A calendar invite lands in an HR manager's inbox: "Black Belt kickoff, Tuesday, HR representative required." She has never built a control chart and is not sure why the meeting involves her. The answer is that HR has two jobs in Six Sigma. It supplies the people side of the programme, from choosing belts to explaining the change to staff, and it owns processes of its own, such as hiring, onboarding and payroll, that can be measured and improved in the same way as a production line.

Only one line of method is needed before starting. Six Sigma works through five steps, abbreviated DMAIC: define the problem, measure it, analyse the cause, improve the process, then control the gain. The rest of this article is about how that plays out in an HR department.
Is Six Sigma useful for HR, or is it a factory method?
It began on manufacturing lines, at Motorola in the 1980s, and its vocabulary still sounds like a factory: defects, yield, throughput. But the logic does not care what is being made. Wherever work repeats and the outcome can be counted, the same questions apply. HR runs exactly that kind of work in volume: payslips every month, offers every week, contracts, leave requests, benefit queries, mandatory-training reminders.
Three tests decide whether a given HR process is worth a Six Sigma project.