Six Sigma Out of Fashion?

We did training using Six Sigma in its early days.    We joined with GE regionally to do advanced training with them.    Though in later connects with GE the term was not mentioned.  Agile was more in fashion.   It had been a very high flying thing for manufacturers.  Now here a fascinating article in Quartz,  tracking the way it seems to be slipping.  Not that it should have been called a fad, but rather a 'fashion' of the late 80s.  See below for more on that.     See also some interesting measures in Google searches and uses in Linkedin Skill Lists, where 'Six Sigma' has been failing.   I am looking forward to seeing push-backs on the article, it still makes lots of sense. just perhaps less in fashion.  I know lots of people that are near religiously devoted to it.

Whatever happened to Six Sigma?
By Oliver Staley In QZ.com

Twenty years ago, no company was flying higher than General Electric. In early 2000, GE passed Microsoft to become the world’s most valuable company. The sprawling conglomerate, which sold everything from jet engines to mortgages to advertising on Seinfeld, was directed by a dynamic CEO, Jack Welch, and his unwavering faith in the power of Six Sigma.

Six Sigma, at its core, is a system for eliminating defects in manufacturing. The name refers to a statistical model, based on deviations on a bell curve, that dictates the number of acceptable defects per million manufacturing steps. Achieving Six Sigma means an organization tolerates just 3.4 defects per million steps, insisting that 99.99966% of its products or services are without flaws. Historically, most industrial companies operate between three and four sigma, making them between 93% and 99.3% defect-free (these figures can vary slightly depending on the statistical model).  .... 

According to Google, searches for “Six Sigma” peaked in 2004, and have fallen steadily since. LinkedIn data reveal a similar story, with fewer and fewer of its 630 million users adding Six Sigma as a skill to their online résumés. It’s since been surpassed by Agile, a management process that emerged from the world of software development.  .... "

Rise of Agile Employee

Ultimately what we need.    Else will more easily replaced by autonomous solutions.  Sure we need narrow advanced expertise,  but many more 'hands' to implement, apply and test.   For now agile-adaptable.  Forrester has some good thoughts and video:

The Rise Of The Agile Employee
Alyson Clarke, Principal Analyst Forrester

Digital leaders tell us that they often struggle to find the right people with the right skills, and competition for elite talent is fierce. As their firm becomes more advanced in their digital journey – embracing new technology, evolving their business models, and the skills and talent they need to execute on that becomes even harder to find.

Many already realize that traditional methods of recruiting and acquisition will no longer be enough, and for some – that are really digitally advanced – the supply of skills they need doesn’t even exist.

Watch the video below to learn more about Forrester’s latest report on digital talent, “The Rise Of The Agile Employee” which looks at what digital leaders can do to continuously cultivate the next generation of digital talent, and set themselves up for success with fast, agile skills development. .... "

R&D in the Age of Agile

Pharma R&D in the ‘age of agile’  From McKinsey

As innovation reshapes the pharma landscape, pharma companies will need to revisit their R&D operating models to thrive. ... 

Sent from McKinsey Insights, available in the App Store and Play Store.

VDML and Business Architecture Modeling

Comment below upgraded here, plan is to trial this for upcoming applications.  Really like the idea of making the interaction between architecture, process and value delivery very clear.

" .... Fred A. Cummins has left a new comment on your post "Value Delivery Modeling Language (VDML)": 

We are currently competing in response to an RFP from the Object Management Group for a specification to support business architecture modeling. Our proposal is to show how VDML supports the requirement with some extensions--some already implemented by VDMbee. In support of that proposal, I have posted a series of blogs on Key Features of VDML that provide powerful capabilities for business architecture and business design. See https://fredacummins.blogspot.com/2018/09/vdml-for-business-architects-part-1-of.html 

Survey: Understanding the Agile Workplace

McKinsey Survey.  Definitions and Organzations.

The agile manager     By Aaron De Smet in McKinsey
Who manages in an agile organization? And what exactly do they do?

The agile workplace is becoming increasingly common. In a McKinsey survey of more than 2,500 people across company sizes, functional specialties, industries, regions, and tenures, 37 percent of respondents said their organizations are carrying out company-wide agile transformations, and another 4 percent said their companies have fully implemented such transformations. The shift is driven by proof that small, multidisciplinary teams of agile organizations can respond swiftly and promptly to rapidly changing market opportunities and customer demands. Indeed, more than 80 percent of respondents in agile units report that overall performance increased moderately or significantly since their transformations began.  ... "

Leading with Agility

Leading with inner agility

By Sam Bourton, Johanne Lavoie, and Tiffany Vogel in Mckinsey

Disruptive times call for transformational leaders with a knack for addressing complex problems. To navigate effectively, we must learn to let go—and become more complex ourselves.

