Integration of CMMI , Agile , and Lean Six Sigma

Many organizations have struggled over the past few decades with a blizzard of process improvement methodologies such as Total Quality Management (TQM), Kaizen, JIT Production, and Re-Engineering. These operations are understandably leery of adopting new methodologies given their past experience, especially with a focus on return on investments and leveraging existing practices. This article examines the relationship of Agile, CMMI®, Lean Production and the Six Sigma Define, Measure, Analyze, Improve, and Control (DMAIC) roadmap. The intent is to explain how these methodologies might be synergistically combined for a cohesive approach to enhance continuous process improvement. The Perfect Process Storm “The old days is just 15 years ago.” Billy Corgan, The Smashing Pumpkins Frederick Taylor, regarded as the father of scientific management, was a mechanical engineer in the late 19th century who sought to improve industrial efficiency. Taylor thought that by analyzing work, the “one best way” to do it would be found. He is most remembered for developing scientific management and time and motion studies, wherein a job was broken down into its component parts and measured to the hundredth of a minute. In my University of South Florida college days, one of our classes delved into Taylor’s work. During an exercise where we practiced measuring a worker’s activities, I remember the instructor noting, “Make no mistake about it. While you are standing there with your stopwatch scribbling timed activities on your clipboard, that worker hates your guts.” It was at that moment I decided to avoid this profession altogether. Nonetheless, as I went on to be an engineer and project manager most of my life, it seems clear I came to embrace measures, metrics, and process enhancement. I have now spent the last seven years as a full-time process improvement consultant. Go figure. Modern process improvement began around 1948 with the Japanese Kaizen system, targeting quality, effort, employee involvement, willingness to change, communication, and elimination of waste in business processes. This led in the 1980s to the popular but short-lived TQM concept, meant to improve quality by ensuring conformance to internal requirements (stifling yawn). Then in 1986 the marketing people at Motorola invented Six Sigma, an exciting quality improvement initiative promising to reduce the number of defects and impurities to zero. No one knows quite why they selected six instead of five or four sigma, but it was the new wildfire once Jack Welch at GE went nuts over it and became its leading advocate [3]. Since any project manager can see that a team laser-focused on defects will neglect all their milestones in pursuit of such perfection, this opened the gate in 1990 to Lean Production, based on the Toyota Production System (sometimes called JIT Production), which had fallen in popularity by 1975 in favor of the more generic Lean Production system. In Lean Production, everyone involved in making a product—design and manufacturing engineers, suppliers, laborers, even marketing and salespeople— works together from concept through production. And because the team is focused on one product, there is a cycle of continuous improvement, resulting in cost savings [4]. In the late 1990s AlliedSignal and Maytag decided to combine increased production and reduced defects with the introduction of LSS. Any CEO leery of a process keyed to a single parameter had to love the sound of LSS. In 1996, paired programming and iterative development began when Kent Beck invented Extreme Programming to rescue a Chrysler project that had been scrapped. This first Agile project was subsequently followed by projects using similar iterative methodologies including Scrum, Crystal, and Feature-driven Development leading to the meeting of the Agile Alliance in 2001 where a dozen or so guys (most visibly were Alistair Cockburn, Kent Beck, and Jim Highsmith) generated the Agile Manifesto, promising workIntegration of CMMI, Agile, and Lean Six Sigma