The Marriage of Project Management and Lean Six Sigma

Michael Herskovitz earned a BS in Aerospace Engineering from Penn State, a Master of Science in Engineering Management from Drexel, a Six Sigma Black Belt certification and a Project Management Professional® certification through Villanova. Michael’s career includes experience in aerospace, defense, semiconductor equipment manufacturing, pharmaceutical development and commercialization, and adjunct teaching.

  Governance   Manufacturing   Organizational Project Management   Strategy   Work Breakdown Structures (WBS)  

With increasing emphasis within many corporations regarding business process transformation[1], there is a need for an approach that will ensure a faster, better and more lasting outcome (the focus of this article is on business processes that are the target of company transformation). This article advocates that to achieve this desired outcome from a company transformation strategy, two key ingredients are necessary:

1. The first is the adoption of a purposeful integration of project management[2] and Lean Six Sigma[3] tools, discipline, skill and processes. This approach provides an inherent benefit to a successful delivery of a corporate transformation strategy by equally emphasizing the delivery of benefits with the on-time/on-budget completion of project deliverables (see Ref 2).
2. The second necessary ingredient is the deployment of an organizational structure designed to support the management of the portfolio of projects undertaken to operationalize the transformation strategy.

This article also encourages the need for the academic world to partner with professional associations and industry to develop and offer a dual-subject-matter curriculum to yield professionals armed with the first ingredient, and to assist next-generation business transformation leaders in implementing the desired characteristics of the second ingredient.

Ingredient 1: Partnering of …

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