Six Sigma: The First Ninety Days

by Stephen A. Zinkgraf

Start Six Sigma Fast–And Achieve Powerful Business Benefits Within Months This book offers leaders a proven turnkey approach to launching a Six Sigma initiative in 90 days and using it to transform your company within a year. Drawing on their experience with fifty Six Sigma programs at companies ranging from AlliedSignal to Motorola, Stephen A. Zinkgraf and his contributors show how to rapidly align people, strategy, processes, and customers in support of your initiative–and gain powerful momentum for success. You’ll walk through preparing for an enterprise-wide launch, executing it flawlessly, and establishing a foundation for achieving sustainable results over the long term. Zinkgraf’s techniques, roadmaps, and milestones can help you quickly launch any complex change initiative–even those unrelated to Six Sigma. Taken together, they offer a complete framework for driving and managing the #1 core competency for twenty-first century executives. Coverage includes Discover how to get dramatic business results from Six Sigma faster than you ever thought possible, and use Six Sigma to drive transformative change for years to come. Writing for executives and initiative leaders, Stephen A. Zinkgraf presents a high-speed methodology for linking Six Sigma to business strategy, planning and executing a flawless launch, aligning the entire enterprise behind performance improvement, and achieving powerful results in both the short and long term. Zinkgraf helped lead Larry Bossidy’s pioneering Six Sigma program at AlliedSignal–he and his team have participated in more than fifty Six Sigma launches. In this book, he reveals best practices for leading every step of the process. You’ll learn how to identify, prioritize, and charter breakthrough projects...choose the right partners... define roles...build and train teams...mitigate risks...implement effective metrics...and “evangelize” the organization. Then, after you’ve launched, Zinkgraf shows how to improve your program–and use HR, IT, and other business levers to extend your impact. Simply put, if you’re leading Six Sigma, this book’s Six Sigma roadmaps, milestones, and techniques represent the fastest route to the most business value. Learn from the experiences of AlliedSignal, Motorola, 3M, and fifty other Six Sigma leaders Set aggressive, measurable business goals–and achieve them

382 pages, Hardcover

First published March 31, 2006

Reviews

[Aaron Bolin · Rating 5 out of 5]

Zinkgraf and his team deliver a very useful volume on the programmatic side of six sigma. This content of this book is about setting up a six sigma program, not about conducting six sigma projects. It is a great book for deployment champions, program managers, or someone in a similar role like a master black belt or operations manager. It would be less useful to someone at the project level - someone just trying to get control of a business process.

The writing was well done, the information was useful, and Zinkgraf's credibility is obvious. In terms of criticism, two items come to mind.

First, the perspective of the book focuses on major public corporations. For smaller deployments, some of the information may be misaligned. Second, I think the book's marketing package suggests that the content will be more at the project level (how to run a six sigma project), but the content is much more focused at the program level.

Overall, the book will be a useful addition to my library. I recommend it to six sigma practitioners who are involved or will be involved in managing at the program level.