How to keep your project’s success【DMAIC: Control Phase】(Lean Six Sigma)
This article is about the Control Phase of DMAIC. It explains the purpose of this Control Phase and what you do would in the phase. Also it mentions the differences between QC and QA.
DMAIC: The outline and purpose of the Control Phase
Hi, this is Mike Negami, Lean Sigma, Black Belt.
I haven’t talked about DMAIC for a long time, so in review, DMAIC is a framework for process improvement projects with Lean Sigma. I wrote an article explaining the whole picture of DMAIC. Please click the following link for the article. ⇒ “【What is DMAIC?】 The Kaizen Projects’ Winning Pattern (Lean Six Sigma)”
Today’s theme is the last letter of DMAIC: “C”- Control Phase. First of all, what’s the purpose of this Control Phase?
In the Improve Phase, which is the phase before the Control Phase, the project team improves the target process and completely hands the new process to the process owner, then the project team will be dissolved.
However, after that, if that improvement level decreased, that’s not good. Therefore, the biggest purpose of the Control Phase is to create a system that will maintain the improvement or make even better.
What will you do in the Control Phase?
Now, what do you actually do in the Control Phase?
Check if the PDCA cycle is working properly. QA (Quality Assurance)
In the Improve Phase, it’s essential to embed the PDCA Cycle into the target process. This is the scope of Quality Control aka QC. QC is an activity that maintains or enhances quality within each process.
During the Control Phase, you’ll confirm that the PDCA Cycle in the target process is functioning effectively. Furthermore, you’ll confirm that that quality is maintained until the customer finishes using your product or service. This is Quality Assurance aka QA.
Generally speaking, QA is the work of a little higher department, and they identify which processes affect the quality of your products and services the most and maintain or enhance those processes’ quality from outside.
To put it plainly, QC is to improve the quality by creating a PDCA Cycle, and QA is to check from the outside whether the PDCA Cycle is effectively rotating.
Document things about the new process.
The next important thing is to organize and document the results of improvement and the materials you have made.
If you save them in SharePoint or other data storage and make them available to other project teams as a template for future projects, the future project management speed will be greatly increased. We call it ‘Lessons learned’.
In addition, make and organize the target process’s process map and SOP (Standard Operating Procedure), internal policies, and ISO standard materials etc.If operations of the target process’s employees have changed, you should update their job descriptions.
If you’re in the manufacturing industry, you would make a ‘Control Plan’. This document is very similar to FMEA (Failure Mode and Effects Analysis). ⇒ “Process FMEA (Failure Mode and Effects Analysis)【Excel Template】”
The Control Plan shows how to measure CTQ (Critical To Quality) and what to do when variances occur. I’ll write this in another article.
Make a plan for training new workers in the future.
We are supposed to have trained the current workers for the new process at the Improve Phase. The important thing to consider here is that when a new worker comes in, if you rely on only the current worker to train the new worker, the quality of the work will be reduced each time the new ones take over.
Therefore, you should make a plan for who will do what and how when a new worker comes in.
Measure the success of the project and celebrate the project team’s success and efforts.
Lastly, review the project charter you made at the Define Phase and confirm whether you’ve solved all the issues of the project by number.
By including those numbers in your final report and reporting that to all stakeholders, you can nurture a Kaizen culture within the company.
Also, make sure to congratulate the project team on their success and efforts individually. Continually doing this will raise the morale of the entire company.
Thank you very much for viewing.
“See these other popular articles.”
Comment
great…
thank you very much mike Sensei