[blam]

"People who ignore Six Sigma are hurting themselves. It is no toy. It produces...big [I'm wondering when they are gonna finally drop it on the NBC division...haha]."

I agree. I implemented it into my chip making 'line' at TI about 14 years ago. It is amazing. (...and then we made all our suppliers do the same.)

[eno_]

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. You literally could not manufacture chips these days without using some form of statistical quality analysis.

It doesn't work very well on more open-ended problems. Measurements of software quality are mostly a crock. Bugs per KLOC is just voodoo, since you have no way to measure what those lines of code do. So it takes some intelligence to discern where you can use six sigma. Most software projects fail because the engineers are in over their heads.