There are many important aspects about the characteristics of Six Sigma teams that we need to understand. First, Six Sigma teams are ideally multidisciplinary and cross functional. The reason for that is we want to avoid what’s called group think. We want to make sure we’re viewing the entire value stream across the process. We need our team to be able to share information and expertise seamlessly, and be able to share resources between our teams. An important consideration is mapping talents to the specific needs of the project and the team. For example, we need subject matter experts. Will we need suppliers to this process? Would we want customers to be involved as well so that we can have their point of view? Is there a specific technical, organizational, or communication skills that we want to have present in our team, so that we have a balanced approach? And all of the talent skills we need to be most effective. Teams can be formed for different purposes and for specific projects. Examples of various teams include process teams, quality teams, ad-hoc teams, and self-managed teams. An ad-hoc team could be formed and end in hours, by solving a very specific point solution for some kind of problem. Whereas a self-managed or self-directed work team could exist for years, with a pretty stable number of team members, and has a team leader to facilitate the team activities.
We need to maintain flexibility. The reason for that is the nature of projects changes over time, as do our objectives. Team members may come and go over time as well. We also need to quickly adapt to meet new challenges. For example, one team I helped form was focusing in on the human resources hiring process for a state government agency. Over time, there was a need for support to roll out a new HR solution. And all of the hiring managers and the bureaus needed to adapt. This team very quickly took on that new challenge, and was superior in their results. Resources, roles, and responsibilities are always very important. As we move through the process, we need to create a detailed work breakdown structure. And the team will begin to define roles, responsibilities, and necessary resources who or what will be needed, when would they will be needed, how much of their time would we require? What kind of subject matter expertise, technical or information technology support do we need? It’s good to think about relationships and reporting structures as well. We need to have the right people engaged with the right people, if you will. But we also honor the organizational structure, the hierarchy of who reports to who, and make sure that politically, we’re running things in a manner that’s going to be best accepted by the entire organization.