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Six Sigma delivers but its success hinges largely on the seriousness of the organization. Although, it is not as simple and as this, Six Sigma is gradually following a path that its processors took during their heydays. While it is too early to predict the future of Six Sigma, it gradually is causing fewer eyebrows to raise in boardrooms across the world anymore. We will take an insider look at the causes for this and what keys open the door to Six Sigma success, as both are inseparable from each other.

An Insight Into Six Sigma Implementation

Six Sigma requires the organization restructured correctly from top to bottom. From Champions to Green Belts, people are hired or insiders are trained for specific duties. Personnel at each level of the organization have their assigned and well-defined jobs with varying degrees of authorities and powers so that, apart from executing their routine job duties, they are able to effectively solve problems. This is a sticky issue where powers overlap within executive departments. Unfortunately, at times this causes relationships to sour, however unintentionally. The actions of champions, who are supposed to intervene, can be mistaken for intrusion in cross-departmental matters such as this.

It is here that the success of Six Sigma requires total commitment from upper management of organizations. If the tense atmosphere is not remedied, Master Black Belts or Black Belts can get frustrated and fail to concentrate. Further deterioration, whether because of procrastination on the part of Champions or upper management, brings professionals into the fear zone. Consequently, the Six Sigma implementation suffers. The delay in its implementation adds to the already hefty financial bills with results yet to be realized.

Obviously, this pushes upper management into a corner with few options. With the commitment of upper management being challenged, the vision that the organization had fails to gel with the larger scheme of things.

Key To Successful Implementation Of Six Sigma

More or less, it is slow implementation that throws the Six Sigma vision into question. If the first among these is the miscalculation about the different aspects which include the saving potential and implementation timeframe, the intensity with which the implementation is being made comes in a close second.

The Anomaly Of Limited Savings: It is agreed that Six Sigma implementation is a huge expense to organizations, but if companies adopt stringent accounting practices to calculate savings, with tightening of expenditure as may become appropriate, results can be expected to turn around. The expenditures can be calculated just like capital expenditures, and proper adjustments to future budgets must be made. Failing this, savings in terms of money in such cases cannot be expected to be substantial.

The Intensity Factor: If for any reason, there are less stringent implementation methodologies and the process is pushed through without proper training of professionals, you can expect the results to be mediocre. Compromises give way to a slippery slope and ultimately the failure of Six Sigma.

Tony Jacowski is a certified Master Black Belt for Aveta Solutions - Six Sigma Online ( http://www.sixsigmaonline.org ). Six Sigma Online offers online six sigma training and certification classes for lean six sigma, black belts, green belts, and yellow belts.

What are our positions in time management? Time management is the process of planning to reach a goal, and finding a solution that helps us to reach that goal. This article should be relatively short, since the words above should be more than obvious. YOU are the main position in time management. However, we must consider all positions in time management to construct a plan that works best for you. Every one of us has a deadline to meet a specific task (s).

Your position then is to get those tasks finished, bring in you one-step closer to your goal. If you are wasting time sifting through papers, or daydreaming, you are wasting energy, money and time that could be spent in your time management plan to achieve your goal. After carefully study clutter, I estimated it takes around 10-15 minutes to clean up the desk, while it takes about 30 minutes to find papers that are important to achieving goals.

Sloppiness is a sign of irresponsibility, and it only wastes time, promotes negative thinking, and costs money. If you work at a desk, and most of your tasks are handled on a computer, then it takes a few minutes to backup your data and store it in a safe place. It takes years to recover what you have not backed up. In addition, if you are labeling your files accurately it takes less time to find a file in demand, and takes longer to find the file that was incorrectly labeled.

Are you spending quality time with your family, or is your time idling? One hour of your time each day can save you money and time. If you are not spending quality time with your family, factor in the expense of divorce, heartaches, time, and other elements when those days comes and deduct the loss in your time management scheme. In some cases, you can calculate the expenses of court costs when your children decide dad or mom is not enough, and they need attention lacking so they get major attention after committing a crime. Let reality sink in when you are diverting a plan to manage your time, reaching your goal. There are many positions in managing time, but for the most part your effort is the position that requires consistency.

