PM-Mastery

Mastering Organizational Transformation: Inside the Mind of a Six Sigma Master Black Belt

• Walt Sparling • Season 1 • Episode 41

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In This Episode:

 Meet Aylin, a Six Sigma Master Black Belt with a knack for transforming organizations from the inside out. As an 'organizational therapist,' Eileen has spent over a decade honing her craft in industries spanning government, finance, healthcare, and technology. Her most recent stint at a Fortune 500 e-commerce powerhouse has equipped her with rich insights into the world of tech transformation. Listen to Aylin break down her role in designing processes that enhance digitization while emphasizing the critical nature of simplifying work experiences and giving voice to people in the workplace.

In this engaging conversation, Aylin takes us through some of her favorite tools for decision-making and process improvement. She introduces the Rapid Decision Making Model - a tool designed for organizations with a complex matrix structure. Additionally, she discusses her experiences with the FMEA tool for risk assessment and solutioning and how it can be instrumental in proving to senior leadership that all potential risks have been addressed. 


We wrap things up by discussing the benefits of the Six Sigma Greenbelt certification for project managers and the importance of continuing education in keeping pace with evolving trends. Aylin shares her unique networking approach through LinkedIn, so don't miss this opportunity to glean insights from her diverse experiences in project management!

Check out the full episode's show notes for some great resource links! 


Favorite Tool(s):

FMEA:  Failure mode and Effect Analysis (Think of RISK assessment)

 Links:

 PMI Talent Triangle: Multiple areas:

  • Technical /Ways of Working 
  • Leadership/Power Skills 
  • Strategy/Business Acumen 
  • (Learn More)

 Get your free PDU Tracker here: https://pm-mastery.com/resource/

Get your free PDU Tracker here: https://pm-mastery.com/resource/


Intro/Outro:

Welcome to the PM Mastery podcast. This podcast is all about helping you master your project management skills by sharing tips, tricks, tools and training to get you to the next level, while sharing the stories of other project managers on their journey in project management. Now here's your host, Walt Sparling.

Walt:

Welcome everybody to the current edition of PM Mastery. Today I have Eileen Roben. Did I say that right?

Aylin:

Yes, you did, Hi everyone.

Walt:

Welcome to the podcast. You have a lot of cool things that you have done and are, and I'm not even going to attempt. I'm going to let you tell us a little bit about yourself.

Aylin:

It's like explaining it to my parents. They still have no idea what I am, or what I do for work these days. So yeah, so thanks for the intro. My name is Eileen and I am a certified Six Sigma Master, Black Belt, with about 10 years of experience driving different types of continuous improvement and transformation projects in all sorts of different types of organizations. I started in government and moved my way into finance and healthcare and ended up in tech. Probably the most interesting thing about me is that I have three little kids, now three and under, so a three-year-old and a twin boy that are 18 months, so my household is always wild.

Walt:

I'll bet three. I got a five-year-old grand kid and he keeps us hopping.

Aylin:

There's no such thing as sleep in my house.

Walt:

You mentioned tech, so why don't you tell us a little bit about what you do?

Aylin:

Yeah, so in the last 18 months I pivoted from running kind of continuous improvement projects and got hiring on with a Fortune 500 e-commerce company to support their tech transformation effort, to do end-to-end process design and governance, to support the business side of digital transformation, and so they're working through reimagining their multi-channel service model.

Aylin:

So if you are online or on the app and you have an issue and you need help, is it the chatbot, is it calling the contact center? Like, what does that journey look like for our customers and how can we leverage AI and different types of technology to create a better customer experience? So imagine you have to call somebody for help and you pick up the phone and the person knows exactly what your issue is. They can see, like, your purchase history. You don't have to feed them any of that information on the phone because it's all integrated on the back end. And so we're working through kind of creating some really cool experiences through that. And then my role as the process architect is to design the business processes that support that, because anytime you have technology, there has to be processes on the back end or governance, and so that's the role that I play right now. Okay, that sounds interesting.

Walt:

It would be nice if you could go to a doctor's office and they would just know everything and you'd have to fill out forms every time. Oh, that sure would be wonderful.

