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Originally Posted by Maksutov
I think GE's *******ization of the Six Sigma program is in part responsible for this. The brainstorming sessions required by this approach give all ideas equal value, and from that point forward someone who opposes an idea due only to its lack if technical merit is looked upon as not being a "team player". Plus GE turned Six Sigma, which originally was concerned with quality improvements, into a cost cutting program which is now a darling and pet program of more executives than I care to mention.
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Well, any design process is only as good as the engineers following it, and Six Sigma is no exception. In the earliest phases, all ideas should be considered, but if the tools are applied properly (CTQ flowdown, QFD, etc), ideas with no “technical merit” should be weeded out pretty easily. However, if the people using the tools are clueless, the process cannot save them.
In Six Sigma’s defense, it does provide a framework for quantitatively refuting bad ideas, which beats qualitative approaches any day. When my boss’s boss has a pet idea that is (pointy) hair-brained, I can at least point out which number they fudged on the QFD, which is a lot safer career-wise than simply saying “Sorry, you’re wrong”.
The mistake GE and others made (IMHO) was creating a Six Sigma bureaucracy—over-training, requiring excessive paperwork (making it a web form does not help—hurts usually!), mis-applying tools, tying promotions and rewards to Six Sigma Projects in a way that encouraged “fluff” projects, and overestimating effectiveness by reporting the same process improvements as results from many different projects. However, since Jack Welch left, I think GE has made good strides towards correcting these problems.
Overall, Six Sigma
does work, and is one of the key reasons GE has prospered over the last two decades.
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Originally Posted by Maksutov
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Originally Posted by JayUtah
It seems this article's author chooses to completely disregard the political aspect of why certain technology and methods persisted and why others fell by the wayside.
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How many times has engineering been told to "take off your engineering hats and put on your management hats", while management took off their management hats and put on their political hats? It's a big number. |
A lot of companies
intentionally pick managers for engineering groups that have no knowledge of the subject they are managing. Supposedly they do it to keep management “open minded” and to cross-seed experience from other disciplines. In my experience, it merely makes the manager over-reliant on advice from senior engineers that is often skewed towards a particular solution or process. Worse, it leave the manager incapable of telling when a program is out of control or headed in the wrong direction.
I’d better quit ranting and get back to work. Managers don’t have to be engineers to know a web board from my
real work.
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