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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?"
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.
It's just another metric. Don't get too excited.
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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)
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
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.
;-) I'm available for consulting, or save a bundle and hire me outright!
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
-Peter