Editorial

(wileyonlinelibrary.com) DOI: 10.1002/qre.2009 Published online in Wiley Online Library

Why Do Lean Six Sigma Projects Sometimes

Fail?

ean six sigma has been a tremendously successful business and quality improvement initiative. Literally, thousands of

L organizations, large and small, spanning a wide range of businesses from manufacturing to services, public sector, and
government organizations, including health care, financial services, and even educational institutions have successfully
deployed lean six sigma and reaped the benefits of more efficient operations, reduced costs, higher quality, and more satisfied
customers and employees. Yet not everything works perfectly every time. Some lean six sigma implementations are not very
successful, and some lean six sigma projects do not turn out achieving the expected results. Based on my experience, I believe that
there are several very specific reasons for this.
First, what makes an overall lean six sigma implementation successful? Most authorities believe that the following are essential:
1 Management involvement and commitment
2 Use of your best people to drive the process
3 A formal project selection and review process
4 Sufficient dedicated resources to ensure success
5 Financial integration to measure success in terms management understands
Without these components in place, success will be very difficult to achieve, and project failures will occur much too often.
Now to some specific reasons for specific project failures.
1 Lack of management support for the project. This ties directly to point 1 earlier. It is not just top management that must be
involved and committed, but leadership at all levels. The project champion should be in a key leadership role and he or she
should stay involved through the duration of the project. A formal project selection process helps with this too.
2 Choosing an inappropriate project. At the start of a lean six sigma deployment, it is tempting to pick a project with lots of ‘low
hanging fruit’ so that it is easy to drive it to completion. But this can lead to situations where the results achieved are not
sufficiently interesting or impactful enough to really ‘hook’ management on the potentials of the entire process. A lot of
management has a pretty short attention span.
3 Poor choice of team members. There are a couple of aspects to this. First, the team may be too large. Teams of 15 or more
people are likely to be ineffective because there are too many ‘cooks in the kitchen’. Decisions are harder to make, meetings
are harder to schedule, and it is easy for team members to be distracted by other attentions. Teams of five to eight people
are usually more effective that larger ones. Another aspect of this is the skill set of the team members. Every team member
should be trained in some aspects of lean six sigma. They must have the technical skills to execute the project. It is usually
not a good idea if most or all of the team has not been exposed to the basic tools and how DMAIC works going into the project.
Training the team ‘on the fly’ is not successful very often.
4 Poor project scope or ‘scope creep’. This is a major cause of disappointment. Great care should be taken in developing the
project charter and all members of the team, including the champion and process owner should be involved. Changes to the
scope should be very difficult to make.
5 Inadequate training in lean six sigma tools and how to apply them. Frankly, there is a lot of really bad (even incompetent)
training going on out there. I see evidence of it pretty often. But even if it is technically good, training in lean six sigma
techniques should always have a project component. For example, if a group is being trained in design of experiments, they
should have to complete a project in which they have to plan, design, conduct, and analyze the results from a real experiment.
This could be something simple, and even outside the scope of their job. But without this component of their training, many
people will not completely grasp the techniques they have been trained in and then be unable to successfully use the
methodology in a real work-oriented project. Learning by doing really works, especially for adult learners.
I am sure there are other sources of failure. I did not intend this list to be comprehensive. But these are some of the ones that I see
all too frequently.

DOUGLAS C. MONTGOMERY
Editor-in-Chief QREI
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Copyright © 2016 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. Qual. Reliab. Engng. Int. 2016, 32 1279