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For guidance in implementing Lean Six Sigma (LSS), both the academic and the practitioners' literature offer deployment models and models for assessing the implementation's maturity. This paper makes a critical appraisal of the quality and usefulness of a sample of 19 such models. The appraisal follows a set of review criteria developed on the basis of theory. The analyzed models appear disconnected from established theory in organizational development, and the given advice lacks in specificity and operationality. The underlying notion of deployment processes seems an exclusively programmatic view, leaving little room for idiosyncrasy and learning elements. The study signals an important need for scientific insight in the process of implementing approaches such as LSS, and for a more effective translation of established theory in organizational development to forms practitioners can use. The paper also bridges the gap between academic literature on organizational development and practices in the field as codified in practical deployment models, and identifies how the former could have more impact on the latter.
Key words: deployment, diffusion of practices, Lean Six Sigma, maturity, operations improvement, organizational development
INTRODUCTION
Operations improvement manifests itself in various forms, such as total quality management (TQM), business process reengineering, lean manufacturing, business process management, Six Sigma, theory of constraints, and Lean Six Sigma (LSS). This paper focuses on operations improvement following the Six Sigma method (Linderman et al. 2003; Schroeder et al. 2008; Zu, Fredendall, and Douglas 2008; Arumugam, Antony, and Linderman 2014), including recent manifestations that incorporate principles from the lean manufacturing community. This latter amalgamation is generally called LSS in the popular literature (George 2003; Shah, Chandrasekaran, and Linderman 2008).
Adoption of LSS principles and the translation to structures, policy, and action plans create a task for an organization's leadership, namely that of managing the LSS implementation process. This involves the design of the initiative, its day-to-day control, and, when needed, the adjustment of the initiative. This study focuses on the task of adopting LSS, which the authors refer to as LSS deployment. The academic and practitioners' literature on LSS offers a multitude of models for structuring the deployment task, which the authors call deployment models. In addition, this literature offers models for assessing how far an organization has progressed in deploying LSS. The...