Skip to main content
Office of Operational Strategic Initiatives OSI
  1. HOME
  2. Services
  3. Continuous Improvement Projects & Workshops
  4. LSS Overview

Continuous improvement at UC San Diego

OSI developed and nurtured UC San Diego's LSS culture, empowering and enabling thousands of staff to identify, assess, and solve issues with a customer-centric balance of efficiency and effectiveness.  Our campus often refers to itself as a “living laboratory” and we take this seriously at not only a transformational level, but also at a very incremental level where we continuously seek to find ways to streamline, optimize, and improve the quality of our operations. By paying attention to this critical nexus we help deliver end-to-end solutions that allow UC San Diego to be a Student Centered, Research Focused, Service Oriented, Public University.

What are Lean Six Sigma and Continuous Improvement?

  • Lean Six Sigma (LSS) is a process improvement approach that combines Lean Tools and Six Sigma Tools. LSS methodology shows that speed does not have to be at the expense of accuracy, and vice versa.  If we identify variations in our process and define the expectations of our customers, then we can move towards a process that can be faster and more accurate.
  • Lean tools evaluate processes to focus on simplifying steps involved and find ways to achieve faster outcomes.  Speed is the focus.  The kinds of questions we often tackle may be: Are we producing reports which were necessary a few years ago, but are not needed today?  Are there multiple systems that don't communicate with each other? Are we seeing bottlenecks?
  • Six Sigma tools focus on quality and accuracy.  The kinds of questions we examine may be: Is this a problem we thought was solved in a past effort?  What are the goals for our outcomes, and how often are we within those goals?  Are quality controls built into the process, or are we capturing errors well after they occur?
  • Continuous Improvement is the concept that we can make iterative changes in our process.  We can move towards a perfect process in steps, rather than a single leap.  This also means that even after our process is spectacular, we can continue to find opportunities for improvement if we so choose.

What concepts are important in LSS that may differ from other methodologies?

  • Focus on "customer": Identify your customers, whether that is students, vendors, patrons, other departments, etc.  Once you have your customers identified, gather their input on their goals and pain points.  As your project moves forward, involve your customers in the discussions, along with your Subject Matter Experts.
  • Don't jump to improve: Strive to address a root cause.  Leverage data to validate ideas, and pilot changes to check for downstream considerations.  This will drive you towards averting fires, rather than frantically extinguishing them.
  • Empower staff at all levels: Process knowledge and ideas should be generated from the staff who perform the work.  The Lean Practitioner facilitates discussions and manages the project, but the teams provide and implement solutions.  Not only does this secure creative and effective ideas, but it also facilitates change management and longevity of your outcomes.
  • Explore assumptions: Dig deeper to clear obstacles we have created for ourselves over time. For example, if you hear "There's a policy which drives that step," then consider whether the policy has changed, or whether other comparable departments have interpreted and implemented the policy differently.  If you hear "We've always done it that way" then prompt your team to consider whether it has to be done that way.  

 

How do I get involved?