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?"

Comments

For the unintiated

[bolix]

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"

Are you trying to tighten a nut with a hammer?

[plsuh]

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

Re:Are you trying to tighten a nut with a hammer?

[nbvb]

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.

Right on.

I work in an environment where "zero impact" is the big buzzword. The end goal is to have our change control list at the end of the year list "Impacting changes: 0". Our "emergency" changes aren't allowed to be above 15% of our totals.

So you know what that does? That makes everyone do the tasks that _should_ be change controlled cowboy-style. Nobody wants to submit the forms to replace a failed disk drive, because you're going to get beaten up for it. So everyone just DOES IT and hope for the best. Application teams roll out new code and bugfixes all the time without change controls -- they don't want to sit on the phone with the VP's yelling at them for being over their emergency change numbers .......

That sort of management style "zero defect" does nothing but drive the business processes underground.

It's sickening.

Repeatability

[GCP]

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.

Depends on your target

[TBone]

As many of the people have already commented, your responses are going to break down into one of two types:

• Tech people: WTF, I don't do business process crap
  
• Managment people: Six Sigma is a useful tool
  

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...

• You don't apply Six Sigma to your coders, you apply it to the process by which the business comes up with requirements and specifications, which are then handed off to Project managers, who work with the developers and endusers to come up with the product.
  
• You don't apply Six Sigma to the people in your call center, you apply it to the process by which they answer calls, then collect and present the data the customer needs, then handles the call themselves, or hands off the call to an area which has more expertice
  
• You don't apply Six Sigma to website development, you apply it to the process of having testers or endusers use the site to perform tasks that the site is designed to handle, then give feedback to the developers, who fix the site.
  

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.