Six Sigma Team Dynamics: The Elusive Key to Project Success

287 Pages·2003·0.969 MB·English

by  George Eckes, Sandra Derickson

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Team-Fly®
S I X S I G M A
TEAM DYNAMICS
The Elusive Key
to Project Success
GEORGE ECKES
JOHN WILEY & SONS, INC.

S I X S I G M A
TEAM DYNAMICS

S I X S I G M A
TEAM DYNAMICS
The Elusive Key
to Project Success
GEORGE ECKES
JOHN WILEY & SONS, INC.
Copyright ©2003 by George Eckes. All rights reserved.
Published by John Wiley & Sons, Inc., Hoboken, New Jersey.
Published simultaneously in Canada.
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data:
Eckes, George, 1954–
Six sigma team dynamics : the elusive key to project success / George
Eckes.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
Bookz ISBN 0-471-22277-1 (CLOTH : alk. paper)
1. Teams in the workplace. 2. Project management. 3. Leadership.
I. Title.
HD66 .E324 2002
658.4′04—dc21
2002006584
Printed in the United States of America.
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
To my dear Uncle Joseph Della Malva,
it has been an honor being a part of your “team.”
And to the memory of my sister, Adrienne.
You left our “team” too soon.

Foreword
As the Business Leader for Household Retail Services, I have become
keenly aware of the impact Six Sigma, as a management philosophy,
can have in managing a business. Both in my current responsibilities
and in my previous career at General Electric, I have seen the power
of Six Sigma firsthand in helping my organization improve both its
effectiveness and efficiency.
We have embraced Six Sigma at Household Retail Services since
early 2001. Having worked with George Eckes at General Electric, I
knew he had a results-driven approach. Since Household Retail Ser-
vices contracted with Eckes and Associates Inc., we have had impres-
sive success.
A key ingredient in our success was embracing Six Sigma as a man-
agement strategy. Beginning in the spring of 2001 we created our Six
Sigma Business Process Management System. My management team
and I aligned our core and subprocesses to our business objectives and
began to collect data on measures of both effectiveness and efficiency.
By the summer of 2001, we had selected nine low-performing, high-
impact projects for improvement. Over the course of the next six
months, George Eckes and his staff trained our project improvement
teams to apply Six Sigma tactically. By year-end 2001, we were cele-
brating our first round of successes. These successes included reduc-
ing dispute resolution from an average of 38 days to less than 3, and
dramatically reducing incidences of fraud.
Which brings me to the topic of George’s third book on Six Sigma,
Six Sigma Team Dynamics: The Elusive Key to Project Success.The tools
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