What is six sigma tools?

Six sigma tools are the techniques and approaches used by six sigma methodology, in the every day development process, of an organization. Implementation of these tools in a justified manner, lead to an amazing result. This investment tools and techniques act as a good place to start a new process. There are several tools and techniques to be used, but it has to be used in an appropriate way to get the better quality results. The brief description of some of the major tools and techniques are as follows.

LEARNING OBJECTIVES: The main thing to be kept in the mind is that it is necessary to learn things beyond the current situations and knowledge. Learning objective is the matrix, helping the project managers in identifying, planning and documenting the current knowledge and experiences whenever starting a new projects. This is done at the starting stage of the new project. This is done by the project manager in order to prevent the users, jumping to solution based on the current statistics. This helps the project managers in avoiding reworks in planning and deliverables, which causes disruption in the project at the time of production. the matrix deals with the aspects like ” What is the need of the company? From where the company get the needed information? And how will the company get the information?” Attaining solutions for these questions will prevent the managers from drawing conclusions before the correct time.

PLAN POPULATION USING COUSTOMER MATRIX: This is a graphical representation of matrix which makes the users easier to find out the holes in the planned interviews and to make sufficient corrections. The usage of customer matrix helps in planning and assuring that the representatives included in the requirements gathering activities are correct. The requirement gathering activity includes interviews and observations. This also includes the segmentation of the populations into specific areas, and finding out of types of participants to each areas or work. The different types of participants are expert users, new users and difficult-to-satisfy users.

CONTEXT AND NEEDS DATA ANALYSIS:   With in a business there is a need for the reevaluation to ensure the requirements accuracy. The six sigma community looks for new requirements. Requirement volatility is the metric used for this purpose.

PRIORITIZE REQUIREMENTS: When a new project is done it is important to categorize the requirements according to its importance. Commonly people act as if it is not necessary to do this at the bottom level and gives importance in doing everything. Until the delivery date, prioritizing the requirements are not done, and then the importance will be given to the product to be released instead of the requirements needed for the production of the products. The use age of six sigma tools will help in prioritizing the requirements from simple to the analytical hierarchy process. This ensures the quality functional deployment.

VALUE STREAM AND PROCESS MAPPING: Flow charts or maps are used to identify the flow of transactions through a system or module. Value stream maps are used to draw the flowchart of the value-added, non value added and wait time.

USER STORIES AND SCENARIOS:  The identifying of  possible situations can help in solidify the requirements and design needed. This is possible through the investigation of what the system should do rather than looking at general functional requirements.

IDENTIFYING Y-TO-x RELATIONSHIP: It is inevitable to know the factors that will drive the success or the cause of failure, for all projects in a company. Identifying all these factors earlier in the process will help the final product to meet the better satisfaction of the customer.

DESIGN OF EXPERIMENTS:  Monte Carlo modeling and the design is used for the experiments to validate the potential design factors and the drivers identified by the project managers.

FAILURE MODE AND EFFECTS ANALYSIS: This is an important analysis to be done with in a project and it is done twice during the development of the life cycle. As soon as the design plans have been completed this analysis can be done first. This analysis helps in the identification of potential failure modes in the current design. Once these issues are identified at a project’s starting stage, it helps the managers to find out the option of modifying the design to soften or eliminate the issues. On the second hand the analysis is done just before the release of the product. At this time the analysis shows the severity, occurrence and detection weakness remaining in the system. The obtained information should be passed to the help desk and customer service which allows them to respond to the customers when these failures happens.

PROCESS CAPABILITY EVALUATION (Cp): The performance measures of the projects must be tracked and measured as a part of control plan. Data like online response times, reliability numbers, restore cycle times etc can be used as the process capability numbers to validate these measurements.

CONTROL CHARTS FOR MONITORING: Control charts provide a simple approach to the customers and customer service personnel at the time of monitor after the implementation of new work. When a new system is developed, the project managers must describe the measures that is to be implemented. For this the company should already track the Cp numbers for online response times.