By Army Sgt. 1st Class Jon SoucyNational Guard Bureau
About 30 students from 11 states completed the program, which combines the Army’s Lean Six Sigma and the Air Force’s Smart Operations for the 21st Century efficiency programs.
“It’s the first time … that we actually have a class that was designed to be truly joint,” said Air Force Col. B.J. Marshall, CPI director at the National Guard Bureau. “We took the best of the OSD (Office of the Secretary of Defense) curriculum, the Army’s black belt curriculum and the Air Force curriculum and built our own curriculum that meets the learning objectives of both the Army and the Air Force.”
The course runs four weeks and covers a variety of ways and means to evaluate and improve upon processes and procedures within the Guard, such as preparing for deployment, said Marshall.
“This course actually teaches them or provides them with a tool box of techniques to use to improve effectiveness and efficiencies,” said Marshall. “So, if you’re working on improving the efficiency of a project, you would use a lot of lean tools to remove the waste; but if you’re looking at the effectiveness of a process, you would be looking at removing errors that happen repetitively in [it].”
Those who are trained in CPI are rated on three levels – green belt, black belt and master black belt. Currently, the NGB training program is geared toward those working in the black belt capacity. However, a course for green belt certification is scheduled to start in March and a master black belt program is being planned for 2011, said Marshall.
Currently, those seeking green or master black belt training are certified through the Army’s training program. The difference in the three levels of certification is the scope of the projects those individuals would work on to increase efficiency.
“Master black belts traditionally would work mostly enterprise level – very large, very complex projects,” said Marshall. “They also teach the black belt course and coach and mentor black belts. Black belts then coach and mentor green belts.”
Recent graduates of the course have already seen its benefits.
“A lot of times you’ll go to meetings and people will assume they know what the problem is already,” said 2nd Lt. James Domenico of the 167th Airlift Wing of the West Virginia Air National Guard.” He added that the training has taught him how to collect statistical data during meetings, which helps to determine what the problem is.
The path to improving efficiency really starts prior to the attending the course.
“Our whole initiative starts with the strategic alignment workshop for the senior leaders,” said Marshall. “We go in and we take their strategic plan, align it to their core processes, identify the gaps and build a project library.”
Black belt students are assigned a project from that list of prioritized projects and they start working those projects, said Marshall. She added that improving readiness or streamlining the deployment process is among the projects worked on most often.
The push for a joint training program came in part from issues raised by many adjutants general who felt that having two separate programs – one for the Air Guard and one for the Army Guard – was often repetitive and cumbersome, said Marshall.
Air Force Gen. Craig R. McKinley, the chief of the National Guard Bureau, who visited with the class on graduation day, also expressed an interest in having a joint program.
“Bottom line is, I’m all in, in terms of commitment to the program,” he said. “I spoke at length during the (Joint Senior Leaders Conference) to my belief that if we don’t adopt or adapt to this new way of doing business, we will fail.
“As good as we are in the Guard – and we celebrate our 373rd birthday on Dec. 13 – we may not make 400, because we will have lost our relevance and value. I say that tongue-in-cheek as I think we are adaptable enough to get through this.”
Part of that adaptation will include the Guard becoming a data-driven organization, said Marshall. “And one of the key things that this does is that it actually provides the data so that you can actually show the data and then the leadership can make a data-driven decision.”
In the end, it comes down to using the CPI tools to better manage finite resources. “By working through and using the continuous process improvement tools, we are able to free up resources to apply them in other areas,” she said. “And that can be both people and money.”
NGB currently has seven iterations of the course planned for 2010, said Marshall, with the next scheduled to start in February.
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