Green Beret's Guide to Six Sigma
By Tim Beckman
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About this ebook
This is a definitive guide for the staff layman struggling with Counter Insurgency or COIN operations. It applies the methodology of Six Sigma to the staff process with the intent of producing more qualitative and quantitative results with real impact on the battle space.
Tim Beckman
I am a retired US Army Special Forces team sergeant. This is my first book for general publication, but I have previously written and published several handbooks for Special Operations forces and the Department of State. I live currently in Germany with my family and continue to work as a contractor.
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Green Beret's Guide to Six Sigma - Tim Beckman
The Green Beret’s Guide to Six Sigma
Tim Beckman
Copyright 2011 Smashwords by Tim Beckman
Discover other Smashwords titles by Tim Beckman:
Blackwater: From The Inside Out
IQATF: The Less Lethal Solution
Smashwords License Notes
This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please visit an ebook vendor where you can purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.
Introduction
Back in the day I used to think that it was enough to develop a plan and execute it. After all big daddy Army always seemed to have enough cash and resources to back my play. Then I joined the Special Forces and learned to do more with less, to the point that sometimes we got tasked to do missions with nothing.
As I was completing my Six Sigma certification recently I realized that most of what Six Sigma stands for are processes that, had I known about them or how to use them back in the day, I could have accomplished far more and been inherently more effective along the way.
In Special Forces ‘management’ tools equate to Troop Leading Procedures, Military Decision Making Processes (MDMP) or the CARVER matrix. These, much like the business processes that Six Sigma tries to fix, are a day late and a dollar short when evaluated for effectiveness and efficiency. This is never more true then evaluating the process of Special Operations Forces of SOF engagement. Millions of dollars and hundreds of millions of man-hours are expended in waging campaigns that often lack a process or metrics or even routine evaluation of effectiveness.
There are naturally times when the usual tools are most appropriate. As the bad guys are closing on your position and your hoping to god the radio works so you can call in fire you probably don’t need to be thinking about whether a Kaizen Event would have been a better mission analysis process then going with the word of an informant. But there are plenty of times pre mission when some good staff work would lay the groundwork for success.
This book is for those times. For the others I recommend the Push To Talk button ;)
Tim
Table of Contents
Preface
Chapter One – Counter Insurgency and other interesting work
Chapter Two – Define Phase
Chapter Three –Measure Phase
Chapter Four – Analyze Phase
Chapter Five – Improve Phase
Chapter Six – Control Phase
Preface
‘Deliberate and defined activity produces results, which are quantifiable and qualitative.’
Six Sigma is a business process, or more accurately a way of doing business, that seeks to solve the problems, which impact on customer satisfaction. Secondarily, Six Sigma gets after the detrimental processes which impact on the bottom line including cycle time reduction, cost reduction, or defect reduction.
So you are probably asking yourself ‘What does any of that have to do with me or my mission set?’ Good questions.
Mission execution is fundamentally a process. It involves planning, analysis, tasking and execution. It should also involve research and post event analysis but that’s not always the case.
Six Sigma breaks the process into small manageable pieces and applies specific analytic tools, almost all of which are unusual to the Special Operations Forces (SOF) planning or execution pallet. Through a process known as DMAIC or Define, Measure, Analyze, Improve and Control, Six Sigma provides a pathway for the user to follow which reveals the most effective and efficient way of doing business, or in your case of accomplishing the mission. Some of the tools will seem familiar to you like flowcharting or bar charts, others may seem a little off the deep end like standard deviation. All of them however provide substance and when applied properly, show that you have applied due diligence in your thought process. Considering the impact of making bad or ineffective decision in today’s media intensive environment during a mission in say, Afghanistan versus being able to prove you did all you could to mitigate, might mean the difference between having a job tomorrow and well….not.
In a nutshell, the intent of each of the DMAIC components of Six Sigma are the following:
Define Phase.
Here we decide what the end state of our project should be. This includes some of the classic tools like individual slides from the Military Decision Making Process (MDMP) concerning Mission, Assumptions, Constraints and Limitations. We define who our customers are and what they expect from this project. There is generally a problem statement produced during this phase, which identifies the need for this project and how we are going to get after the problem set sort of like the Operations Order (OPORD) Paragraph 2: Mission. This phase is similar in some ways to a Concept of Operations or CONOP brief.
Measurement Phase.
In this phase we measure what we are doing currently. The intent is to agree upon standardized methodology, metrics, and which tools we think are going to be appropriate and their implementation. This phase is comparable to some extent to the Task, Conditions and Standards portion of military doctrine.
Analysis Phase.
Here we apply the methodology agreed upon in