Feds may unleash Six Sigma on Terrorism

USA Today ^ | 10/30/2002 | Del Jones

[VaBthang4]

At a time when fighting the war on terrorism has become arguably the most important issue facing the USA, authorities are looking into an unlikely weapon to aid their fight: Six Sigma.

Six Sigma is nothing like a laser-guided smart bomb but rather a statistics-heavy regimen of analyzing problems that has saved corporations billions.

[SSN558]

"Anybody remember Zero Defects"

Yup, and I laughed. Zero is a mathematical abstraction and describes absolutely nothing "pun" in the natural world. Weird things happen as the limit approaches Zero. Nature prefers infinity and non repeating decimals.

[Willie Green]

I certainly agree that Japan's deeply entrenched culture of honoring procedure above results, and of following established routine has held them back from growth in the past 10 years.

OTOH, "flexibility" is an oft abused term with "positive" connotations that rivals "diversity" for sinister implications. "Flexibility" can be a political excuse for failure to implement or adhere to (or in some cases, actually undermining) efficient established processes and procedures. Management that "thrives on chaos" is often guilty of generating the problematic environment they're supposed to control. It is not dissimilar to a firefighter going around setting fires.

[SauronOfMordor]

It's great for repeatable processes where observing procedure (and, in greater depth, identifying effective and ineffective procedure) is important - like processing visa applications and airport security. It doesn't work very well on more open-ended problems.

Bingo. Policy in general is for dealing with the routine and predictable. Having rigid policy and procedures based on stats works in a standardized environment where there is little need for independent decision-making by low-level troops

It falls apart when there are lots of special cases, and lots of independent decision-making by the troops

There are two types of management environments (actually, they form two ends of a continuum): "management makes policy and makes sure people follow it", vs "management finds competent people for the low-level decisionmaking, gives them discretion, and lets them get on with it"

[e_engineer]

We will be in deep trouble if Al Queda gets their hands on a Quality Circles manual. But what could be worse is if they ever learn to use one of these:

The Instant Buzzword Generator. Just pick a word from each column and hey-presto some technical jargon!

	Column 1	Column 2	Column 3
0	integrated	management	options
1	total	organisational	flexibility
2	systematised	monitored	capability
3	parallel	reciprocal	mobility
4	functional	digital	programming
5	responsive	logic	concept
6	optical	transitional	time-phase
7	synchronised	incremental	projection
8	compatible	thrid-generation	hardware
9	balanced	policy	contingency

[Denver Ditdat]

Even fans like Michael Dell warn it could take years for U.S. intelligence agencies to fully implement Six Sigma but adds, "It's possible."

I'm assuming that Mr. Dell speaks from experience. His computers are widely used at my workplace and I'm not impressed by their construction, reliability, or the support provided by Dell Computer.

[bvw]

True!

[spanky_mcfarland]

What's next?

Tony Robbins as Commander-in-Chief?

More bullshit "Think outisde the box" and "New paradigm" bullshit?

Management should be less cultish and more based on sound analysis and evaluation.

[The Duke]

We really need to put together a virtual team to synergise
with your buzzword generator. I think the result might
just be a responsive monitored capability that might
yield parallel reciprocal projections.

[Professional]

Cheap Fast Good

Pick two

Such simple truth. Words to live by, work by...

[Aracelis]

Ping!

[Vince Ferrer]

As long as we're all having a meeting on this, I'd like our sigmas to have their own colors. Most of the time we could be at yellow sigma, but sometimes, if something goes wrong, we'll go to orange sigma. We never want red sigma, because that will be our bad sigma.

[300winmag]

I may have to join. I was on the original TQM team for my squadron at Nellis. Had some interesting meetings, good donuts - but they weren't really interested in the suggestions we had to meet. The leaders of the project had their own agendas.

A lot of this stuff is "management by magazine". Enough articles appear in CEO-type magazines, and they start talking about it at the club, the opera, charity events, etc. It becomes a hot button, and they want it pushed at their company so they won't be the last kid on the block without Six Sigma.

