Part III: Getting Buy-in for Your Project

Reality Check

A Six Sigma team charged with improving first-pass yield on pharmaceutical fill lines had been working for two months. They made great progress in the first couple of weeks, but by the beginning of the third month, things began to fall apart. People started coming late for meetings, not doing their assignments, and sometimes not showing up at all. No one seemed to get along any more. The team leader, John, referred to the guidelines in Using the Goals, Roles, and Procedures Pyramid to Identify the Cause of Project Team Problems.

He looked at the “interpersonal relationships” problem area, because team members were not getting along. Following the guidelines, he looked up a level in the pyramid to see if the root cause of the problem might be the procedures they were following. John had to admit that they had gotten sloppy about getting the agenda out, and the task list hadn’t been updated for three weeks. He resolved to do better, but got sidetracked by yet another urgent request to redo his monthly report for the upcoming board meeting. His boss told him, “Your team will just have to wait. If we don’t prove to the board we can hit the numbers this quarter, they’re going to close the plant.” Nobody seemed to mind that John cancelled the next meeting because everybody was getting the same message from their own boss.

Eventually, John came up for air and realized that his team was weeks behind schedule. Another look at the pyramid convinced him that root cause of their difficulty was still higher than procedures. All of the team members were having difficulty with conflict between their roles on the team and their regular jobs, and the goals of the team seemed to be in conflict with the shifting goals of the company.

John decided to use the Project Team Effectiveness Survey with the team to confirm that this was what was getting in the way of their being effective. The results of the survey confirmed his suspicion. John was then able to sit with the team and the sponsor and work on clarifying and refocusing the goals of the team so that it would be clear how they could contribute to the needs of the plant. With a renewed sense of purpose, the team got back to work.