The Six Sigma Way Team Fieldbook An Implementation Guide

So You Want to Actually Implement Six Sigma Without Losing Your Mind

I've spent more years than I care to count watching companies buy into Six Sigma implementations that collapse within eighteen months. The people who make it stick are the ones who stop treating it like a methodology to memorize and start treating it like a operating system for their organization. That's where The Six Sigma Way Team Fieldbook An Implementation Guide by Richard C. Davis, Paul H. Carlson Jr., and Richard M. Hinderer comes in. Not as a gospel, but as one of the few practical documents that doesn't waste your time with corporate fluff. The book is structured around team-based problem-solving using DMAIC — Define, Measure, Analyze, Improve, Control. But unlike textbooks that describe DMAIC from a consultant's ivory tower, the Fieldbook walks through each phase with actual team exercises, facilitator notes, and worksheets you can photocopy and use the next day. It's designed for a team to work through together, not for a lone project manager to read cover to cover. I picked it up around 2008 when my company was trying to standardize its process improvement efforts across three divisions. Each division had adopted different frameworks — Lean, Six Sigma, TQM — and nobody could talk to each other. The Fieldbook became the common language we needed. Not because it was theoretically superior, but because it was concrete enough to implement consistently and flexible enough to adapt to different types of problems.

How to Use It Without Wasting Six Months

Here's the thing most people get wrong: you don't need to read the whole book before starting. Start with the Define phase. Work through the team exercises. If your team gets stuck, go back and read the relevant section. The book is organized so you can reference individual chapters without having read everything before them. The measurement phase is where most teams stall out, and the Fieldbook handles this better than most resources I've seen. It walks you through building a measurement system plan, identifying which data matters, and — this is the part people skip — validating that your measurement system is actually reliable before you spend weeks analyzing data that doesn't mean anything. I learned this the hard way on a project in 2011 where we spent three weeks running regression analysis on cycle time data only to discover our time-stamping system had a known bug that introduced a consistent 47-second delay on about 30 percent of transactions. Three weeks gone because we never did a measurement system analysis first. The Fieldbook's section on this is maybe twelve pages, but it would have saved us months if we'd done it in order.

What Beginners Miss

The most counter-intuitive part of this book for people new to Six Sigma is the emphasis on control in the final phase. Everyone gets excited about the improve phase — that's where the cool tools are, the DOE stuff, the optimization. But the control phase is where most Six Sigma projects quietly die. The Fieldbook is blunt about this. It dedicates significant real estate to control plans, SPC charts, and standardization. Not because it's bureaucratic, but because data from hundreds of project post-mortems shows that without proper control mechanisms, improvements regress within six to eight months in the vast majority of cases. Another nuance that isn't obvious: the team composition guidance. The authors insist on cross-functional teams with actual decision-making authority. This sounds obvious until you're working in a matrix organization where every stakeholder has a different boss and nobody can commit resources without three levels of approval. The Fieldbook doesn't fully address this political reality, which is its main limitation. I've had to supplement it with internal stakeholder mapping exercises to figure out who actually had sign-off power versus who just had influence. No book will tell you that part.

The Limitations

The book assumes a certain level of organizational maturity. If you're in a company where process documentation doesn't exist and management treats process improvement as a side hobby, the Fieldbook's structure will feel heavyweight. In those environments, you're better off starting with something lighter like Toyota's Kata or even just the DMAIC framework distilled to its essentials. The Fieldbook is at its best in organizations that already have some process discipline and need to systematize their improvement efforts. It also skews manufacturing. While the principles apply to services and healthcare, the examples and exercises are predominantly from discrete manufacturing contexts. If you're in a knowledge-work environment, you'll do some translation. I found that mapping manufacturing terms to service equivalents — for instance, treating a "defect" as a "rework instance" in a claims processing workflow — made the framework work reasonably well, but it required effort on your part.

Where to Get It

The Six Sigma Way Team Fieldbook An Implementation Guide is available through standard channels — Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Wiley's website. The current edition is the second edition, which includes updated examples and some additional tool coverage. The first edition is fine too if you find it cheaper used, since the core framework hasn't changed significantly between editions. If you want a companion resource, I'd recommend pairing it with Montgomery's Introduction to Statistical Quality Control for the deeper statistical background, and maybe a book on change management like Kotter's Leading Change, because the Fieldbook covers the technical side well but underplays the human side of getting people to actually adopt new processes. It won't fix a broken culture. No book will. But if you're serious about building capability in process improvement rather than running one-off projects that produce nice charts and disappear, this is one of the better field guides available. Use it actively, not passively. The exercises only work if your team actually does them.