Aylin:

But I think we're years before that happened, after spending five years in healthcare.

Walt:

Why? Why do you do what you do? What drew you here? What keeps you going?

Aylin:

I love to help people and I kind of consider myself like a non-licensed organizational therapist where I get to come in and work with different teams, work with our customers, work with people all over the business to help them make their jobs easier and to create easier experiences.

Aylin:

So if you think of like something that you can't stand doing every day and you're like this is a pain, why are we doing this? Why are we doing it this way? We've always done it this way I get to come in and be like, yeah, that is kind of terrible and here's your avenue, through this work together to be able to change that and kind of elevate people's voices in the workplace, and so I find that really satisfying. It's why I definitely I fell into process improvement. So I know I'm on the PM mastery podcast, M project management certified Consider myself more of the process improvement side. So I love working really closely with other PMs on the implementation because I'm more of the big idea person where I need to be really strong to come in and help me with the execution of those ideas.

Walt:

Cool, yeah, there's that's. I think process improvement is kind of heavy with PMs. It's like a natural because they tend to be very detail oriented and they don't want to waste a lot of time because they're you know, some of them, sometimes they're jumping from project to project to project and how can they make a process that they can do where they can, maybe batch stuff or I mean I know on that way and I've seen some others like that it's like, yeah, this is this is way too much work. We got to figure out a way to automate this.

Aylin:

Yeah, it's totally a natural fit. I love working with project managers.

Walt:

All right, you're big into process improvement, obviously you're. You like being around people. You've got to probably learn stuff that, if I recall right, this is a new position for you, right? Pretty recent.

Aylin:

Yeah, I moved into this, this new company, in the last 16 to 18 months. Okay similar work for similar work in finance in terms of the process modeling and business process management, but doing it within the context of an enterprise wide digital transformation effort and the level of complexity in a new industry. It's new for me. So I'm still on, I would say, my learning curve of trying to. It's steep.

Walt:

And that's one of the questions is like how do you continue to learn or keep up with like you've got a black belt? Do they require you to do any kind of continuing ed or PDU's or anything like that for the certification?

Aylin:

Yes, I do. I have to renew it, just like I do with my, with my PMP, but the nice thing is that I can usually do some dual counting right.

Aylin:

With the different organizations. So one of the things that I recently did was took some time and went through the Scrum Alliance Scrum certified Scrum Master two day course, because I'm working in that tech space where we're doing release planning and things like that. I wanted to really understand from the experts what that looks like and kind of fill in some of the skill gaps. I had done it some of my day to day work prior but really wanted that holistic picture of like what does it mean to be a Scrum Master? How did that fit in with agile and product development and try to fill in some of those technical gaps that I felt like I had.

Aylin:

The rest of the upskilling, I think for me personally it's their area in my in my background that I want to lean into more. And then it's how do you take something like a six Sigma process improvement, lean and adapt it to the organization that you're in so that you're making meaningful changes? Because there is anywhere you go, there is the rules, and then there's the unwritten rule In kind of learning how to navigate, what's valued, who the key players are, how things actually get done, and then you can layer in the some of the more technical aspects of our skill set to drive change. So I think that's kind of the learning curve that I coming out of like OK, now I understand how the organization is structured, how it's function, things that appeal to people, areas where maybe there's like a little bit of resistance because that the maturity level with the organization and where can we upskill, how can we upskill our peers, things like that.

Walt:

And do you have any specific channels that you go to for like continuing to learn or getting your PDUs?

Aylin:

Well, I have memberships through all of the licensure places, so I really try to lean into things that are available on through PMI and ASQ and things like that For my non-PDUs. I think within the last six to nine months I will say I have done so much learning through LinkedIn, and not the LinkedIn learning courses, but by connecting and building a network with other experts that maybe work in slightly different fields or have different backgrounds, or peers of mine that maybe I didn't have access to before because we never worked for the same company where I can have thought, partnership and reach out, and so that's been really wonderful.

Walt:

Well, you're gonna get half a PDU just for being on here.

Aylin:

Sweet, I am not gonna make the mistake of waiting until my certification is going to allow to get all of that uploaded.

