Moving Forward: Mastering Entry and Exit Criteria in Six Sigma

Last Updated on 9 September 2023

These are the checks and tests you need to pass before you can move onto the next stage of a project, such as for moving on to the next phase or releasing them to the customer. They often take the form of a checklist that you need to work through. A common example in Six Sigma is the tollgate reviews that you need to pass before you can progress to the next phase in DMAIC.

Entry vs Exit criteria

Where there are many stages, Entry and Exit criteria can often be the same thing. Generally the Entry criteria for the next step is just that the exit criteria for the previous step have been met. Entry criteria generally therefore means how you can know you’re ready to start a project.

Entry criteria

The entry criteria is defined as everything that needs to be done before the project can start. This can often be seen as those things that are found in the define stage, such as:

• Have we chosen a suitable project to undertake?
• Is the project well defined?
• Do we have a project scope agreed?
• Is the problem understood?
• Is the budget signed off by management?
• Do we have a team arranged?
• Are the roles understood?
• Do we have a timeline?
• Do we understand what we’re trying to achieve?
• Have we defined the project exit criteria?

It can often just be as simple as ‘do we have the resources we need for this task?’

A traditional Entry criteria is therefore can we start actually doing the measurements and improvements; have we set everything up correctly?

Exit criteria

The exit criteria is often a form of checklist, where you make sure that every task you want to perform has been done, every deliverable has been delivered and the goals have been met.

In a basic project, this will be that:

• The initial measurements have been made
• The analysis has been performed to find the root cause of issues
• Improvements have been implemented
• Testing has occurred to make sure the improvement is as intended
• Any reporting or deliverables to customer has been made

A common framework in Six Sigma to make sure all these criteria has been met is DMAIC, but it works for most improvement projects

Why do we use entry and exit criteria?

They are necessary so that you know when to start a project and when to complete it. If you don’t know your success or end points, projects can run for longer than necessary, wasting your precious resources. They can even be completed before they are ready, giving results that can do as much harm as good, as the incorrect or sub-optimal solution will be given.

There are some tasks such as trialing solutions, testing and performing initial measurements that can potentially go on forever, and so you need a set limit to guide how long these will go on for. You can set a length of time or number of runs to test for, that will give you the best value for money.

Without setting these limits, staff will guess how long to go on for, giving you a huge range in thoroughness. You can also just have that people stop when either resources run out, or when resources are demanded elsewhere, both of which are inefficient methods of allocating resources.