[Dan Day]

I worked for a Raytheon company a number of years ago when they were toying with ISO 9000, another "quality assurance" approach (or maybe it was the ancestor of Six Sigma instead of a competing idea).

It would definitely take a lot of the spontaneity out of the work process, but while that has its downsides, it has a lot of advantages, too. Far more projects are screwed up by sloppiness than by too much rigidity, and Six Sigma/ISO 9000/etc. are aimed at instituting procedures, and especially oversight/inspection procedures, which quickly raise a flag if something's getting off track, and/or catching errors before they can snowball.

Lord knows the far-flung intelligence community could use better internal coordination, and something resembling a goals-oriented method of operation.

[VaBthang4]

ISO is European if I am not mistaken. I think Loyd's[sp?] of London has something to do with it.

Six Sigma is for real. The writer is correct though...if you dont have top executives driving it. It wont work because workers will instinctively go against it. It has to become a mindset. At GE...it is literally the culture.

[r9etb]

I'll take your word for it that this works for GE. Certainly the basic idea is valid -- however, once it gets guru-ized I think it's basically a way to get the big consultant bucks, and then it has little chance of succeeding.

I've seen I don't know how many things like "six sigma" come and go. They tend to fail, because my company (and others with which I'm familiar) tends to get really big into the process crap, while losing sight of what the process is really about. Consultants sell process. Management likes to buzzword-ize, and to blindly follow process. They forget that it helps to know the business.

I would certainly hope that the terror warriors don't get so mired in process crap that they forget about the bad guys.