Six Sigma Contributions to Project Management in Marketing Processes
A great deal of standard material is available to help marketing professionals generate a project plan. It is not our intent in this chapter to review the basics of the project management body of knowledge. Our goal is to demonstrate how a few value-adding elements from traditional Six Sigma tools help in the design and analysis of marketing cycle time. We want you to have high confidence that what you choose to do and how long you forecast that it will take are in alignment with management expectations.
We have found, over the last decade of studying project cycle time, that executives and work teams are really out of touch with one another. This is true of both marketing and technical teams across the strategic, tactical, and operational processes. Executives have a cycle-time expectation that is almost always dramatically shorter than what their teams say they need to do the job right. Completing a set of tasks correctly and fully is what teams try to do. Management forces these teams to do their work faster than that. Why does this happen? Usually the key reasons stem from the business's doing too many projects and from being unaware of when and why each project should finish. The thinking is "the faster we get done, the sooner the cash will flow in, and we hope we will make our numbers." Busy people present a comforting image that they are helping increase income.
This rushed, frenetic, short-term-focused behavior causes three consequences: unfinished critical activities (or tasks); incomplete key deliverables; and ad hoc usage of tools, methods, and best practices. Any combination of these three can result, but they merely serve as a warning sign of unsustainable growth. Rushing works, but not on a sustainable basis. Rushing produces sporadic growth. If you want consistent growth, allow your teams the time they need for proper planning and completion of requirements (using the appropriate tools-tasks-deliverables combination).
Unfinished activities or tasks occur when a flow of work stops prematurelybecause of lack of time, lack of funds, or superseding priorities. For example, completing a task may require seven essential steps; however, shortcuts taken in the process may have truncated some of the steps. If most senior executives assessed task completion below a superficial look, they would be surprised by the number of shortcuts that occur in their company. Our collective experience tells us that this "abridged" approach negatively affects your ability to meet your growth goals. Too often executives are unaware of its occurrence or its magnitude of effect on the business. Yes, work gets done, but it gets done incorrectly and incompletely. Work gets done just to the point of "that's good enough for nowwe'll clean it up later when we have time" (which seldom happens, because we have too many other projects to do so that we can make our growth numbers). Growth is not sustainable under these self-defeating conditions.
Incomplete deliverables wield a similar, but more obvious, outcome than unfinished tasks. At the juncture of a Gate Review, the data needed to assess risk and make key decisions either is absent or is less helpful to the executives who confirm that the phase-gate requirements have been met. Summary data gets trumped up to appear to have enough credibility to enable the gatekeepers. People can get clever at dressing up incomplete data to look good. The typical gatekeeper, when presented with this situation, immediately goes into "best judgment" mode. This tactic saves face but cannot replace balanced sets of data that tell the truth. Taking incomplete sets of summary data and filling in gaps with judgment is routine in modern corporations. When this becomes a standard practice, sustainable growth is not. You have a mismatch between what data is required to make decisions and what data your teams are allowed (funded and expected) to produce.
Clients tell us that another fallout of an environment that breeds incomplete data is that the talented people shy away from such projects. The experts opt out of projects that expect them to sell half-baked data at Gate Reviews because they find them unrewarding. Hence, less-experienced people staff these projects, thereby causing learning curve issues when producing complex deliverables. We have observed that under pressure, management tends to load teams to the hilt, even with B-grade projects. Chapter 4 , "Six Sigma in the Strategic Marketing Process," shows how to cut these projects back to an acceptable level.
Ad hoc use of tools, methods, and best practices yields inconsistent results. A compounding effect starts with misaligning tasks with their enabling tools. The tools become viewed as unimportant or things that slow down progress. Unimportant tools become ignored tools. Ignored tools obviously cannot fulfill their purpose of generating consistent and proper results. Lack of a systematic linkage of enabling tools applied to completing a task (or a series of related tasks) produces unpredictability. Critical tasks get done in any number of ways. In fact, an undisciplined application of enabling tools can elicit ill-defined tasks and incorrect data summaries. Often personal preference determines which tools get used (the familiar or "easy" tool), as opposed to a standard of excellence that is universally recognized by management. Hence, the individual deciding how to complete a task ignores best practices (standard work) that shape the adoption of supporting tools and methods. Consequently, inconsistency defines the standard for unchecked application of tools, methods, and best practices.
There is much you can do to fix this mismatch. A disciplined approach for both management and the work teams can stabilize inconsistencies and drive predictable results. The project management discipline coupled with Lean principles and Six Sigma can better design and statistically model cycle time. This combination can improve understanding and documentation of critical path failure modes and then better resolve which tasks and enabling tool sets are critical to producing the necessary deliverables for proper decision-making at a Gate Review or project milestone meeting. When such work is designed, funded, and expected, risk is much easier to manage.
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