Читать книгу Lean Six Sigma For Dummies - Martin Brenig-Jones - Страница 42

When you start an improvement project, ensuring that you and your team understand why you’re undertaking the project and what you want to achieve is an essential ingredient for success. With a DMAIC project, you start with a problem that needs to be solved. Before you can solve the problem, you need to define it. One of the key outputs from the Define phase is a completed improvement charter.

The improvement charter is an agreed document defining the purpose and goals for an improvement team. It can help address some of the elements that typically go wrong in projects by providing a helpful framework to gain commitment and understanding from the team. Keep your charter simple and try to contain the document to one or two sides of A4 in line with the example shown in Figure 2-2.

The improvement charter contains the following key elements:

 A high-level business case providing an explanation of why undertaking the project is important.

 A problem statement defining the issue to be resolved.

 A goal statement describing the objective of the project.© Martin Brenig-Jones and Jo DowdallFIGURE 2-2: A sample improvement charter.

 The project scope defining the parameters and identifying any constraints.

 The CTQs specifying the problem from the customer’s perspective. Unless you already have the CTQs, these may not be known until the Measure phase.

 Roles identifying the people involved in and around the project, expectations of them and their responsibilities. The improvement charter forms a contract between the members of the improvement team, and the champion or sponsor.

 Milestones summarizing the key steps and provisional dates for achieving the goal.

The improvement charter needs to be seen as a “living document” and be updated throughout the various DMAIC phases, especially as your understanding of the problem you’re tackling becomes clearer.