Walt:

I've done it in the past. I did on my first round. I waited till like two months before and I knew I had a lot of PDUs already that I hadn't recorded. So I had this spreadsheet that I started putting everything in so I could figure out which category they went to.

Aylin:

That was my mistake. Mine were all in one category.

Walt:

Oh yeah, so I actually get a lot of credits for doing this and I read a lot, so I get a lot of. I listen to Audible, so it's real easy. The book is four hours long. Oh, that's four credits. You know four PDUs, but I think I've got two more years.

Aylin:

I think I can hack True Crime podcast and get some PDUs for that.

Walt:

Yeah, you just gotta figure out how it applies. That's part of your. Yeah, I'm learning how to do scope development. All right, so learning is big. Then we have challenges. So in any role, whether it's new or existing, there's bound to be some challenges. That could be personal or work related. What are you dealing with now?

Aylin:

So I think for me I'm in the season of life that because I have three young kids trying to balance being a mom with a career and with a side business that I also have, because I just love coaching so much and I wanted to have some things that was just for myself kind of outside of work, and so it's learning how to not be as critical of myself or like what I can take on at any given time.

Aylin:

You know, I came from like the mindset of probably being an overachiever for ten years in my career, of staying after work, volunteering for things, taking on going to events, doing all of that stuff.

Aylin:

And now that I have kids, realizing, you know the kids come first and like I might have to slow down a little bit on their career, but it's only just like a portion of my career and of my work life. And that's the company I work for has great work-life balance. If I didn't work and I say this to them all the time if I didn't work from home and work for a company that had so much flexibility, I don't know that I could be in the workforce with three little kids. They're not home with me, they're in daycare, right, so I'm not sitting here trying to work full-time and have my kids at home, but just between drop-off pick-up, sick, sick time appointments. You know, really being able to be empowered to manage my schedule because my work gets done and it's delivered has been really, it's really been career changing. I think if I, like I said, had I been in another company, I think I probably would have been pushed out of the workforce during COVID.

Walt:

Yeah, it's interesting. There's so many stories from COVID and how it's changed the world and a lot of the corporations are fighting back with no, we want you back in the office. And I know they say it's collaboration, but the reality is is they've got a huge investment in their buildings and it's sitting there wasting away and I think that's a big draw and some of them believe that there is there is collaboration and there is collaboration. I mean my team. I have them in every Monday or every other Monday now, because we're everybody's super loaded to get that togetherness, and then they're in the office twice a week or they're at field visits. But no one works completely remote. But there are some jobs that working 100% remote fits.

Aylin:

So I'm on. I work 100% remote. I'm on a global team. We are all over the country, so while we some of us have offices that we're able to go into, some of us are not within driving distance to the office. The part that I do miss, especially for process improvement, is really that being able to whiteboard together and do more face-to-face chair size that we can do that on Zoom with shared screens, and then we try to get together at least a partial team or a sub team every quarter at one near headquarters just to have that face time. But it's not mandated, it's something that we choose to do when we make it work with our schedules.

Walt:

Yeah, that's. The tools now that are available are nice, but having that real face-to-face is a nice plus, nice plus. Yeah, I'm actually. I work for a large company and we're all over the world, but we work for our particular group, works for an account, and our main office on that account is in Charlotte. I'm in Florida and I always look forward to the opportunity to be able to go to Charlotte and actually see my counterparts. So it's awesome when we get to do that and it's very rare, but when we do, it's awesome.

Aylin:

I think when my kids get a little bit older I will really appreciate being able to kind of travel to the different locations. Right now it's all hands on deck, so I'm gonna be gone for three days. I mean, they're getting old enough now where I feel like one of us can be with the kids without the other partner, but when it was like two under two, that's a lot of little babies.

Walt:

Yeah.

Aylin:

For three under two, I mean.

Walt:

So with your you said your regular job, your side gig, your coaching, what do you coach on?

Aylin:

Yeah, so originally when I started out I was coaching primarily with career coaching with women, helping them kind of navigate and elevate their career, navigate the corporate landscape, learn about how to ask for a raise, promotions, things like that. And then over time that really I went through a period of time working with career changers, so non-traditional career changers, like somebody who went to a US boot camp and they wanted to land their first corporate gig no professional experience, but they had boot camp or a teacher wanting to break into a corporate job. So I have been doing that for a few years. It started off as like a passion project and then within the last year I kind of formalized it more into a thigh business.

