Six Sigma Professor

Review by Scott Burns for The Six Sigma Way Team Fieldbook, Chapter 4: Selecting Winning Six Sigma Projects Getting It Right the First Time
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This book is the one book for someone who is joining their first six sigma team. It will give you a feel for the tools and methodology that you will be exposed to and provides handy references of forms, metrics and best practices if you are requested to complete a task in a six sigma project. The material is very well organized and summarized for usage as an ongoing team resource.

Review by Rhiannon Bishop for The Six Sigma Way Team Fieldbook, Chapter 4: Selecting Winning Six Sigma Projects Getting It Right the First Time
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The Six Sigma Way Team Field Book is a must have for anyone that is seriously studying Six Sigma. It gives you practical solutions for every phase of Six Sigma. This book goes wonderfully with The Six Sigma Way. If you work in a company that is implementing Six Sigma, or you’re trying to advance your career to a Black Belt or Master Black Belt position – buy this book. Buy both books! Outstanding tools, superb readability, a wealth of knowledge at your fingertips!

Review by for The Six Sigma Way Team Fieldbook, Chapter 4: Selecting Winning Six Sigma Projects Getting It Right the First Time
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The Six Sigma Way Team Fieldbook is an excellent companion to the original Six Sigma Way. I’m using it as a primary textbook in the Green Belt course at the college where I teach. The Fieldbook does a good job of laying out the “nuts and bolts” process of attacking a problem and making improvements. The book is a little light in some of the more techinical areas, specifically in the Analysis Stage of the DMAIC model. That’s where I come in as the course instuctor. I supplement the Fieldbook with the QCI CSSBB Primer and use MiniTab software for statistical analysis. It all blends together, and is held together, by the very well written descriptions of DMAIC methodologies in the Team Fieldbook. This book is exactly what it is intended to be — A Team Fieldbook for Six Sigma practitioners. Used with the guidance from an experienced Six Sigma practitioner (Black Belt), it is an excellent tool for both training and basic reference.

Review by Peter V. Tamas for The Six Sigma Way Team Fieldbook, Chapter 4: Selecting Winning Six Sigma Projects Getting It Right the First Time
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This Six Sigma book is for those who have little direct experience as a project manager. In addition to an introduction to Six Sigma (albeit not as efficient introduction as “What Is Six Sigma?”), the authors go into depth on team dynamics and other project management information. While the project management information is good and an excellent refresher for those who are only peripherally involved with project management, it helps to feed the Achilles heal of Six Sigma: the perception that it’s the same old stuff repackaged and given inflated value.A quick read of the reviews on Amazon will give you a feel for why people are skeptical of 6 Sigma: the feel-good tone of most writing on 6 Sigma and the insistence that it “is not a flavor-of-the-month management trend” make many of us suspect that 6 Sigma is not much more than hollow jargon and acronyms. Lets accept that these criticisms are valid and further that many “practitioners” are just self-aggrandizing or worse. But that still leaves us with the essential difficulties of positive change in any organization: you need to overcome assumptions that your organization’s subculture may not even realize it has. What a corporation does by accepting Six Sigma is that it empowers people to gather data to challenge what “everybody knows”. Most importantly, it sets a very high quality standard, which further sanctions data-driven change.I was not surprised to see that this book was used successfully in a college-level course on Six Sigma. That audience is less cynical that many in the corporate world and certainly could use exposure to project management.I feel that the greatest flaw in Six Sigma is that many practitioners and even the books permit the basics to be lost in the shuffle. If one listens to people talk about Six Sigma, its easy to forget that a critical part of Six Sigma is that the data comes first, not the solution. I often hear co-workers say “we need to finish this project to improve our six sigmas” or “if we could get rid of this server we’ll all get our green belts”.The term Six Sigma is derived from statistics. This book covers all the necessary statistics and other “tools”.If you just want an introduction to Six Sigma, I would recommend “What Is Six Sigma?” (by some of the same authors). If you’d also like to read about project management, this book will serve you well. But be warned, you’ll see feel-good digressions such as an explanation of why Sherlock Holmes would have made a great Six Sigma Black Belt. Some will find these digressions annoying. I would also recommend Michael Lewis’ Moneyball as a companion book. Lewis (author of “Liar’s Poker”) uses Wall Street trading as an analogy to explain why the Oakland As baseball team is one of the successful teams with much less money than most. But I also see an analogy relevant to the topic of Six Sigma. “Moneyball” also shows how one can achieve superior results by testing what everyone thinks they know with fact gathering and rigorous analyses. “Moneyball” may prove to be an inspiring book for those about to measure processes and look for opportunities for dramatic improvement: precisely what Six Sigma practitioners SHOULD be doing.

Review by Mitchel Martin for The Six Sigma Way Team Fieldbook, Chapter 4: Selecting Winning Six Sigma Projects Getting It Right the First Time
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As a Transactional Six Sigma Black Belt, this has been one of the most useful six sigma books I own. It contains a wealth of illustrations and tools that are priceless in terms of teaching process improvement teams basic six sigma methods. Using this book, people in process improvement can learn to apply many of the basic six sigma concepts.

I cannot stress enough, the number of useful illustrations and examples that are in every chapter in this book. Where most six sigma books tell you what six sigma is and how to analyze and measure, this one gives you the communication tools that are essential for getting and keeping an improvement project on-track.

Although many six sigma people would disagree with me on this point, I am a firm believer that Process Improvement & Management is the program to achieve business change success and six sigma is a tool to help accomplish and control the improvements.

A must read and a bargain-priced book. I recommended it to every process improvement team I lead and the feedback is always a “Wow – what a book!”