Throughout your project, developing a storyboard summary of the key decisions and outputs helps you review progress and share what you’ve learnt. A storyboard builds up as you work your way through your project by capturing the key outputs and findings from the DMAIC phases. A storyboard would include, for example, your improvement charter and process map (see Chapter 5). The storyboard also helps your communication activities. Developing and reviewing a communication plan is an essential activity. You really need to keep your team and the people affected by your project informed about the progress you’re making in solving the problem you’re tackling. Communication begins on day one of your project.

      After you’ve defined the problem, at least based on your current understanding, you need to clarify how, and how well, the work gets done. To understand the current situation of your process, knowing what it looks like and how it’s performing is important. You need to know what’s meant to happen, and why. Understanding how your process links to your customer and his CTQs is also helpful. What does the bigger picture of the process look like?

      Knowing the current performance of your process is essential – this knowledge becomes your baseline – but knowing what’s happened in the past is also useful. Measure what’s important to the customer, and remember also to measure what the customer sees. Gathering this information can help focus your improvement efforts and prevent you going off in the wrong direction. Using control charts (see Chapter 7) can help you make better sense of the data, as they provide a visual picture that demonstrates performance and shows you the variation within the process. Importantly, control charts help you know when to take action and when not to by enabling you to identify the key signals so often hidden when data is presented as a page of numbers.

      Lean Six Sigma projects can take longer than you might like because the right data isn’t in place in the day-to-day operation. So often organisations have data coming out of their ears – but not the right data. You need to develop the right measures and start collecting the data you do need – which takes time.

      

Use the CTQs as the basis for getting the right process measures in place. Understanding how well you meet the CTQs is an essential piece of management information. Chapter 8 provides more detail on getting the right measures.

      In the Measure phase, you discovered what’s really happening in your process. Now you need to identify why it’s happening, and determine the root cause. You need to manage by fact, though, so you must verify and validate your ideas about possible suspects. Jumping to conclusions is all too easy.

      Carrying out the Analyse phase properly helps you in determining the solution when you get to the Improve phase. Clearly, the extent of analysis required varies depending on the scope and nature of the problem you’re tackling, and, indeed, what your Measure activities have identified. Essentially, though, you’re analysing the process and the data.

      

Checking the possible causes of your problem using concrete data to verify your ideas is crucial. In checking the vital few, you may find the ‘usual suspects’ aren’t guilty at all! Identifying and removing the root causes of a problem prevents it happening again.

      Most people want to start at this point. Now you’ve identified the root cause of the problem, you can begin to generate improvement ideas to help solve it. Improve, however, involves three distinct phases: