Don't Know Six Sigma? You Need To Learn About These Roles! : Part 2

Hey, welcome back to my channel. My name is Mundo and today we're going to talk about the key roles and responsibilities within a Six Sigma project. So there are a lot of roles within a Lean Six Sigma organization or a project that, that we should definitely cover. And I think it's important to understand all of this because it's going to lay down the foundation for everything else that we're going to cover in this course. This is the video that kind of sets the baseline understanding of everyone involved so that doesn't create confusion later on down the road. So let's dive right in. So the different certified roles within Lean Six Sigma consist of a white belt, a yellow belt, a green belt and black belts. And there's some other roles involved, but we'll talk about that in a second. So if we look at white belts and yellow belts, typically you don't see that as like a widely recognized Lean Six Sigma credential. It's more of just a quick stamp of approval that says, hey, you have a basic understanding of, of what Lean Six Sigma is. I think it's critical to have everyone on your team have a basic understanding of Lean Six Sigma because when you are getting a group of people together for a project, there can be a lot of confusion in the beginning. You know, you may be running into resistance of, you know, people asking, why am I here? You know, I have a day job that I need to focus on. This is taking away time from what I need to be doing. Right. They may not understand the importance of what you're doing and the problem that you're trying to solve. So I like to start off the project with educating team members on what Lean Six Sigma is and kind of just give them a basic overview of what the process is going to look like and what the end goal in mind is going to look like in terms of eventually leading to a solution and kind of the framework and how you're going to get there. So, so whether you go through and get those team members like educated in a formal course or not, or you just keep it to a brief, you know, 30 minutes, maybe one hour meeting where you're just kind of doing a lunch and learn and educating them on Six Sigma, there's lots of ways to do this. But essentially a white belt training is probably a day or less. Or again, you can do this in an hour or so where you're kind of just giving them an overview of the process. Yellow Bell is taking it a step further and you're educating them on how to do things Like a process map which we'll get into later, how to create a swim lane. And, you know, we'll also get into that later. So again, it's a little bit more than a basic overview of Lean Six Sigma. So now we get into the green belt. So green belts play a pivotal role in the whole Lean Six Sigma process. They are typically considered the project manager and the person that's really driving things forward. They've gone through extensive training. Depending on the course, this could be 40 hours of training or it could be 80 hours of training or even more. They are typically shadowed by a certified black belt who's got more experience. So a green belt will typically go through at least one project, if not two or three projects in which they are shadowed and mentored by a black belt to kind of coach them through and make sure they're set up for success. They've learned how to do the process mapping, the swim lane mapping. They are great communicators. They know how to align everyone on the team towards a common goal. They are really just excellent at being a project manager and making sure people are adhering to deadlines. And there's a whole bunch of other skills that are touched on as a green belt that like statistical analysis and things like that, learning how to develop a project charter. And we're going to get into everything, all the green belt stuff, that's really what this video series is meant to cover. So I'm not going to touch on every single thing right now. All right, so let's talk about black belts. Black belts are typically full time Lean Six Sigma dedicated resources within an organization where that is all they do. They are live. They live, breathe, sleep and eat Six Sigma. They're typically managing multiple projects. You know, I briefly mentioned before, they're usually coaching and mentoring other green belts that are up and coming and learning how to be involved in Lean Six Sigma. Sometimes, depending on the organization size, the black belt may be the only Lean Six Sigma subject matter expert and they may be helping upper management with setting the strategic vision of that. Now, if you get into a much larger organization, typically above black belts, you will have a Lean Six Sigma champion who their role is to really mentor the black belts and mentor the green belts and work directly with upper management to set the strategic vision and the project roadmap for implementing Lean Six Sigma. Next we get into sponsors, or sometimes it may be even the champion itself. Typically each project will have a sponsor and that is someone in management or even upper management. This is absolutely critical to every project because this helps set the tone for the importance of the project. And I briefly mentioned before how you may sometimes run into resistance within your organization where people are like, why am I here? What are we doing? This is pointless. The sponsor can come in on the front end and set the tone for, hey, this is why we're doing this project. This is important to the organization and that can really mean a lot to everyone on the team because they know someone in management has limited time, limited availability, and the fact that they're stepping in and being involved with this project immediately sends a message to the organization that, hey, this is important, we need to take this serious. Sponsors are really only there to check in with the green belts and the black belts. They may show up with other team members involved at tollgate reviews if they feel like the team is not headed in the right direction and they need someone in management to come in and help corral the team together. That may be a time where the sponsor comes and checks in on the project. But typically the sponsor's role is to communicate one on one with the green belt and or the black belt and get periodic updates every week or every two weeks on how the project is going. So they're really having conversations behind the scenes outside of the day to day meetings where they're kind of pushing the project along, making sure that the green belt and the black belt have the resources that they need within the project to continue making progress. And that's really the role of the sponsor. So let's talk about the people involved in the team. Now you may have a project where everyone in the organization is involved in the project, right? You'll have a key stakeholder from everyone. Now you may not have that in all the projects. It may just be one or two departments that are in the same room working together to solve this problem, whatever that problem may be. So there can be a large amount of roles and we're not going to talk about every single type of role, but I do want to bring up one critical role and that's typically involved in every project, which is the process owner. The process owner is going to be the one who's essentially going to champion that process going forward after the project is done. So one thing that is pretty critical to mention that a green belt and black belt or whoever's serving as that project manager is the project manager and it is a project. They are not the ultimate process owner. That is something that you definitely need to communicate up front and early in the process. Because during the life cycle of the project, the Green belt or black belt is really going to be the go to person and people within the project are going to kind of look to the project manager to keep moving things forward right there. Because you know, they're managing everything, making sure everyone is on the same page, they're effectively communicating, they're leading brainstorming strategies. So it can be often misunderstood that the project manager is going to be the one dealing with this going forward. That's really not the role. The role is for the project manager to come in, use their skill set, help the team come up with a solution, implement that solution, and then that project manager, that green belt or black belt, is going to move on to a different project, right? They're going to move on to a different problem within the organization. Whatever solution is developed through that project, that's going to be handed off to a process owner and that process owner is going to be the one responsible for, for carrying that out and making sure that that solution remains a permanent solution. You don't want to spend all this time, effort and money on a project, go through all of these steps, come up with a solution, and then two weeks later you find out that no one is continuing to monitor this and no one is implementing this on a daily basis and it all falls apart and reverts back to the old process. That's a great example of a failed project. We definitely don't want that. So throughout this process you should have SOPs, standard operating procedures where the process owner knows exactly what to do step by step on how to maintain this solution and make sure that it doesn't revert back to the old process. That sometimes can be one of the most difficult parts of the project. And, and it is your role as the green belt or black belt to make sure that that does not happen. So hopefully you have a pretty good understanding now of the different roles and responsibilities of people involved in a lean Six Sigma project. And the biggest take home from this video is that you need to clearly communicate to everyone who the process owner is going to be after the project is concluded, because it is definitely not going to be you as the project manager. Thanks for watching today. If you haven't already, go ahead and like and subscribe. And in our next video we are going to talk about the DMAIC framework and all of these steps involved in that. And if you're a person who needs to know everything to all of what's involved, this next video is going to be for you. It's going to give you a full overview of the entire life cycle of the project in one video and then in other videos. We are going to break down each component of that DMAIC framework step by step into bite sized chunks that are easy to understand. But the next video will at least give you a full overview of the entire project. See you next time. It.