Aylin:

And then recently I'm starting to make a shift to get back to my roots and we really like to focus on coaching folks in process improvement. So mid-career, mid to senior career professionals who maybe have some background in process improvement or they've already gone out and they have quite a bit of experience and I want to make that pivot into that. Their first Six Sigma role, lean role, into transformation, portfolio management for a transformation effort. So I think that's where everyone says meech down. That's where I'd like to go, since that is my background and where I have the most experience Makes sense yeah.

Walt:

Okay, now what about tools, either in your personal or work environment. Do you have any favorite tools?

Aylin:

So lately, for all my PM listeners out there, I have been absolutely obsessed with the rapid decision-making model. Everyone says from my previous experience use a raskey, use a raskey, that's got everything you need on a raskey. Well, have you ever used a rapid decision-making model? Nope, that's okay. Let me spread the gospel. So rapid is a tool that is designed specifically for role and responsibilities within decision-ing, and why I prefer that to a raskey is because it's built just for decision-ing and with most organizations I've been at, you turn it into decision-making with a strong consult with the accountable roles. But for really large, complex organizations where there's a lot of partnerships and dependencies, having the rapid model is really great because it gives you the ability to have nuances with decision-ing and decision-ing authority. So you might have for any type of decision that needs to be made.

Aylin:

Let's say there is a change, that is, somebody submits for change control, but there needs to be a change from the customer experience. It'll drive that. It'll drive a change from the configuration on the back end with, like, what they have thought for. Maybe that's a really big deal because it's a huge lift. And so it's to come in and say who is the ultimate decider of this change that's come through. It can only be one person for ultimate accountability, but because we know that there's so many other stakeholders, maybe there's somebody that has to be an agreeer, that has veto power. So it helped you level out to say, for a change in X, y and Z, you're the decider, you're the agreeer. This team recommends. I wanna know what you think, but you actually don't control the outcome, and so it helps to kind of find that fine line between consensus versus having a bottleneck, because there's 15 different people that have their hand in the pot and you get stuck. I don't know if you've ever been in those projects where you get stuck, you can't move forward.

Aylin:

There's two people in the room. Everybody wants to say this matrix gets really clear on who has a say over what and, like I said, with the leveling it gives people more for highly matrixed organizations, really complex ones. It's a fantastic tool to bring into your toolkit.

Walt:

And now obviously someone can Google, but is there like any specific resources that you think would be like go-tos for that?

Aylin:

Yeah, there is. So it's Bain and Company is the consulting firm. It's their model. If you go to Harvard Business Review, there is an article called like who has the D, which is a silly name, but like who's the decider. So I would go to Harvard Business Review for the article and it kind of gives you a whole once over.

Aylin:

They take a little bit of practice to kind of go through your first one, but they're really straightforward to make. They're a living document If you never look at it again after creating it. The value that you get from just having those conversations with your stakeholders is worth the time, Especially if you're working in an organization where there's a huge power differential and you wanna help one of your stakeholders kind of elevate their voice and have a better seat at the table. This is a tool that you can use to facilitate through that and keep it copathetic, right, You've got the structure of the framework for it.

Walt:

Looks like I got some readings to do.

Aylin:

It's a great one.

Walt:

What about on the Six Sigma side?

Aylin:

On the Six Sigma side, I like the non-math tool. I mean, everyone talks about Six Sigma. We're like data, data, data. Do the analysis, do the correlation? It can actually be really trying to set to be able to do that because they're so complicated.

Aylin:

One of my favorite tools it's called an FMEA, which stands for Failure Mode Effect Analysis. Well, it can be. I'm not going to sugarcoat this. They're boring to do but they're super, super effective. What it is?

