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
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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
Chapter One – Counter Insurgency and other interesting work
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 the Measurement Phase to data, which we have compiled for just this purpose. Our intent is to identify the root cause(s) of failure of defects in the system. In the world of SOF we use the CARVER matrix (Criticality, Access, Recognizability, Vulnerability, Effects on Local Populace, and Recouperability) for analysis of target systems and associated subsystems and it represents one of the only comparable techniques that I am aware of.
We also need to validate the data sets we are analyzing to ensure that randomly selected data is in fact random and representative data is in fact representative. This may seem obvious but it’s not. Consider:
In our example, your team drives around in a HMMWV and solicits responses to a questionnaire from local residents of multiple villages in a region with a dedicated insurgency at work. Based on those responses you advise the staff to develop a response to local concerns and when you’ve applied your conclusion and it fails to have the intended outcome, you act surprised. I watched this process happen again and again in several places in the world. Not taking into consideration the environment that exists or that which you create when compiling data, creates bad data. Bad data cannot enable good decisions.
Improve Phase
Based on the Analysis Phase results, we create or identify possible solutions to the problems with the intent of reducing or eliminating defects and garnering efficiency. In this step there is also a missing military component, namely pilot testing. In Six Sigma you have to not only find a potential fix but also you have to test it practically before you apply it system wide. Important to this effort is the understanding that the pilot results may show that you missed something important and that you need to go back to the drawing board and that’s ok. The inability to accept failure as part of a deliberate process to design and implement fixes, is a critical shortcoming of strategy which surfaces every time some staff applies a fix based on a historical reference to a modern issue and it fails.
Control Phase.
This is the final phase and it is where you document everything you did, brief back the boss, and then establish or update your Standard Operating Procedures or SOPs. Important here is to establish a regular relook schedule and most importantly to validate that the results you came up with during the process are suitable and acceptable to the client. Your idea of what constitutes a solution and that of the client have to match up or it’s back to the beginning and do this all over again. This demonstrates the importance of buy-in from the Define Phase all the way through the Control Phase.
So stick with me through the next couple chapters and I’ll make this as pain free as possible. I think you’ll actually get to the end, much like I did when my certification as a Six Sigma Green Belt was finished, and realize that some of this you knew inherently but didn’t realize there was a method to your madness. The rest will either be useful to you right away or maybe end up on the ‘ol brain shelf til later when you dust it off.
Either way, as my Sergeant Major used to say ‘It’s all good training’.
Chapter One – Counter Insurgency and other interesting work
Special Forces have a couple basic missions. They include Foreign Internal Defense, Direct Action, Special Reconnaissance, Counter Terrorism, and Unconventional Warfare. It was my experience that the most challenging missions were the ones involving Counter Insurgency or COIN. After retiring I got to see these missions from a couple different perspectives so I am going to use COIN for the basis of the examples in this book.
This is going to be pretty simplistic and to the point. If you’re already intimately familiar with the concepts of COIN then bear with me or jump ahead. If you’re not, then come along for a short blurb from my soapbox. I’m a little passionate about the work. You can’t live on the side of a mountain somewhere for months with a group of Little Brown Guys without developing a relationship. Pulling frag out of kids who are braving minefields, laid by their government to keep them segregated, in order to get to chow being airdropped, makes you callous after a while. That’s the life I lived for most of my adult life.
History of Insurgency
The COIN process has been around forever and ever. In conflict you generally either have two sides, where one of them is stronger then the other, or you have a group of people who feel oppressed by the existing structure of governance which rules over them. In both cases you have the scene setter for insurgent activity.