SharePoint Tip of the Month

October 2008: Six Sigma Based Project Portfolio Management Using SharePoint

Many companies in the manufacturing and utility industries are familiar with and employ the Six Sigma business management strategy, a methodology designed to improve efficiencies by incorporating quality management methods into a structured process. As demonstrated by a solution developed recently for a global customer by Abel Solutions and sponsored by Microsoft, SharePoint provides all the tools necessary for managing a portfolio of projects based on Six Sigma.

In the solution, all members of the organization have an opportunity to propose new ideas for process improvement. An InfoPath form is used to collect basic information about the idea, such as the defect, a problem statement, and the possible benefits to the organization.

In a Six Sigma process, before an idea can be taken on as a project, it must first be adopted and approved by a Program Manager, a Business Analyst and the process owner. In addition, other roles must also be identified to participate in the project. These include a Green Belt, a Black Belt, a Master Black Belt, a Sponsor, and a Champion. A custom workflow, based on the Workflow Foundation in SharePoint, collects all of this information, assigns approval tasks to the appropriate parties, and notifies them of their assignment at the appropriate times.

Once a project is approved, the belts and other parties need a place to track all of their project information, such as action items, milestone dates, and key documents. A dedicated SharePoint site based on a custom site template is automatically provisioned by the workflow when the project is approved.

To move projects from phase to phase, the green belts can request approval from the master black belt, again using a custom SharePoint workflow. This allows the master black belt to perform critical quality checks prior to moving to the next project phase. As the phase changes, key project indicators are tracked and updated automatically by the workflow.

Since the core of Six Sigma is process improvement, it is important for champions and sponsors to be able to see key reports on how projects are performing and improving efficiency across the organization, or within specific business sectors. Using a dashboard based on Excel Services, managers can quickly and easily access graphs detailing the metrics they need in order to make key decisions.

The fundamental goals of Six Sigma are process improvement, efficiency, and quality. The forms, workflow, document management, collaboration, reporting and dashboarding capabilities of SharePoint and related Office tools make them a perfect platform for building a solution to manage a Six Sigma based portfolio of projects.