We live in an age of accelerating disruption. Every company is facing up to the profound changes wrought by digitization. Industry boundaries have become permeable. Data, algorithms, and artificial intelligence are changing the nature of forecasting, decision making, and the workplace itself. All this is happening at once, and established companies are responding by rethinking their business models, redesigning their organizations, adopting novel agile-management practices, and embracing design thinking.

We’ve had a front-row seat at many such transformation efforts. Their importance, and the challenge they pose for institutions, has been well documented by management writers. But comparatively little attention has been paid to the cognitive and emotional load that change of this magnitude creates for the individuals involved—including the senior executives responsible for the success or failure of these corporate transformations. What makes the burden especially onerous is the lack of clear answers: the very nature of disruption means that even the best, most prescient leaders will be steering their company into, and through, a fog of uncertainty. ... "

How Can Agile Teams Work Together

How to Make Sure Agile Teams Can Work Together   By Alia Crocker, Rob Cross, Heidi K. Gardner in the HBR

Increasing volatility, uncertainty, growing complexity, and ambiguous information (VUCA) has created a business environment in which agile collaboration is more critical than ever. Organizations need to be continually on the lookout for new market developments and competitive threats, identifying essential experts and nimbly forming and disbanding teams to help tackle those issues quickly. However, these cross-functional groups often bump up against misaligned incentives, hierarchical decision-making, and cultural rigidities, causing progress to stall or action to not be taken at all.

Consider the case of an organization in our consortium, the Connected Commons, that uncovered a ground-breaking audio/visual technology which would differentiate the organization in existing channels but also had the potential to open up entirely new markets. The CEO heralded it as a pivot point in growth and formed a cross-functional initiative of 100+ top employees to bring it to new commercial channels. Yet, unfortunately progress did not match expectations. Employees assigned to the effort struggled to make time for the work. They often did not understand the expertise or values of different functions, and advocated too aggressively for their own solutions. The group was surprised several times by the demands of external stakeholders. 

Despite this project’s visibility, critical mandate, and groundbreaking technology, the organization was ultimately hindered when it came to agile collaboration. This story is not unique..... " 

The Amazon Playbook

Good overview, in general this has been my external view as well.

The Amazon Playbook for Speed and Agility 
Jeff Toister   In CustomerThink

It’s no secret Amazon is a customer-obsessed organization.

What’s fascinating to me is how they achieve this obsession. Former Amazon executive, John Rossman, shared some of the company’s secrets in a keynote address at ICMI’s Contact Center Demo and Conference last week.

His presentation shared insights from his book, The Amazon Way, which highlights 14 leadership principles Amazon follows to drive its legendary customer service. Rossman called this Amazon’s playbook for speed and agility. ... " 

Digital Factory Showing an Agile Way

Podcast on Digital Factory Model

Companies are beginning to use digital factories as incubators of more agile ways of working, often filtering the best attributes of the factory culture back to the larger organization.

A digital factory often calls for a whole new set of rules, including increased agility, new technology solutions, and cross-functional teams. Those differences have often spelled success for companies trying to develop and push out new digital capabilities quickly. In this episode of the McKinsey Podcast, senior partner Rohit Bhapkar and partner Joao Dias speak with McKinsey’s Barr Seitz about the challenges leaders might face in building digital factories and how to set themselves up for the best results. .... " 

Agile in the C-Suite

In Bain & Company:

How to Make Agile Work for the C-Suite   By Eric Garton, Andy Noble

Many companies are attempting a radical — and often rapid — shift from hierarchical structures to more agile environments, in order to operate at the speed required by today’s competitive marketplace. Companies like ANZ, the Australian-based banking giant, have made explicit commitments to adopt agile principles, while others like Zappos, are on the bleeding edge of organizational transformation. Many stopping points exist along the continuum from hierarchy to holacracy. To successfully transform to a more agile enterprise, companies must make conscious choices about where and how to become agile. They have to decide where to adopt agile principles and mindsets, where to use agile problem-solving methodologies to dynamically address strategic and organizational challenges, and where to more formally deploy the full agile model, including self-managed teams.

At Bain & Company, we do not believe that companies should try to use agile methods everywhere. In many functional areas, such as plant maintenance, purchasing, sales calls, or accounting, more traditional structures and processes likely will deliver lower cost, more repeatable outcomes and more scalable organizations. Sorting through every function and every part of your company’s operating model to determine which parts of the agile playbook to adopt requires some deep thinking. It also means you have to figure out how to make the agile and traditional parts of your organization effectively operate with one another. This takes time. .... " 

Theory of Agile Constraints

Newly discovered in InfoQ:

Evan Leybourn of IBM on the Theory of Agile Constraints ... 
Business Agility in general   ..... 

