that course - its a good idea to start with the founders of the "process"
One thing that all of the various "quality assurance" regimes miss entirely is the value of being able to make mistakes. Risk-averse managers love this "zero defects" kind of environment, because they like the predictability. However, for the organization in a rapidly changing environment, such predictability is often deadly. Achieving the goals takes too long, and by the time you have perfected a process it's obsolete. Customers have moved beyond what you are doing and demand something else. Your perfect buggy whip is no longer useful in an age of automobiles.
Six Sigma and the like were developed in a manufacturing environment, where the same processes are used for years, and there is time to get it perfect. In the IT industry, two or three years yields a radically different environment. People need the room to take risks in order to deal with such a dynamic environment. The corollary is that in taking risks, sometimes you roll snake eyes and crap out. People make mistakes and if you focus only on the down side, you miss out on the greatly increased upside that comes from taking those risks.
Six Sigma in the IT department sounds like a loser. In IT, you want a management style that is looser and and more free-flowing, able to shift quickly, and not stuck on not making mistakes. (Perhaps the biggest mistake to learn from would be to try to apply Six Sigma to your department!)
--Paul
It's this thing that companies (like Sun Microsystems) bombard their employees with for months at a time, removing them from their work and other productive efforts. Nobody is *totally* sure what it really is because even though everyone spends weeks of their life training for it, nobody ever implements any of it and it is soon forgotten.
It doesn't matter in the long run because major corporations revamp their processes and trends every few years when some yahoo in the company wants to impress everyone and go on a power trip by changing the dynamics of the company (or so they think). And as soon as it has been changed, trained and implemented, someone else comes along and chances it again.
I work for a large software development company that is trying to implement "Six Sigma" and it is a joke. Management has all the best intentions, but applying the Six Sigma model to a process as complex and as poorly understood as software development is a waste of time. The reality is, when a person in our organizations picks a "green belt" or "black belt" project, they already know what needs to be done. Nothing new is learned through the Six Sigma process and it adds a non-trivial amount of work onto the organization. I keep hoping that it will fizzle and die out soon, but this program is lasting longer than most. Good luck with the IT related project, I would be very interested to read a followup post if Six Sigma tells you anything you didn't already know.
-Derek
I agree with your response, but I'd like to state it somewhat differently.
It's all a question of repeatability.
The idea of six sigma is a statistical thing, where you have a huge number of instances of the same thing, and they are almost all identical: almost completely repeatable. The fewer the exceptions, the more sigmas.
I feel this is quite inappropriate in something like IT app development, because of the one-off nature of most IT apps. It may be a good idea for other aspects of IT that need to be repeated a huge number of times without any glitches, such as phone connections, server backups, etc., and maybe that's all that 6-sigma is trying to address here. But IT app dev is custom craftsmanship. You have a few things that are approximately repeated, such as putting up yet another web form, but most apps are not clones of anything. If they were, it would be "installation", not app dev. Most apps don't even share much in the way of success metrics, and there are far too few of them to talk about 6-sigma.
I believe in statistical process control for repeatable processes, but for custom crafted items like apps, I think other software methodologies make a lot more sense.
"Those who have never entered upon scientific pursuits know not a tithe of the poetry by which they are surrounded."
What about an IT process is meaningfully quantifiable?
What about an IT process occurs in statistically significant numbers of comparably quantifiable instances?
What do you have a million of to see where you stand relative to 3.04 defects? Transaction processing response times. What else? Not much that I can think of.
As many of the people have already commented, your responses are going to break down into one of two types:
The question is, what exactly are you hoping to make use of 6S for? Six Sigma is a methodology for analyzing business processes - customer interactions, process flow, things like that. It's not a process for developing programs or websites or business tasks.
The majority of the audience here on /. probably does not (judging from comments already posted) does not know the difference between "business processes" and "business tasks". Tasks should be done in the manner which is most effective. However, the framework around those tasks is something that can be analyzed and improved...
If you are an end-of-the-line technician/programmer/coder/etc/etc/etc, then Six Sigma will not necessarily be of help for you. Six Sigma will not help your company with the people that do the business. However, if your position gives you access to be a project manager, or department leader, or something sith some kind of management level overview, where you can influence the way various groups work with each other, then you will find the methodologies helpful.
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