Flavor of the Month - Part 1 (Six Sigma)

The advantage of working at many start ups is the occasional exposure to new business processes, especially those that are considered and decided upon at the high level.  While there may be the need for education, and some additional hires, the process (whatever it is) will help the company streamline itself, or even make the company more competitive.  Or at least that is the thinking.

This is how Six Sigma was presented to us at one company, whose name will remain anonymous at this point since it is still around.  This company was a service provider using ASP and MSSQL along with apps written in both Java and C++ that utilized COM and COM+, depending on the various item.  So in the middle of the yearly managers meeting we learned that Six Sigma was the way to go.  A business process person was hired, books were bought and sent to all the managers, and we were encouraged to help bring this process into the company and help expand our productivity and effectiveness.  Were we really ready for any of this?

In a word - no.

The company (especially the Development Heads) was more concerned with getting new software and features out to customers, even with a huge backlog of issues that needed to be fixed in our production code the push was on to get the newest and sexiest feature out.  While the issues kept rising, and the bug reports noted the increase, the Development Managers ended up ignoring the Six Sigma and kept moving on the way they were.  We could have improved our code some, we actually did two bug fests when we had some massive system hemorrhages, and then moved on to improving our process; or done it in parallel.  But we didn't.

Instead we ended up reading the books, doing what we normally do then sit in the kitchen and look at each other saying things like "Did you make that coffee by Six Sigma?  It doesn't look very efficient to me."  Which was when we knew the process was gone...oh that and the fact the Business Process Person got promoted to the Operations group, and spent her time getting new offices and sites up and running.