Sun Sigma was a customer-requirement-and-statistics based quality improvement program Sun started using in 2000. Sun Sigma was based on the Six Sigma programs then in use at the General Electric company. I was one of the 40 “wave one” Black Belts appointed in 2000 to kick off the program. I was the Black Belt (and later Master Black Belt) for Sun Laboratories and the Chief Technologist’s Office.

Rumor had it that Sun CEO Scott McNealy adopted the Six Sigma program after an inspiring series of conversations on the golf course with then-GE-CEO Jack Welch. All of Sun’s executives and most of the staff were trained and a huge number of Sigma projects were started in all areas of Sun. Many of the projects were successful and effective but some were not. Many were never completed. The amount of training, process, and time required made Sun Sigma generally unpopular.

Sun hired its first group of Master Black Belts and trainers from GE. They brought or developed much new business vocabulary. There was the HAT OF SHAME, to be worn by those who jumped to conclusions without data. There were SUN SHOTs (short projects with fast gains and comparably little overhead), symbolized by Sun-branded glass shot glasses someone had made. There were belts: WHITE for those who were on a project team, GREEN for those who were formally trained and had lead a project that finished, and BLACK for those with much more formal training who had completed two projects and passed a standardized exam.

Sun had a number of early pilot projects but the first Sun Sigma project ever to be signed off formally was “Mobile & Remote Technical Contributor Onboarding” (Sun Sigma Registered Project #P16) lead by me and completed on 19 April 2001. The Problem Statement was: “It takes too much time and money to bring up a remote or mobile technical contributor, resulting in a loss of productivity and employee satisfaction.” The Goal Statement was: “Provide the tools to bring up remote and mobile technical contributors on their first day of work.” Greg Papadopoulos (Sun’s Chief Technology Officer) was the Champion for this project. The project team included Carl Cargill (Standards Director),Carol Gorski (Human Resources Manager and Change Advocate), John Hill (Standards), Carman Mondello (Standards), and Roy Reed (Standards). Our Master Black Belts were Carol “CJ” Griggs and Kornelija Zgonc.

In 2003, Scott McNealy hosted a party and ceremony to give Certified Black Belt award plaques to those of us in the first group to complete the requirements.  Adrienne Whitmore and I were both in that first Black Belt group.  Nineteen years before that, Adrienne and I had also started working for Sun in the same week (in June 1984). 

The tools and methods I learned from Six Sigma have continued to be extremely useful, especially on projects with large amounts of short-cycle data. The last Sun Sigma project I signed off was completed in December 2006, by which time many areas of Sun had quietly abandoned Sun Sigma.

Images Copyright 2009 by Katy Dickinson