Friday, October 21, 2011

Six Sigma In Education

The future of a company or institution depends on the performance of their employees and students. Education professionals always come up with new ideas to improve overall performance of students and institutions. These ideas are implemented in the form of new techniques and learning aids in teaching. This information given to the student not only helps them, but also helps the institution to maintain a good track record.

What Is Six Sigma?

A technique to achieve strategic business results, Six Sigma is a customer-based approach, which shows that neglecting defects can turn out very expensive for the company or institution. The fewer risks a company is exposed to, the lesser the possibilities of losing customers.

Origin Of Six Sigma

In the 1980's, under threat from its Japanese counterpart, Motorola came up with a concept to counter the situation. The success of this concept is witnessed in the profit and expansion of companies like General Electric (GE) and Allied Signal.

Culture And Techniques Used In Six Sigma

Culture may be very unnecessary, but by merely changing it, companies can be very successful. This culture includes not just the Quality Leaders, Black Belts and Green Belts, but everyone in the company. After following a process of identifying the problem in a process and charting out the course to address it, the process is evaluated and worked upon.

By reducing the number of defects from a process to 3.4 defectives per million, Six Sigma raises the level of customer satisfaction. In companies, everyone strives to achieve targets by introducing a change in their work environment and way of functioning.

Education And Six Sigma

Six Sigma is the appropriate tool where quality management is concerned. In an educational setting, teachers are the work force and parents are the customers.
The latter tend to pay the fees and expect their wards to get good and qualitative results. By improving teaching techniques, teachers expect a positive change in the performance of their students. This change is expected to last for a stipulated time for the acquired profit to remain constant.

Six Sigma Implementation

The first step before the implementation is to recognize the problem and define a project to lessen or completely eradicate the problem. These projects are led by the Green Belts and assisted by the Black Belts. Using a DMAIC (Define. Measure, Analyze, Improve and Control) theory the following steps are taken

Starting from the senior most level, basic six sigma principles are taught. This creates an environment for innovation and creativity. Thereafter, a module is developed in order to establish a close communication between teachers and students. This module involves preparing a method to obtain and evaluate everyone's input. In educational settings, teachers help in building a data by conducting a study.

Conclusion

By applying Six Sigma to education, a positive change in teaching methods and a consequential positive result is bound to happen. Proper education paves the way for qualitative learning for everyone. By implementing the right techniques, the road ahead would be smooth enough to reach the desired goals.

Tony Jacowski is a quality analyst for The MBA Journal. Aveta Solutions - Six Sigma Online ( http://www.sixsigmaonline.org ) offers online six sigma training and certification classes for lean six sigma, black belts, green belts, and yellow belts.

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