School is important and a vital requirement to managing time, since it is a resource to reaching goals. When you are at school your position in this time management scheme is to DO your homework on time and study accordingly. If you are daydreaming in class, remember it is a dream toward a past that was never achieved to reach the dream. If you are procrastinating, your position is lost. Procrastination is the process of intentionally and habitually putting off responsibilities, and when we put off responsibilities our position in achieving those goals is sitting in a seat in someone else’s pocket. In addition if you are not studying to meet grades that are required in achievement, then you are saying to yourself and everyone around you that, “My position in life is to do what I can, and ignore what I want to do.”

The positions in planning to achieve a goal are requiring that you act out your plans putting strong emphasis on laboring to reach your goal. It requires the ability to manage your time while staying organized. If you are waiting for your goals to fall in your lap, remember your ship rolled in when you was out in the middle of the ocean. It takes work, effort, responsibility, motivation, and careful planning to save time and make money to reach a goal. If you do not have all these qualities then your position in life are to wait for someone else to reach your goal while you sit back wondering what happened. Your position if well thought out in your time management scheme can bring forth short-term rewards, such as motivation to achieve, great self-esteem, self-confidence, and so on. Holding your position in your time management scheme may even bring your goal closer than expected if you apply the actions that are needed in managing time.

For more great free resources on how to manage your time visit Gabae Time Management.

Also for more informative articles on time management visit Gabae Time Management Articles.

As both an active project manager and a project management
trainer, people often ask me what are the fundamental aspects to
successful project management. Whilst there have been many great
books written on the subject, I always summarise what I believe
to be the best practices at the heart of good project
management.

Define the scope and objectives

For any project to be successful you need to understand what the
project is supposed to achieve. Suppose your boss asks you to
organise a campaign to get the employees to donate blood. Is the
aim of this to get as much blood donated to the local blood
bank? Or, is it to raise the profile of the company in the local
community? Deciding what the real objective is will help you to
determine how you go about planning and managing the project.

The project manager also needs to define the scope of the
project. Is the organisation of transport to take staff to the
blood bank within the scope of the project? Or, should staff
make their own way there? Deciding which activities are within
the scope or out of scope of the project has a big impact on the
amount of work which needs to be performed during the project.

An understanding of who are the stakeholders is also crucial if
you are going to enlist their support and understand what each
person expects to be delivered from the project. Once you’ve
defined the scope and objectives, you will need to get the
stakeholders to review them and agree to them as well as
agreeing who should be on the list of stakeholders.

Define the deliverables

To achieve the desired outcome from the project, you must define
what things (or products) are to be delivered by the end of the
project. If your project is an advertising campaign for a new
chocolate bar, then one of the deliverables might be the artwork
for a newspaper advert. So, you need to decide what tangible
things are to be delivered and document in enough detail what
these things are. At the end of the day, someone will end up
doing the work to produce the deliverable, so it needs to be
clearly and unambiguously described.

Once you have defined the deliverables, you will need to have
the key stakeholders review the work and get them to agree that
this accurately and unambiguously reflects what they expect to
be delivered from the project. Once they have agreed, you can
begin to plan the project. Not defining the deliverables in
enough detail or clarity is often a reason why projects go
wrong.

Project planning

This is the time when you define how you will achieve the
desired outcome of the project embodied within the objectives
and definition of deliverables. Planning requires that the
project manager decides which people, resources and budget are
required to complete the project. You will need to decide if you
will break up your project into manageable phases, decide which
products will be delivered in each phase, and decide the
composition of your project team. Since you have already defined
the deliverables, you must decide what activities are required
to produce each deliverable.

You can use techniques such as Work Breakdown Structures (WBS)
to help you to achieve this. You will need to estimate the time
and effort required to complete each ctivity, dependencies
between related activities and decide on a realistic schedule to
complete the activities. It’s always a good idea to involve the
project team in estimating how long the activities will take
since they will be the ones actually doing the work. Capture all
of this into the project plan document. You also need to get the
key stakeholders to review and agree to this plan.