Aylin:

If you take your process end to end and for every step of the process you asked yourself how could this fail? How can we go wrong here? What's the likelihood that something could go wrong here? If it did go wrong, what could be the outcome Then? What's the severity if it does go wrong, is it a showstopper or is it a nuisance? But whatever, we can live with it. Essentially, you're creating your own prioritization matrix for solutioning. But why I really like this tool is if you've ever worked on a project and the VP says to you how do you know we found the problem? How do you know this fix is going to actually work? How do you know I can go back to the auditor and say we're good, I covered everything with this project that we've implemented.

Aylin:

The FMEA is your tool because you were doing a step-by-step risk assessment and you can do it at the beginning of a project to identify where the opportunities are for improvement and for risk mitigation. You can do it at the end of the project as a sanity check to go back and say, oh yeah, I captured everything, or there's a little bit of a gap here. Then, lastly, it's really great tool, especially when you're working with operations teams or operation leaders who maybe they struggle a little bit more with a strategy. There might be something that, to them, is a fire that they want to put out or something that they're really, really anxious about, but it's noise.

Aylin:

This tool allows you to say, hey, executive leadership, you have a ton of items that are above the threshold. We should really worry about this. These five down here. I know they sound scary, but either the likelihood is it's not going to happen and we're over-correcting and we're wasting our resources here, or if it does happen, the impact isn't actually bad as we thought it might be. It helps with decisioning of where to put your resources and things like that. I really like it. I think it's a great tool that anybody can pick up and use, which is a little bit of practice because, like I said, there's only a little, there's really no math. You put it in a spreadsheet, it does some calculations for you for ranking, and then that's it. Cool, another one.

Aylin:

Yeah, it's a really good one.

Walt:

Are you trying to learn any new tools?

Aylin:

Am I trying to learn any new tool? Well, I'm struggling my way through notion. I just decided at this point that I just might buy a template, because I don't have the bandwidth, time, energy or mental capacity to figure out how to use that tool. But I know it's really cool and I should add it into my list. I would really love to learn how to use notion.

Walt:

Yeah, a friend of mine is going through the same thing and his results are the same. Because I'm just going to buy a template and then customize it because this is just way too complicated, because it's powerful, but it's just way too complicated.

Aylin:

Very powerful.

Walt:

So I'll wait for both of you to figure that out, and then I'll pop in and take one of your templates.

Aylin:

Well, I'll wait for your friend to figure it out, and then we can leverage the template.

Walt:

OK, david, you heard that, all right, so my favorite. Did you know? Do you have an interesting? Did you know?

Aylin:

Yes, did you know that if you wanted to replicate Dark Fader's suit, it would cost you $18.3 million? From an unverified source on the internet? I'm gonna trust that this number is accurate, based on my Google search.

Walt:

That's interesting. Yeah, I wonder where. Why 18.3 million? That's what you know. What about it would be so expensive?

Aylin:

That's to make a real life replica. You would need a voice modifier, breathing apparatus, prosthetic limbs and augmented reality filter, or you could just spend 600 bucks. Pop over to Disneyland, buy yourself, make yourself a well forward.

Walt:

Those lightsaber.

Aylin:

Totally not. Totally not what it's called. My husband is a Star Wars nerd, not me.

Walt:

All right. Well, this has been an interesting conversation. Process improvement love it. I'm definitely not as technical as you are in that I can tell because of your experience, but that is something I love to do Hate waste.

Aylin:

Honestly, well, all it is is it's really a mindset, and if you have that mindset you can do process improvement. Everything else is these are just tools that you pick up along the way. So I would say for all of our folks out there listening spend some time. If you're interested in process improvement, look into Six Sigma Greenbelt certification. It's a great way to either open more doors or just to have down on your resume. Go really nicely hand in hand with project management.

Walt:

Good deal, all right, you heard that.

Aylin:

Stop me down on LinkedIn and I will talk to you all day long about process improvement.

Walt:

And I am definitely gonna have you. I have your LinkedIn profile in the show notes so people can check you out and we'll get you some more followers.

Aylin:

Yeah, we appreciate that. Thank you for your time. This has been so much fun.

Walt:

Well, I appreciate you coming on and, for everyone else, we'll see you on the next episode of PM Mastery.

Intro/Outro:

Thanks for listening to the PM Mastery podcast at wwwpm-masterycom. Be sure to subscribe in your podcast there. Until next time, keep working on your project zin puppawee.