Yesterday I was in a meeting at work where we were discussing how one of our sister organizations could save tens of thousands of dollars by discarding their subscriptions to some electronic journals and instead accessing those same journals through our system. Had they taken the deal, they would have saved about $25,000 in the first four months and picked up access to about six times as many journals as they currently had.
Forunately, their LSS guru put a stop to it.
The dude was amazing. He forced the entire decision process to stop dead in its tracks so they could do a full-on LSS process improvement effort. Tollgates, voice of the customer, problem definitions, the full treatment. It was awesomeness squared. I sat there, playing Bejeweled on my Droid, marvelling at the way he enforced our organization's rigid orthodoxy of Continuous Process Improvement on a group that would have otherwise run off and saved money while picking up more benefits.
Lean Six Sigma. Is there anything more beautiful in the world?
Lean Six Sigma is just one success story after another.
5 comments:
So after all that did he go with it in the end? Or did he successfully argue against it.
Sigh. (Shakes head with a wan smile.) Poor, sweet, naive Kelly, you are such an innocent in the ways of Lean Six Sigma! A LSS event like this could take months to complete. This particular one might be rushed through in a matter of weeks.
The benighted beasts of the field - the sow in her sty or the weevil on the corn - might unhesitatingly rush to ingest a gobbet of delicious, sustaining food, but the noble and brilliant practitioner of Lean Six Sigma knows better. He, in his mighty wisdom and armed with countless hours of training in process improvement, will take months to figure out whether or not it's a good idea to take a grocery bag stuffed to overflowing with hundred dollar bills that have been lovingly placed before him.
Such is the wonder of Lean Six Sigma.
You clearly were distracted by your demonic "bejeweled" and did not hear the substance of the call.
The LSS expert rightly asked if, before we saved $25,000, we should have been spending the $25,000 in the first place. We cannot claim a savings if the spending was pointless in the first place.
Second, the LSS expert was focused on the $25,000 we spend on a single journal. He will not care that we save $25,000 and gain access to innumerable additional journals. That is outside the scope of this event.
Be nice to the LSS experts; they are on full alert exploring why the last solution the LSS experts recommended has all the peasants ordering extra pitchforks and sharpening stones.
We must not countenance those east coast moochers who want to suck at the teat of your proxy server for free.
(fibbi)
Fair enough. It just sounded like total overkill for the issue and he was the only one questioning the value of the effort.
Why didn’t you hammer him with the LSS dipstick with this should be a “Just do it” event. No really, there is such a portion of LSS. It exists so that when there is one of those “wow, we can just do this and it is a cost savings with nothing but upside”, they can skip the bull$hit and just do it.
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