What Leading a DMAIC Project Involves

Many people learn the tools of Six Sigma and then find that the hard part is something else. The hard part is leading the project: choosing a problem worth solving, getting a busy manager to support it, collecting data people trust, keeping a team moving for several months, and handing a better process back to the people who run it.

This course is about that job. It follows DMAIC, the five-phase improvement method: Define, Measure, Analyze, Improve, Control. For each phase it asks what the project leader has to decide, produce and defend, and what usually goes wrong.

It is written for people about to lead their first Six Sigma or Lean Six Sigma improvement project. In many organisations this is the work expected of a person trained to "Green Belt" level. It assumes you already know the ideas taught in the course Six Sigma Foundations (Yellow Belt Level): variation, the voice of the customer, DMAIC in outline and basic process measures.

What this course does not re-teach

The statistics behind DMAIC, such as hypothesis tests, capability indices and control chart formulas, are taught in full in ASQ Six Sigma Green Belt Exam Preparation. Here they appear only as short recaps, so that the lessons can spend their time on running the project: what to ask for, how to choose, and how to explain a result to a manager who will never open the spreadsheet.

Other subjects have their own courses and are pointed to where they come up: designed experiments, control charts, failure mode and effects analysis, measurement systems and leading change.

The project you will follow

Every module uses the same worked project. Quorvale Logistics is a freight and warehousing company (an invented example). Its billing team sends about 12,000 customer invoices a month. Customers often find mistakes: the wrong rate, the wrong weight, a missing surcharge, a wrong delivery reference. Each mistake means a credit note, a new invoice, an annoyed customer and a payment that arrives late.

Amina, a senior billing analyst, has been asked to lead an improvement project. You will watch her select and scope the project, write the charter, collect a baseline, find the root causes, pilot a fix and hand the process back. All figures in the story are invented for teaching, and every calculation has been checked.