When developing the project plan, a project manager is often
under pressure to produce a plan which meets the (unrealistic)
expectations of some of the stakeholders. It is important here
that the project manager comes up with a realistic schedule -
one which he/she thinks is realistic to achieve. You will be
doing nobody a favour if you succumb to pressure and agree to
deliver the project in a totally unrealistic schedule.

Communication

Even the best made project plans are useless unless they have
been communicated effectively to the project team. Everyone on
the team needs to know exactly what is expected of them, what
their responsibilities are, and what they are accountable for. I
once worked on a project where the project manager sat in his
office surrounded by big colour print outs of his latest plans.
The problem was, nobody on his team knew what the tasks and
milestones were because he hadn’t shared the plan with them.
Needless to say the project hit all kinds of problems with
people going off and doing the activities which they deemed
important rather than doing the activities assigned by the
project manager.

Tracking and reporting project progress

Once your project is underway and you have an agreed plan, you
will need to constantly monitor the actual progress of the
project against the planned progress. To do this, you will need
to get reports of progress from the project team members who are
actually doing the work. You will need to record any variations
between the actual and planned cost, schedule and scope. You
will need to report any variations to your manager and key
stakeholders and take corrective actions if the variations get
too large.

There are lots of ways in which you can adjust the plan in order
to get the project back on track (rearrange the order of tasks,
assign tasks in parallel if the variation is small, or add more
staff to the project or reduce the scope if the variation is
very large).

All projects require the project manager to constantly juggle
three things: cost, scope and schedule. If the project manager
increases one of these, then one of the other elements will
inevitably need to be changed as well. So, for a project which
is running behind schedule to recover so it can be delivered to
it’s original planned schedule, the budget might be increased by
employing more staff (although this invariably never achieves
the desired result of reducing the time left to complete the
project), or the scope will need to be reduced. It is the
juggling of these three elements - known as the project triangle
- that typically causes a project manager to tear their hair out
in frustration!

Change management

All projects change in some way. Often, a key stakeholder in the
middle of a project will change their mind about what the
project needs to deliver. On projects of longer duration, the
business environment has often changed since the start of the
project, so assumptions made at the beginning of the project may
no longer be valid. This often results in the scope or
deliverables of the project needing to be changed. If a project
manager simply accepted all of these changes into the project,
the project would inevitably be delivered late (and perhaps
would never ever be completed) and would inevitably go over
budget.

By managing changes, the project manager can make decisions
about whether or not to incorporate the changes immediately or
in the future, or to reject them. This increases the chances of
project success because the project manager controls how the
changes are incorporated, can allocate resources accordingly and
can plan when and how the changes are made. Not managing changes
effectively is often cited as a major reason why projects fail.

Risk management

Risks are any events which can adversely affect the successful
outcome of the project. I’ve worked on projects where some of
the risks have included: staff lacking the technical skills to
perform the work properly, hardware not being delivered on time,
the control room being at risk of flooding in a major
thunderstorm and many others. Risks will vary from project to
project but it is important to identify the main risks to a
project as soon as possible and to plan the actions necessary to
avoid the risk, or, if the risk cannot be avoided, to at least
mitigate the risk in order to lessen its impact if it does
occur. This is what is known as risk management.

Do you manage all risks? No, because there could be too many to
manage, and not all risks have the same impact. So a simple way
is to identify as many risks as you can, work out how likely
each risk is to occur on a scale of 1 to 3 (3 being the worst),
estimate its impact on the project on a scale of 1 to 3 (3 being
the worst), then multiply the two numbers together. The result
is the risk weighting. A high risk weighting is the most severe
risk. Just manage the top ten risks i.e. the ones with the
highest risk weighting. Constantly review the risks and
constantly be on the lookout for new risks since they have a
habit of jumping up at unforeseen moments.

Not managing risks effectively is also often cited as a major
reason why projects fail.

