Process Improvement: When More Is Less

June 25, 2007 from ITBusinessEdge – “Is there such a thing as too much process improvement?

Yes, says consultant David Taber. While process improvement efforts like Six Sigma tend to work well for established products, helping companies ensure that high quality standards are met, they aren’t that helpful — and in fact may be harmful — when companies are trying to develop new and innovative products.

180 View – We defer to the comment posted by Dr. Phyllis Thompson on July 3, 2007, who said

“Don Zook has it right. When I started working some years ago, the emphasis was on “systems and task analysis.” Other cutely named strategies (good for marketing and for differentiating the designer from competitive companies) complemented and extended these approaches to figuring out what is going right and wrong, and how to demonstrate and measure that a problem has been fixed (emphasis on measurably, by the way, since without metrics you can’t prove change has occurred).

Over time we have been inundated with the menu of (quite literally) thought-provoking tools . . .and more (e.g., remember, or like others, have you forgotten Management by Objectives?). . .that Zook enumerates. The problem arises when folks check their analytical skills and common sense (assuming they have both) at the door and think a tool will serve as the holy grail, showing them the way to “the solution.” What they forget is that they, not the tool, hold the answer.