Interesting Article on PMI Network – Six Sigma and PMBOK

Just finished reading an old article in my PMP magazine about marrying the two disciplines of PMP and Six Sigma in any given project. They quote, “when a company merges both PMBOK and Six Sigma, it has support for planning and monitoring a project and techniques for better performance in its process”. I’ve been giving this philosophy a lot of thought and practice in my RPO work and I have to say that while some tenets hold true, the jury is still out on some of the other pieces.

Six Sigma has been great in resource re-alignment as it relates to aligning limited sourcing resources to recruiting. The Six Sigma technique of 5 S (Sorting, Set, Standardize, Shine, Sustain) allowed me to view the resources and align them to the most critical areas of recruiting. There have been a number of other six sigma tools that I have utilized and I will write about them in more depth in later posts.

However, the PMP discipline allows you to really set some limits and prevent scope creep. This too will increase efficiency in a recruiting process. Taking requirements from a hiring manager / authority can be controlled if a “Scope Definition” approach is taken. Once the scope is defined, all parties should sign off on the scope and be made to understand any repercussions of scope creep (re-work, adding additional time to the search, etc.)

Overall I am a big advocate of both tools but I really see greater flexibility in using the PMP discipline within an RPO process. However both discipline and tools combined can really impact an RPO whether it is within an implementation phase or the actual operations phase.

Related articles

• Six Sigma and Project Management are a Perfect Combination (pmpworldinc.wordpress.com)