Summary

So, in a nutshell, these best practices are the main things that
I would expect all project managers to do. They are applicable
on all projects big or small. Project management is not rocket
science. Applying best practices on your project cannot
guarantee that your project comes in under budget, on time and
exceeds all the expectations of the stakeholders, but applying
them will certainly give you a much better chance of delivering
your project successfully than if you don’t apply them on your
project.

PERMISSION TO REPUBLISH: This article may be republished in newsletters and on web sites provided attribution is provided to the author, and it appears with the included copyright, resource box and live web site link. Email notice of intent to publish is appreciated but not required: mail to: brent@actionleadership.com

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Hiding Your Leadership: The Jersey Joe Walcott Way of Leading
by Brent Filson

Former heavyweight champ Jersey Joe Walcott was training for a fight against a boxer who had a ferocious left hook. Asked if he was worried, Jersey Joe replied, “Nope. I’ll take his left hook and put it in his pocket.”

Walcott’s low key, wry, confident attitude matched his boxing style. He hardly looked as if he was fighting at all. It was more like Aikido than boxing, the martial art that controls an attacker by redirecting their energy instead of blocking it.

Jersey Joe didn’t attack. He lured his opponent to him. He shuffled “the Walcott Shuffle.” He created ingenious punching angles. He feinted not only with his hands but with his shoulders. He threw a sneaky right hand counter and a counter-punch left.

In other words, Jersey Joe, to better employ his boxing abilities, hid those abilities. Jersey Joe Walcott provides a lesson in leadership.

To be a better leader, do what most leaders neglect to do, are even ignorant of: hide your leadership.

Why would you want to hide your leadership? After all, isn’t a leader supposed to stand out? When you’re a leader, aren’t you supposed to be the center of attention, telling people to do things?

Yes, that way of being a leader is appropriate if you are viewing leadership in its conventional terms and getting average results.

But if you want to be a leader who gets consistently great results, remember Jersey Joe, if only for this simple, powerful dictum most leaders miss. People are more effective not when they are “ordered to …” but when they “want to …” Having people “want to” through your leadership is the drive shaft of all great results.

Chinese philosopher, Lao Tzu, wrote 2500 years ago: “As for the best leaders, the people do not notice their existence. The next best, the people honor and praise. The next, the people fear; and the next, the people hate … When the best leader’s work is done the people say, ‘We did it ourselves!’” In other words, the best leadership is the hidden leadership.

Leadership is about getting results, however one may define those results. If you can’t get results, you won’t be a leader for long. But, clearly, you can’t get results by yourself. You need others to help you do it. The “best” leader is the leader who gets the “best” results through the good offices of other people.

The best results are tied to a concept I’ve been teaching leaders for almost a quarter of a century: When they seek to get results, they should seek to get more results; they should seek to get faster results; and they should seek to get “more, faster” on a continual basis.

(For a discussion of what results really are I refer you to my web site and the articles section.)

If hiding your leadership doesn’t help you get more results, faster results continually then it should be taken no more seriously than the notion that the moon is made of green cheese.

How does hiding your leadership achieve these results? The HOW is in “want to.” But remember this: the people’s motivation is not the choice of the leaders. It’s the choice of the people. Leaders communicate, the people themselves motivate. They make the choice to motivate themselves. When your leadership is exhibited not on stage but behind the scenes guiding them to be motivated to make that choice, you’re creating the super-charged environment conducive to the establishment of more results faster, continually.

What is the best way to hide your leadership? Hide your leadership by realizing the Leader’s Imperative. “I will lead people in such a way that we not only accomplish the needed results but that we together help one another grow personally and professionally.”

This has two parts: results accomplishments and self-improvement. You are never more powerful as a leader as when, in getting results, you are helping others be better than they are - even better than they thought they could be. And when you’re realizing the Imperative, you are advancing yourself in the best way — by advancing them.

Make hiding your leadership a way of life. Test every leadership situation against the Leadership Imperative. Build the Imperative into your strategy, tactics, and have it be a driving factor in your interpersonal relationships.