He defines (full interview at the link): 

I wrote about this in my article on, and with apologies to Eliyahu Goldratt, “Evan’s Theory of Agile Constraints”.
"An organisation can only be as agile as it's least agile division!"   ... 


Very basically, the Theory of Constraints is that there is a constraining factor in any process. More importantly, that there will always be a constraining factor. The Theory of Agile Constraints is that, in an organisation, there will always be a constraint to business agility. 20 years ago, that was IT. That was your software team. And that’s why it was logical for Agile, capital “A” Agile, to emerge in that domain. Today the constraint to agility isn’t IT, but rather it’s the PMO, HR, finance, or legal department.   .... " 

Implications of Agile Culture

I am teaching a course on leading analytics change at Columbia, and this Cisco blog post provided some interesting information about using methods like Agile.  Worth a look, passing it along to my students.   In the Cisco Blog. 

Minimum Viable Bureaucracy

Like the bare statement of the idea, not that I understand the implementation.  Detailed below.

Minimum Viable Bureaucracy—A Practical Approach to Scaling Agile Project Management
by Adam Rose

Companies transforming alongside new digital disruptors are often talking about minimum viable products (or, better yet, minimum lovable products). But there’s one more “minimum viable” category that these businesses should be considering—minimum viable bureaucracy (MVB).
Bureaucracy tends to have a very negative connotation, especially in agile companies that are more free-flowing than traditional enterprises. However, Mozilla and Spotify have made MVB a popular approach in agile businesses, giving executives an answer to the ever-present question—how do we maintain efficiency and consistency at scale without hindering creativity?

It’s easy to theorize about implementing MVB, but practical implementation is much more challenging. The following insights into real-world MVB implementation should provide a clearer path toward balancing agility and governance. .... " 

IBM CIO on Agile

The CIO Of IBM On How To Create An Agile Enterprise
Jacob Morgan  
   
What this episode is about and why you should care:
When you are leading one of the world’s largest organizations with hundreds of thousands of employees you need a unique vision to succeed. Jeff Smith, the Chief Intelligence Officer at IBM, has two major missions as CIO. First, to enable a productive work environment and second, to lead the deployment of an agile culture throughout the company. ... " 

More Agile for Service Innovation

Continued conversations with Dan Greening of SenexRex.  In particular about the use of Agile for services innovation.   See in particular recent posts in their blog.

Agile Systems by Senex

Today's  ISSIP SIG Education & Research speaker was Dan Greening, Managing Director, Senex Rex LLC. He discussed his perspectives on service innovation and delivered a mind mapping exercise.  Notable is their work with Skype and Microsoft in using Agile methods.

Enterprise Agility through Culture

Have been involved in a company with a strong and sometimes difficult culture for years. Worth understanding, In InfoQ:

" .... Culture plays an important role in organizational change. Successful agile adoption tends to depend on the ability to change the culture. Making the culture explicit and becoming more conscious of the existing culture is important in agile transformations according to Olaf Lewitz and Michael Sahota. Giving attention to culture can increase the agility of an organization.

InfoQ did an interview with Lewitz and Sahota about what makes culture important for organizational change, giving attention to and creating awareness for culture, techniques and tools to work with the culture and culture skills for change agents. ... " 

Scaling Kanban

Being agile.   " ... It is a misconception that in an agile organization all teams would use agile methods. There are many different methods, teams have to apply what works for them and adapt it to their situation. Organizations are living social systems said Klaus. Teams are not alone in organizations  ... InfoQ interviewed Klaus about using kanban for managing a program, deploying and connecting kanban boards on team and program level, managing work in progress across the full delivery cycle and the benefits that kanban can bring. ... " .  More on the Kanban Scheduling system.

Adapting with Speed

Adapting with speed: How agile selling organizations win in a demanding environment
Adapting with speed in a rapidly changing CPG marketplace 
Winning CPG companies are adapting with speed in an evolving marketplace by anticipating the future and collaborating with customers; making omnichannel investments, and developing and retaining talent. GMA's Customer and Channel Management Survey produced by McKinsey & Co. identifies best practices by linking actions to results visible in Nielsen market data ... " (May require registration)

Looking at Agile

In CACM:  A critical look at Agile.  I have taken a look at Scrum for development, but not used it in a real application.  And a warning about hype.  Bertrand Meyer in a new book.  " .... an attempt to sort out the jewels from the gravel. There is so much to be learned from the best agile techniques that it would be a pity to throw them away altogether because of their catastrophic elements. I do not expect everyone to agree with every single one of my assessments, but I hope this attempt at presentation and reasoned analysis will help the software industry benefit from what agile methods genuinely can bring to us. ... "  Links to the book.