Six Sigma Black Belt Tutorial | Project Charter Areas

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Project Charter Areas

A project charter is the first step in the Six Sigma methodology. It takes place in the Define step of DMAIC and the charter can make or break a successful project. It can make it by specifying necessary resources and boundaries that will in turn ensure success; it can break it by reducing team focus, effectiveness and motivation.

Necessary Project Charter Areas

Project Title

At the beginning of a project one hopes to complete the project and over time this project will hopefully serve as a best practice for other people within your business. It is important to name the project with a properly descriptive title that will allow others to quickly view and select the project based on the keywords and phrases. If one is increasing call center effectiveness, a possible title may be Call Center Cycle Time or Call Center Variation Reduction.

Black Belt/Green Belt

This is the person leading the process improvement project. It is important to identify the project leader so management knows who is leading the effort, and others can locate the leader for gathering further knowledge at a later date.

Mentor/Master Black Belt

It is important to identify a resource for the project leader to lean on if any project questions or issues arise (and they always do). Everyone needs a helping hand – a successful project ensures that when it’s needed, the helping hand has already been identified.

Project Start Date

No project can maintain momentum indefinitely. This field is mainly for documentation purposes. It is the date the project or project leader formally started working on the project.

Anticipated Project End Date

The anticipated project end date will probably be set by the mentor, master black belt or quality leader. The duration of the project will provide the leader and team adequate time to complete the project, given business conditions, work-load, holiday schedules, and such. Many businesses set general guidelines around how long projects should take.

Cost of Poor Quality

It is relatively easy to quantify the cost of poor quality that is being produced by the process. If scrap is being produced – quantify it. If excess hours are being spent by employees performing manual and redundant activities – quantify it. If violations and fines are being levied – quantify it. It just needs to give business leaders an order of magnitude guesstimate of your project savings. If the business is saving Rs 50,000 over the next year, that may not be a project on which to focus an entire team.

Process Importance

Every business operates by processes. What is the process that one would be improving and why is it important enough to spend time improving? For instance, if improvement is needed in the account opening process, one could identify how the current process compares to competition, how it is the lifeline of your company, how the customer experience is suffering etc.

Process Problem

Once there is a high level view of why the process is important to the business, it is important to view the issues. For instance, there is no online data checking, customers cannot instantly open accounts which leads to frustration, redundant processes lead to human error, no validation of customer typed information leads to mis-shipments of collateral, etc.

Process Start/Stop Points

Bound the project with a start and stop point: From the time a customer calls until the time the complaint is handled and customer is informed of the decision. Then, when the inevitable issue arises confusing the group’s mission. One can ask – ‘Does that action/issue occur between our process stop and start points?’ If the answer is no, table it and get the team focused on the task at hand.

Project Goals

What results do you anticipate from this project? Will cycle time be reduced 50 percent? Will defects be eliminated or at least reduced 90 percent? Will variable costs be identified and capped to a certain dollar figure per transaction? Set challenging but realistic goals.

Process Measurements

What are the measures that will be used to determine effectiveness of the project. Will it be Rs/item or cycle time in days, or call queue time in seconds? Specify all that is necessary, but within the scope (process start/stop points) of the project.

Team Members

List the following roles and who will be filling the roles:
Sponsor
Project leader
Subject matter experts – it is sometimes a useful reference to list the subject matter in parentheses next to each name, especially if the team is cross functional and employees do not know each other.

Project Timeframe

Major milestones need to be determined. For example: presentations, phases of the Six Sigma methodology, etc. and the dates in between. Mentors and MBBs are very helpful in creating this part of the charter because they have done projects and have an idea for how long each step requires.