Even if you or your company has not embraced Six Sigma, know that its tools can be applied to business processes outside of the typical Define-Measure-Analyze-Improve-Control (DMAIC) project model. This article is adapted from PDSS President Skip Creveling's book "Six Sigma for Technical Processes" and is from Chapter 3: Project Management in Technical Processes. It explains how the use of Six Sigma tools is applied to the design of cycle-time for a product development process.

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The goal of this chapter is to demonstrate how a few value-adding elements from traditional Six Sigma tools help in the design and analysis of technology development and product commercialization cycle-time. We want to be confident that what we choose to do and how long we forecast that it will take aligns with management expectations and market dynamics.

Designing cycle-time correctly requires nine steps, as follows (Note-items marked with a * are enhanced with the Six Sigma methods):

1. Define the gate requirements. What exactly do you need to get through the gate? What do you need to know to manage risk and make decisions?
2. Define the gate deliverables. These include documents that contain summary data sets reporting progress with respect to the gate requirements. The truth is found in this data, not in opinions about data that does not exist!
3. * Create detailed process maps, work breakdown structures and designed workflow charts. These should be very "Six Sigma-ish" to show how a technical process has controllable and uncontrollable inputs and outputs. This concerns the flow of critical technical tasks within each phase and results in a documented system of integrated, value-added work for a phase.
4. * Link major tasks to balanced sets of tools, methods and best practices. This linkage will be how tasks really produce data-based deliverables in your phase-gate process. It involves enabling toolsets that ensure the right data will be fully developed in order to truly complete a task.
5. Define roles and responsibilities. Generate a RACI matrix to define personal (or functional role) accountability for task/tool completion. The RACI matrix lists the names (or positions) of the team members who are Responsible, Accountable, Consulted and/or Informed.
6. Generate a PERT chart for each phase of the project. The PERT chart illustrates a network of serial and parallel flows of tasks as they occur sequentially. This visual flow of work shows task relationships and dependencies within a phase.
7. Calculate the critical path. This is a timeline of critical tasks that is the longest between starting and ending a phase. This defines the cycle-time for a phase.
8. * Conduct a Monte Carlo simulation of the cycle-time distribution forecast for the phase. This Six Sigma tool creates a frequency distribution that predicts the likelihood of finishing the critical path of tasks; it is a range of times over which we have quantifiable confidence in being done with the critical tasks.
9. * Create a project cycle-time FMEA for the tasks on the critical path. This tool, the Failure Modes and Effects Analysis, is used in every Six Sigma project known to mankind. The FMEA provides an assessment of what can go wrong for each task on the critical path and the likelihood that it will occur. It also includes a prevention plan and a risk-mitigation plan.

When all of these steps are done well, a team has much higher credibility when they commit to a product development project schedule and the time required to complete it.