There are companies, and divisions of companies, where this stuff could work wonders. At other times and places, it can be lethal. And the "enablers" never give presentations of situations where it would be the absolute worst thing in the world to implement.

I attribute the executive tendency towards fads (unproven or inappropriate procedures) as a form of "magical thinking", where the proper things are sacrificed on an altar (usually the oldest, most experienced workers), and the universe is absolutely forced to give you success. For people self-selected for seeing the subtle, and having unique insights, they can be quite gullible.

Six Sigma can be valuable where you make billions of somethings, like chips, and need to squeeze out every last fraction of a percent of improvement. But like paper-shuffling in general, it can become the end-product itself, and people live or die on the numbers they generate, and not on the physical product that goes out the door.

[fire_eye]

You're right about the Nazi's. At a plant I used to work for, we became ISO certified. Sure enough, those who wanted power but were powerless under previous management schemes became ISO nazi's and got their power.

In my company, the ISO-900[n] Gestapo are so loathed that even senior managers try to find a way to be out of the office when the Kameraden come calling.

It's sort of irrelevant whether or not any of these trendy management system fads have any core of real merit. What happens, in *every* case, is that they are entirely the province of the "seminar droids", people who have no real skills and who therefore survive by attaching themselves to meaningless "high-profile" activities. They attend every superfical seminar and meaningless meeting into which they can insinuate themselves, scrambling around generating reams of reports and piles of paperwork and surfeits of slideshows, impressing only those as stupid as themselves (many of whom have sublimated upward into corporate management).

Then, as others have pointed out, whenever the latest metaphysical miracule cure has lost its romantic appeal,they eagerly gravitate towards the next one, which is always waiting in the wings. They're of the same mentality as those people we all know who are always involved in one pyramid sales scheme or another, jumping from one to the next with the same madcap gleam in their eyes, convinced that this time they're going to become a "diamond" in the pyramid and get rich. Actually, I think at my company they've already jumped off the "Six Sigma" bandwagon and onto another one called "M-II Awareness".

yaawwwwnnnnn.....

[Travis McGee]

Motorola mention bump.

[Media Insurgent]

Is it just me or does this whole idea of using mathematics-based business management models to win a war sound an awful lot like Robert McNamara redux?

[FreedomPoster]

>>The first buzzword of this nature that I recall was "Zero Defects" back in the 70s.

I remember "Zero Defects" banners being splashed around the hangers of one of Dad's Army Aviation units when I was a kid. I'm pretty sure it was Fort Rucker in the '67-'68 time frame, but it might have been Benning a year or so earlier.

[RWG]

throw out some [to most] of the quality...I think almost all operations in the civilian and government sectors have adopted your idea.

[PatrioticAmerican]

Six Sigma = How to measure failure without ever understanding the competence required for success.

No "process" can ever teach the knowledge necessary for professional competence, and no expert ever needs such a process.

Six Sigma, PMI, TQM, ISO, CMM, et al., are best at ensuring how to flip a burger or cook fries. I sure as hell would not want my surgeon going through a "process" on how to perform a procedure. That is the difference between training and education.

Training is a step-by-step, monkey-see monkey-do procedural instruction. Education is understanding how things should be and knowing how to make it that way.

There may be SOPs and SPPs in an educated and competent environment, but that is a far cry from the procedural "do it this way, and if it is any different, then we'll analyze the hell out of it and try to determine how it should be."

Every expert knows what is needed to be understood to ensure quality and repeatability. Most of these “processes” interfere with advanced knowledge and expertise. Hell, ISO keeps my company from being able to make a hire in under one week, and usually it takes two weeks. Before ISO, we did a far better job and could hire in an afternoon. Yes, I have heard, “Then you are doing ISO wrong”, except that several ISO “experts” have all recently concluded that it really does take that long for what we need to do.

All these “processes” do is absorb money from needed areas and give some academic morons something to do other than produce product.

[e_engineer]

LOL!! Be careful, Al Queda monitors FR. ;)