Can anyone provide any feedback on Six Sigma training? If you are interested in helping businesses find solutions to their problems, is it worth the cost?
Thank you,
Barry B

Barry B

Without specfic knowledge or any special circumstances of your case. Six Sigma can be effective when you start with a proper assessment, leadership from top mangement, business focus etc (the usual suspects).

Happy Orchids
Nero

Nero,
Thank you!
Barry B.

Six Sigma can be a lot of things. It can be a corporate goal (much like ISO certification is). Six Sigma as a set of tools can also be useful (in which case, use can use Six Sigma tools--many of which originally come from the quality field) integrated into performance consulting work.

Is it "worth it"? Well, that depends on a lot of things. The whole idea of Six Sigma as an objective (near perfection in a process or result) makes sense in some instances and would be bad business in other cases. For instance, let's suppose that we wanted to achieve Six Sigma status in the number of errors/error rate for checks processed at a bank. That is achieveable and a pretty desirable goal (b/c you don't want to miscredit money to the wrong account--costs the bank and costs customers). On other hand, let's suppose you're trying to suppress the mosquito population in Florida by 99.999996%--to do that you'd have to depopulate the state and spend more money than the result was worth. So there are some instances where we don't need to achieve near perfection (or to do so is unaffordable).

Is it worth it as a tool set? Well, again, that depends--what will you use it for? If you're interested in doing some serious statistical analysis and/or root cause analysis than Six Sigma is invaluable. But if you have an organizational culture that is anti-measurement, takes lots of quick actions or resists rigorous analysis of performance issues than getting Six Sigma training will be frustrating for the Black Belts and a waste of money for the organization.

Joe,
Thank you for your response-I'm trying to determine if the training would be beneficial to a community college in their potential support for local business. I think I see some possibilities here as our community college gets more involved in workforce development.