Major General James Wright MBA Program Capstone Project

The officers, all students in the Major General James Wright MBA Program, help you obtain an inside-out evaluation and perspective on your problem or project.

The team is inside in the sense they are experienced, educated Army officers who have an understanding of what you are facing. At the same time, the team has an outside perspective since they are not currently within your organization. That allows them to view problems and solutions with a more external perspective. The teams bring a combination of relevant experience, newly developed MBA skills, and tools specific to process improvement via Lean Six Sigma problem-solving framework.

A number of items lead to a good project, including:

• Identified GO/SES support. This oversight is a key to success.
• Availability of POCs and SMEs to support project scoping (January through April) and planning and execution (May through early August).
• Access to relevant stakeholders for background and perspective.
• Access to relevant documentation.
• Availability of data to support problem exploration.
• Data can take on many different formats, but the capstone project will be more useful to you if you can access existing information systems to pull and share data by early May.
• Good fit with a need to balance scope and schedule with available resources. Because of the accelerated timeline (the teams have six weeks of full-time execution), the work product tends to move the project considerably in the right direction, develop next steps and analyze alternatives rather than implementing a complete solution.

Certification Standard

The certification "standard" for Green Belt is a minimum of 6 tools applied appropriately across DMAIC.

Each project will use the following tools, as a minimum:

1. Project charter (agreement with the client, includes scope elements) & teamwork plan (rough schedule with milestones);
2. SIPOC (high-level process map, ideally begins to identify CTQ attributes for process performance);
3. Process map (extent & use of map TBD based on project);
4. Stakeholder map & plan for engaging.
5. Operational definitions of key process measures and data visualization (TBD based on available data—Affinity diagram, Pareto analysis, Scatter plots, time series plots, control charts, frequency charts, histograms, or others.)
6. Elements of cause and effect analysis, to the extent possible. Recommendations for waste elimination, standardization, variation reduction, quick hit improvements, control, and next steps, as appropriate.

Additional analysis tools will be applied contingent on data availability. Additional tools could include the use of other problem-solving (consulting frameworks), statistical analysis, including hypothesis testing or regression, proposed DOE, piloting or other confirmatory work, or recommendations for additional measurement and data collection.

Project Selection Process & Requirement

• GO/SES must be assigned to each project.
• Available data must be addressed in the project proposal in order for a project to be evaluated for inclusion.
• The project proposal must include information about who will provide data and when.
• Project charter & scope of work will be developed between W&M faculty & client—modifications as necessary during project execution.
• GO/SES must attend at least one meeting with POC & W&M faculty prior to finalizing the charter.
• W&M faculty, POC & GO/SES must sign the project charter.
• The project charter will include language for when issues will merit elevation to GO/SES. For example, if key data or access to personnel that are listed in the charter becomes unavailable, GO/SES should be involved so we can either get access or modify the project scope & charter.