The Pied Piper is a grim story about naive innocents being led to their demise.
This morning I received an email about a talk by a hawker of the Six Sigma Scam, under the auspices of the Pied Piper. The talk is attempting to lead naive innocents in a new direction. It promotes: "a new set of Agile and Lean tools to replace pre-pandemic TQM tools such as Quality Circles".
Ironically, Six Sigma is not mentioned, despite the Pied Piper pawn's claim elsewhere that it gives "efficiency". It certainly proved an "efficient" way to go down the drain for 91% of Six Sigma true believers (Qualpro survey). For example, my article https://lnkd.in/giBb6w56 describes the destruction it wrought at Ford. A study of hundreds of "successful" Six Sigma projects showed 1 in 5 defectives AFTER "improvement".
Six Sigma was no accident. My article https://lnkd.in/gNh32-wQ describes how it was built as intentional fraud, by a self-confessed con man.
AGILE
The Pied Piper's new direction of Agile, has nothing to do with Quality. Agile is a software development methodology that evolved from James Martin's RAD (Rapid Application Development) of the 70's. RAD was an improvement on the traditional "waterfall" development. Instead of writing a specification and having developers disappear into their cave for years, the idea was for developers to show prototypes to users for feedback along the way.
RAD morphed into RIP (Rapid Interactive Prototyping). RIP morphed to Agile. The Pied Piper is not concerned that it has nothing to do with Quality. It is a source of income from the naive.
LEAN
Lean is a fad that has had a 98% failure rate (IW survey). Consultants of course claim that the naive aren't doing it right. Lean was copied from Toyota's methods. Toyota's methods evolved over decades, for making automobiles within the Japanese culture. What could possibly go wrong in trying to use it everywhere.
Many Lean tools are fine in their own right. Mistake proofing for example, has been used for thousands of years. However it should be used in a proper context of quality improvement.
QUALITY CIRCLES
Perhaps the greatest irony is the claim that Lean should "replace" Quality Circles. Toyota, from which Lean was copied, still uses Quality Circles today. Toyota's Quality Circles teams have made millions of process improvements, thereby saving many millions of dollars.
The statement by Shoichiro Toyoda, Honorary Chairman and director of Toyota, is lost on the Pied Piper:
"There is not a day I don't think about what Dr. Deming meant to us. Deming is the core of our management."
by Dr Tony Burns BE (Hon 1) PhD (Chem Eng)