Ready for a Lean Six Sigma Flashback?
grinning at cringes past
Amazing what you can find in the shadows.
Friend to the blog Kurt reminded me why I was so happy to head to NATO for the second half of the first decade of this century. I had just spent the previous half-decade recovering from all the TQL stuff. With everyone breathlessly chasing the latest concept they heard at their “Two Week MBA for Flag Officers” upward bound meets band camp experience, it could all be so exhausting.
By becoming a NATO Euroweenie, I managed to avoid all this. I heard about it. I read about it…but praise Buddha, never had to brief it.
Ummm…I think it has a headstone now too.
While money and efficient processes are important when you look at the last quarter century, what did we gain?
Did the “business best practices” fads of the 1990s-2000s make LCS better? Did it make DDG-1000 a success? Did it control technology risk assessment with FORD? Did it create a more effective maintenance infrastructure?
Did our proposed cure for perceived ills - spreadsheets and motivational speaker seminars - really address the core problem?
Was it really the system that produced our process - and not the system that selected our people - that needed to be looked at? Was it both problems, but we decided to attack the more comfortable of the two?
That’s a hard nut to crack … but boy did the struggle generate some charts.
I can’t laugh too hard, because for one NATO exercise, I was told to turn the existing Conditions-Based OPLAN into an Effects-Based OPLAN inside a work week and created a slide not dissimilar to the above. It confused people so much and appeared to be so deep, that no one challenged it. Still proud of my intellectual chaff.
Just look at the Seawolf and the audacity of it. Seawolf was a Bentley, VA Class and on were General Motors products.
Meanwhile, IRQ was falling apart and The Smartest People in the Room™ were convinced that a small, caveat-laden NATO could fix AFG.
What a time.
To be fair, I believe that Dr. Deming would be aghast today if he saw what his 'disciples' have wrought. I speak from experience - somewhere in the twists and turns of my engineering career at the Great Big Defense Contractor I became a 6 Sigma Black Belt and in the process went back and read Deming's original work.
Half a century into this mess. To quote Dave Larter adding to ADM Rickover.
https://www.defensenews.com/naval/the-drift/2020/12/12/its-rickover-time-the-drift-s-ii-vol-xxxvi/
"A deemphasis on engineering and technical expertise resident in the Navy and instead outsourcing that to industry, and a corresponding shift to emphasizing management skills, will have long-term consequences for the Navy, Rickover agued.
“I have learned from many years of bitter experience that we cannot depend on industry to develop, maintain, and have available a technical organization capable of handling the design of complex ships and their equipment without the Navy, itself, having a strong technical organization to oversee the work in detail,” he said, adding that “management systems are as endemic to the government as the Black Plague was in Medieval Europe.”
The emphasis on management over technical acumen in naval officers, and the empowerment of line officers over technical experts in technical matters, combines to push bad engineering practices on the Navy, he said."
The plague continues unabated and the immunization is about as good as that for SARS-CoV-2. Big Defense is making money like Big Pharma.