Corporate Leadership Profile
On a Roll By Jamie Friddle
PointRoll grew from 29 to 201 employees in three years and annually serves billions of rich media ads. When errors and missed deadlines mounted, the pioneer in online advertising turned to Six Sigma. Since January 2007, the small company has trained eight employees and started projects in creative services and production engineering. PointRoll sees Six Sigma as a top priority in terms of differentiating itself from its competition and driving its leadership position.
Research
Size Matters: How Small Companies Use Six Sigma By Michael Marx
Find out what Six Sigma looks like at small companies – and how their approach differs from deployments at billion dollar-plus organizations. Key findings:
A Black Belt in a small company (those with less than $50 million in annual revenue) typically completes a project in 1 month less than their counterpart at a large company.
Black Belts at small companies more often work independently (42 percent) than those at large companies (16 percent).
Innovation and Six Sigma are more likely to be independent of each other at small companies
"Final Tollgate" Project Example
Membership Renewal Rate By Ilona Kirzhner and Jeannette Kesmarki
This project, based on the experience of a small business, sought to increase monthly revenue by increasing the membership renewal rate. As a result of improvements, the non-renewal rate dropped from 60 percent to 41 percent. With additional planned improvements, the organization expects to exceed its project goal of 30 percent.
The Final Tollgate features a Six Sigma project as it would be presented to a panel of company executives at the final project review. The objectives of such a presentation are to 1) communicate significant results of the project, 2) share highlights of how results were achieved and 3) gain agreement to close the project. The slides are the Black Belts visual presentation and the accompanying text is the verbal presentation. It is assumed that the project leader has been making regular presentations at each tollgate and that the executives in the audience have a basic understanding of Six Sigma. The content for this project was assembled for illustration purposes. It is based on fabricated data from a fictional company. Any similarities to an actual project are coincidental.
Do you have an exemplary Six Sigma project to share? Would you like to see it here? Submit it to us at www.isixsigma.com/submit/.
Strategy
The Business Belt By Michael Pestorius
A Black Belt needs more than statistical expertise to integrate Six Sigma into daily business operations. Today's Black Belt must posssess the pedagogic skills of a tutor and the business acumen of an executive.
Methodology
Speaking Up: 5 Team Problems that Need 'Crucial Conversations' By David Maxfield
Five common problems, identified in a recent study, can lead to deployment failure. Get the inside track on how to address these problems:
AWOL executives and sponsors
Powerful opponents
Skirting
Team failures
Stakeholder fear
Bonus Section
Faces of Quality: Carl Friedrich Gauss By Pam Baker To celebrate 20 years of Six Sigma, in each issue of the magazine this year, we profile an influential figure in the development of Six Sigma. This month's quality guru is Carl Friedrich Gauss, who introduced the concept of Kaizen, or continuing improvement, to American businesses.
More Features
10 Tips for Deploying a Measurement System Improving Efficiency in Radiology Finding Balance: Scorecard Equalizes Measures of Success Excuses, Excuses: How to Combat Reluctance to Use Lean Six Sigma Walking the Collaboration Talk
Also In This Issue
Editor's Notes
Best Black Belt
Blog Blurbs
Six Sigma Basics
Tool Spotlight
Shop Talk
Six Sigma News Scan iSixSigma Crossword Puzzle
The Cox-Box Cartoon
Open Mike
Digital edition included free!
PointRoll grew from 29 to 201 employees in three years and annually serves billions of rich media ads. When errors and missed deadlines mounted, the pioneer in online advertising turned to Six Sigma. Since January 2007, the small company has trained eight employees and started projects in creative services and production engineering. PointRoll sees Six Sigma as a top priority in terms of differentiating itself from its competition and driving its leadership position.