Two points of caution. First, don’t mistake, or mistakenly communicate, the pejorative side of “hide.” The word can have a negative connotation: i.e., that you have something to hide, or that you are running away from somebody or something, or that you are being secretive or sneaky.

Use the word in its positive sense; you are hiding your leadership to better realize the Leadership Imperative.

Second, hiding your leadership can turn into a failing if you don’t hide it in a robust way. Hiding your leadership does not mean living an easy life for yourself - i.e., detaching yourself physically and emotionally from the people and doing your own thing. Instead, hiding your leadership means living a hard life for other people - i.e., working hard, taking risks, and putting yourself out to promote their welfare.

You will never know how really good you are as a leader unless you are leading people to be better than they think they are. You’ll have a better chance of manifesting your best leadership when you lead the way Jersey Joe Walcott fought - and have the people say, “We did it ourselves!”

2006 © The Filson Leadership Group, Inc. All rights reserved.

The author of 23 books, Brent Filson’s recent books are, THE LEADERSHIP TALK: THE GREATEST LEADERSHIP TOOL and 101 WAYS TO GIVE GREAT LEADERSHIP TALKS. He is founder and president of The Filson Leadership Group, Inc. - and for more than 21 years has been helping leaders of top companies worldwide get audacious results. Sign up for his free leadership e-zine and get a free white paper: “49 Ways To Turn Action Into Results,” at http://www.actionleadership.com

The author of 23 books, Brent Filson’s most recent books are: THE LEADERSHIP TALK: THE GREATEST LEADERSHIP TOOL and 101 WAYS TO GIVE GREAT LEADERSHIP TALKS. www.actionleadership.com

Brian Tracy, the great motivational guru, often suggests that people do their most important and toughest task at the start of the day. They must ‘eat the frog’ for breakfast and then they will feel great for the rest of the day and have extra energy to cope with all their other tasks.

When it is light enough in the summer, I get a walk and some weight lifting in at the start of the day when it is cooler. I then feel set up for the rest of the day. The walk is quite a tasty frog to eat but still demands some effort and will power.

If you are writing a book, write first thing in the day. Writing may be the most difficult thing you do all day. Get it done straight away. Eat the frog.

After eating the frog, you have to eat the elephant (the huge amount you have to do during the rest of the day) How?

Bit by bit.

How do you build a house? Brick by brick. How do you walk ten miles? Step by step. I love books with titles like “HTML in easy steps”

You can’t learn HTML in one big study session but step by step, inch by inch it’s a cinch. Step by step you will have time to digest what you have learned.

Self-help books frequently use phrases like ’step by step’ with good reason. Taking small steps can work wonders.

If you want to lose weight and are given 5 sausages to eat, give one of them to the dog or throw it in the bin.

People who have done this type of weight loss behaviour have achieved remarkable results. That extra sausage or biscuit gradually built up their weight; not eating it will gradually lose their weight.

Jewish students who wish to be rabbis usually have to study the Talmud, a huge book of many volumes. Their rabbis tell them a story called the ‘Heap of Dust’ to help them to keep going and not give up.

Two men were asked to move a heap of dust. One soon gave up. The other said I will move a little every day even if it seems that I am getting nowhere. Eventually he moved the heap of dust and was rewarded accordingly. The other man achieved nothing and his reward was nothing.

The principle is the same whether you are eating an elephant or moving a mountain of dust. Tackle the task bit by bit.

If you eat the frog and the elephant, you should have a great day and begin to achieve all your goals.

Resource box

John Watson is an award winning teacher and martial arts instructor. He has recently written two books about achieving your goals and dreams. They can both be found on his website http://www.motivationtoday.com along with a daily motivational message.

The title of the first book is “36 Laws To Ignite Your Inner Power And Realize Your Dreams Now!” The book can be found at this URL: http://www.motivationtoday.com/36_laws.php

You are welcome to publish the article above in your ezine so long as you do not alter it and keep the resource box as it is.