Slashdot Mirror

← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)

Six Sigma-fying Your IT Department?

Posted by Cliff on from the applying-new-work-methodologies dept.

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?"

10 of 96 comments (clear)

  1. Yet another buzzword.... by jsimon12 · · Score: 3, Interesting

    Hmmm, lets see, I have been through:

    Mil-Spec (which sort of actually has a point but is a bit over done, well a bit is an understantment and you are at the whime of the government auditors, better keep them happy.

    QA (Quality Assurance, uhh WTF? can we say paperwork)

    ISO 9001 and ISO 9002 (really is there a difference) yes I know the textbook answer, but it seems simply to amount to more paperwork, less productivity, surprise inspections, it is like Mil-Spec without the fat government contracts, sort of like eating healthy and still having a heart attack).

    Now the latest, Six Sigma, some tool writes a book on applying standard deviation to business practice and know everyone is on the boat. Give me a break, yet another engineers paperwork hell. Anyone who says it works probably has an MBA.

    1. Re:Yet another buzzword.... by Mark+Pitman · · Score: 2, Interesting

      I'll bet he is talking about TQM: Total Quality Management.

    2. Re:Yet another buzzword.... by AtariDatacenter · · Score: 2, Interesting

      Crap. I'm going through ISO 900x right now. They said that they wanted processes that are totally repeatable through IT. To improve the way we do things... best practices throughout the sites, etc, etc. Then it came down to actually implementing it.

      Now the mission has changed. It is now, "We want the ISO certificate to show our customers to impress them." And now the process is all about documenting what we do on a 10,000 foot level (which really provides no value at all).

      And now the internal pre-testing has been pushed back again. (The entire timeline keeps getting pushed back and back and back.) I figure if we wait long enough, a reorg will probably take care of this whole thing, and we won't have to worry about it.

      PS: I think ISO9001 in IT is just part of a big ploy to document everything that you do so they they can turn it over to trained monkeys in third world countries to attempt to operate half as well, for a quarter of the price.

      I understand what a six sigma deviation is (at least, I think I do), but I don't know the actual process you're going through. I'll assume it is an ISO9001 with a heavy emphasis on refining and best practices? Please don't tip off my management to this. Please?

    3. Re:Yet another buzzword.... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Interesting

      you left out TQM. Then there's GMP. Every industry has it's "thing du jour." For IT, there was client-server, multimedia, that Internet dealy, web services, java, thin clients, etc. Each one tends to die off in a few years, but portions of it linger on forever.

  2. Just another "five nines" by tunah · · Score: 3, Interesting
    This is essentially the same as the "five nines" reliability that was touted for uptimes. Failures require deviations from the mean of six standard deviations, corresponding to 99.9996% success rate.

    It's just another metric. Don't get too excited.

    --
    Free Java games for your phone: Tontie, Sokoban
  3. Perfect for response times by Breakerofthings · · Score: 3, Interesting

    Soon, I will be implementing an automated monitoring system for our web servers, etc. I plan on using a 6 Sigma approach to monitor reponse times. After all, they do vary with load, and 6 Sigma is more adaptive than establishing a hard limit. Plus, it is trivial to implement (our web servers log to a Postgres server, so 90% of the work can be done with a well-written select ... 6 Sigma is given a bad name by MBA types; it really is an extremely useful technique ... don't let these naysayers discourage you! (but be sure you don't succumb to the 'every problem is a nail' dementia)

  4. Six Sigma: It's what you say it is. by daviddennis · · Score: 3, Interesting

    The owner of my company read the book 'The Six Sigma Way' and got very excited about it. He asked me to read it, and he asked the manufacturing guy to read it. Whenever we would have a problem, he would say stuff like "That's not Six Sigma" in email.

    I read about half of the book. It seemed to be a bunch of billions of generalities, complete with meaningless charts and graphs, and I am not actually sure what implementing it would do in a concrete sense.

    The basic idea of doing a ground-up analysis of your business to determine what needs to be done to make things more reliable is, in my opinion, something every business should do periodically. However, I don't think giving it a trendy name and insisting on hiring expensive consultants is going to help quality as much as just, well, periodically scrutinizing your own processes and looking for ways to improve quality.

    One of the key things the book said is that if you don't have buy-in from management and employees, Six Sigma is useless. So if nobody in your company wants to drink the Kool-Aid, it's pretty wortheless. But if people are enthusiastic about improving the way their company works, I'm not sure if the Six Sigma framework says that much that common sense doesn't.

    Hope this helps; I welcome dissent from the better informed.

    D

  5. Re:Are you trying to tighten a nut with a hammer? by farnsworth · · Score: 2, Interesting
    In the IT industry, two or three years yields a radically different environment.

    This is a generalization about the IT field that holds true sometimes (most times?), but not always. In the health-care provider world, for example, they expect data feeds on ...get this... tape reels.

    IT is just a tool, it's not the application of that tool. ATM machines, NASDAQ, the FAA, and hospital systems all use ancient IT platforms. But I for one am really glad that they took the time to get it right, and that they almost never fail.

    Would you want your bank's ATM system to be rolling out .net web services today?

    --

    There aint no pancake so thin it doesn't have two sides.

  6. Break it down. by pete-classic · · Score: 3, Interesting

    Okay, your department does stuff, right? Break that stuff up into categories. Look at where things can (and do) go wrong. Try to figure out why. Figure out a way to measure success vs. failure. Then apply those measurements.

    Some concrete examples.

    What percentage of updates to "internet facing" services are applied within a set time frame? Maybe you decide they need to be applied within four business hours, or maybe 12 hours. When a patch is released it is a "moment of truth."

    What percentage of help desk calls are resolved (i.e. the employee is back to work) within x minutes (30? 60?). Why aren't they all?

    Six Sigma is full of buzzwords, but IMO it has some great potential. If I was a a guy "in the trenches" (sadly, I'm out of the technical field right now) I'd be taking advantage of a Six Sigma push to help my boss (and his boss) feel my "chronic pain." I.e. "The reason we can't resolve 99.992% of help desk calls in 60 min is that we don't have the parts we are supposed to have." or whatever.

    PS: Feel free to show this to your boss. Make sure he knows my email address is peter at fpcc net ;-) I'm available for consulting, or save a bundle and hire me outright!

    -Peter

  7. We've done six sigma by cassidyc · · Score: 2, Interesting

    As part of a companywide drive (Brought to you by the letters E and G though not necessarily in that order) where we were told that not completing a six sigma project would "affect" our performance review.

    Anyways, come the end of March last year, six sigma deadline, stop coding and software test and release date. We all stopped production to complete our six sigma projects. And for the most part we swindled it something awful. We picked changes and additions to the software that we performed ages ago. Our premise being that before the change our software was 0% compliant (worse than six sigma) and now with this functionality we were 100% compliant (better than six sigma). So we all did that, past a test on basic statistics, and we all got our little certificates and we all got a pat on the back.

    And with the "millions" saved through our six sigma projects we still couldn`t afford any training last year.

    It was the rollout and attitude from management and the "six sigma blackbelts" that was the worst part. Six sigma was clearly aimed at production and manufacturing and there was no leeway for software engineering where it is a very loose fit at best.

    I hear rumours that "design for six sigma" is better suited to the software industry, but that would require more training...

    So as you can see, not too impressed with six sigma.