5. Commencing the Journey

Most organizations tend to follow a similar early path on the Lean Sigma journey, starting with a low-resource, low-commitment “testing of the waters.” Typically this takes the form of one or two interested operations leaders identifying an individual or small handful of resources to attend a locally offered training, either at another nearby healthcare organization, through their third-party provider, or through a local academic institution. The selected individuals attempt a project on a very part-time basis and achieve reasonable, but limited, success.

The activity can remain in this state almost indefinitely if no further investment of effort is made on the part of leadership. Small, local-level project success will ...

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