Creating the culture for change is done by showing the value of Improvement. This comes from showing people in your company the successes of your projects and maintaining a continual improvement climate. Once people see the changes and improvements is becomes contagious and they want to become a part of it. A good sales pitch is that Six Sigma can take your company out of crisis mode.
Do you feel like you continually struggle to reduce costs, improve performance, or improve your customer’s satisfaction? Providing tools and providing a framework to your employees to improve can easily be done using the DMAIC methodology. In order to create a persuasion for the change you only need to show the success of one project.
Developing a persuasion for change and improvement mentality may include establishing systems to match your company through process orientation. This process orientation encourages a collaborative atmosphere which has fluid conversation and communications to better meet the customers’ expectations.
To create the persuasion of change start small. Discuss the principles and the benefits then develop the framework for a Six Sigma program at your company. One of the greatest inhibitors to good implementation of change is time. It takes time to develop any good program but good leadership understands the value of taking time to improve what you do.
Once you have the buy-in of leadership you can begin integrating Six Sigma tactics into your company using instrumental steps to persuade the change:
- Focus your improvements on the customer. The Voice of the Customer is key to your success and in order to gain Six Sigma buy –in you tie it to what your customer wants.
- Understand your company’s culture first. If the existing culture is one in which company employees do not work together well, or have difficulties with civility or simply do not appear to care. It will take more time to encourage them to Participating station in process improvement.
- Develop your data. What are your data sources? Take inventory of what is available. Do you trust the data or will you need more. You will need data to help define the problem in the initial phases or at least give it some validity. If you have any existing critical to quality measure data have it available and know the input and output data as it exists. Determine the validity of your data and if you need additional software to review it.
- Commit time and resources to your improvement. Without resources and time, improvement teams will suffer and your improvements as well.