Abstract

Most Operational Excellence corporate initiatives fail to yield the desired results: many organisations are struggling to turn their Operational Excellence efforts into a success, citing lack of leadership, changing business focus, internal resistance, and availability of resources as the main impeding factors. While a lot of focus is usually put on the technical side, the Leadership, organisational and cultural impacts are often an afterthought, causing failure down the line. The Design-Measure-Analyze-Improve-Control (DMAIC) framework is the problem solving approach that has been at the core of the Six Sigma methodology since its inception, while Scrum is among the most known and adopted Agile methods, characterised by teams given significant authority and responsibility for many aspects of their work. Although it may seem that DMAIC and Scrum tend to pull organisations in different directions, with Scrum favouring flexibility and adaptability and DMAIC favouring process standardisation instead, this conceptual paper shows the two methodologies and can work well together, proposes a practical framework for their integration, and defines the Leadership’s traits needed for their successful integration.