Question

Discuss why a broad adoption of DMAIC is not a good idea for a project? Where does the lifecycle breakdown or introduce unnecessary inefficiencies? What would you tell a manager considering issuing such a lifecycle or project mandate?

Answer 1

A broad adoption of DMAIC is not a good idea for a project due to following reasons=

1)The first drawback is that DMAIC can create amazing bureaucracy and rigidity because the methodology covers all the process of the company and this, in turn, leads to delays and problems in creativity.

2)Furthermore, when DMAIC is taken to the extreme problems can arise because companies tend to favor policies that follow the DMAIC methodologies and forget about policies or approaches that can only apply to their company. So, for example, a company can prefer to follow the DMAIC methodology and apply a very expensive measure rather than trying a very inexpensive measure that evidently is needed in the business.

  
3)For small businesses, one of the biggest disadvantages is that applying DMAIC can be very expensive to implement. The main cause of this cost is training. Companies have to find certified DMAIC institutes to get their training or do their training in-house without formal certification.

The lifecycle breakdown occurs in the Analyze stage of DMAIC cycle because  large number of potential root causes of the project problem are identified in this phase via root cause analysis.

I would tell a manager that DMAIC  really focuses on a strict and rigid process to follow and that goes against the new trends that favor creativity and innovation because the innovative approach focuses on redundancy, unusual solutions, and deviations in production, and all these things clearly go against the Six Sigma principles.