wrong for product development
—Here’s the proof
Katherine Radeka, President, Whittier Consulting Group Inc. (katherine.radeka@
whittierconsulting.com)
Katherine Radeka
Everyone has been talking about “lean” product development for several years and trying to apply it to new product development (NPD).
More recently, people have started to ask how Six Sigma factors in, especially when both techniques are tied to NPD. In this article, the
author takes on this topic. Her article follows an extensive overview on “lean” she wrote with coauthor Tricia Sutton that was published
in the June 2007 issue of Visions.
Six Sigma is a methodology for continuous improvement
that has gained significant momentum in the past five
years, and it may soon arrive at a product development
organization near you. Will it hurt? Can it help? What are all of
those colored belts?
What is Six Sigma?
Motorola developed Six Sigma in the 1990s to provide a
corporate-wide focus on quality management. Then, Jack Welch
of General Electric (GE) embraced Six Sigma and drove it
into every GE business
unit. Six Sigma draws
from the works of W.
Edward Deming and
other quality management experts, as well
as from the research on
how to achieve change
at the corporate level to
articulate a clear path for
any organization that wants to make measurable improvements in
quality, efficiency, and cost.1 Six Sigma, like all process management and continuous-improvement methods, has its roots in the
operations research conducted, beginning in the 1920s, by W.
Edwards Deming, Walter Shewhart, and others. When American
audiences in the 1950s were resistant to the lessons that emerged
from this research, Deming went to Japan, where he found a willing student in Taichi Ohno of Toyota.
In the 1980s, when Japanese cars began to threaten the U.S.
auto industry, these ideas became popular in the United States,
where they became known as Total Quality Management. Direct
studies of Toyota’s production system led to Lean Manufacturing.
IS09000 is a certification program that validates whether or not a
company has good process management procedures in place.
Six Sigma was Motorola’s approach for implementing quality
and process management across a very large organization with
tops-down, metrics-driven accountability for results. Like all of
these methodologies, Six Sigma has its own language. Six Sigma
experts earn “belts,” from green belt to master black belt, and get
promoted to new levels based on successful project completions.
In the language of Six Sigma, Define-Measure-Analyze-Improve-Control (DMAIC) is the process used to improve a process—any
process according to Six Sigma authors and speakers.
“Six Sigma people usually
encounter significant
resistance when they move...
into engineering or
marketing...”
However, people employing Six Sigma usually encounter significant resistance when they move their work into engineering or
marketing, the two key players in product development. “We’re
different,” new product development (NPD) practitioners say.
“We have to have the freedom to be creative.” Some Six Sigma
experts decry this lack of “process discipline.”
Process management in times of change
Mary J. Benner, Professor at the Wharton School of Business
at the University of Pennsylvania, has actually studied the effects
of process improvement and process management programs on
technological innovation and the ability to adapt to changing
markets. For the last 10 years, Benner has looked at the photography industry, watching as photography and consumer electronics
companies navigated the shift from film to digital photography.
To observe the effectiveness of product development, she has
examined 20 years of patent applications and their more recent
product releases. In 2002, she published her initial findings,
which noted that companies with strong process-management
programs released more patents, but that many more of those
patents represented only incremental improvements rather than
breakthrough ideas.2
In a research paper for PDMA’s Journal of Product Innovation
Management that will be published later this year, Benner observes
that those companies with strong process management tools in
the photography industry had a more difficult time managing
the transition from film to digital, while those in the consumer
electronics industry had an easier time. 3
During an interview for this article, Benner theorized that moving from film to digital photography required a lot of flexibility,
whereas a digital camera is an incremental move for a consumer
electronics company, especially a printer company like Hewlett-Packard, since the technology and the business model are highly
leverageable.
3M and Six Sigma
For direct evidence of the difficulties that a product development group has with Six Sigma, look no further than 3M. In the
1980s and early 1990s, this company was renown for its unique
approach to innovation, fostering products such as Thinsulate® and
the ubiquitous Post-it Note®. However, by 2000, the mood had
shifted away from corporate laboratories. When James McNerney
lost the battle to succeed Jack Welch at GE, 3M enthusiastically
