Trained Yellow Belts Think Differently
We’ve been offering a complimentary download of our Yellow Belt training manuals on our website for a couple of weeks and the response has been extremely positive. Of course, some people just want to download something that is free. However, the majority of people are genuinely interested in Six Sigma and process improvement in general, and are looking for ways to bring some foundation capability into their organizations. From the conversations I have, it is clear that the need for basic process improvement hasn’t gone away, but the way companies are willing to build the capability has certainly changed. I did a recent post that talks about how companies are moving back to the basics when it comes to CI, basics that are inexpensive and deliver results to a broad base of the organization.
Now, many of the people that are downloading have heard the term yellow belt and are curious about what a yellow belt skillset is. But I’m seeing that a lot of people don’t have a good feel for exactly what a yellow belt does and how it can benefit the organization. So, I’m going to provide some thoughts here and on some subsequent posts.
As a disclaimer, there is really no standard out there for what a yellow belt knows. I’m talking about our (Qualtec’s) definition of a yellow belt skillset. For us, yellow belt training is usually delivered as 4-5 days of training.
Yellow Belts really should think and act differently after training so, let’s first talk about what yellow belts should be thinking about after training:
- Analyzing real data to drive business decisions, analyzing root cause to drive implementation of the right solutions, and understanding that CI (Lean, Six Sigma, BPM, etc) is all about improving business performance in terms of voice of the customer.
- Identifying and tracking the right metrics (primary, secondary, etc), really understanding process capability and process performance.
- How to practically get and use data and a scientific approach to solve a problem?
- Understanding what a problem is really costing the business, the real cost-of-poor-quality (COPQ)
- Putting in the proper process control mechanisms to sustain improvements over time …
- The project selection and prioritization process of the company to assure that the right things are being targeted, things that will make an impact.
The Yellow Belt skillset is a foundation set of quality improvement and process control tools. It is something that can be applied anywhere in the organization and on any process to yield wide-ranging improvements. It is one approach, and an effective one for many, to building a solid foundation for CI in their organization.
Contact me if you want more info or would like to discuss in more detail ….
