11.2 Introduction

When you hear about Tesla’s “Autopilot” feature in its cars, do you have visions of futuristic commutes where all you have to do is to sit in your car, tell it where you want to go, and the car will get you there? Many people did. In fact, Tesla’s announcement of its autonomous driving mode led to every major automaker to follow suit with their own! Nissan has its ProPILOT Assist technology; General Motors has its Super Cruise; Volvo has its Pilot Assist. Other automakers, such as Audi, ditched fancy branding and simply announced the release of their own “level 3” automated driving systems. Just how do they work?

1. The system maintains detailed maps to predetermine directions from origin to destination.

2. The system uses a wide array of sensors such as cameras and radars to determine surroundings in real time as the vehicle moves.

3. The system has a set of predefined proactive and reactive movements to prevent accidents based on a combination of both predetermined direction and real time conditions.

With ever-increasing computing power, everything above sounds doable, right? Yet, we keep getting headlines of autonomous cars colliding with other cars, pedestrians, bicyclists, tractor-trailers, guard rails, and more.

As it turns out, where things are going wrong with the autonomous driving mode is the same as what can go wrong with the DMAIC process: control. What this basically means is that these vehicles can have the most detailed maps installed in their memory storage, the most advanced suite of sensor arrays to determine real-time surroundings, the most fanciful programming to formulate obstacle avoidance, predictive modeling, and object discrimination; they still require the driver to monitor the environment to ensure that the smooth self-driving process remains working as the engineers intended.

In companies, the same things apply. You have painstakingly built a newly improved process through the earlier phases of DMAIC. Now you need to hand it off to the actual owner of the process to retain control and maintain the performance gains. The worst thing that could happen is for your process to revert to the way it used to be and waste all your efforts up to this point. Much like how the current Level 3 autonomous mode requires a driver to stay engaged to maintain control of the vehicle that seems to be driving itself, the Control phase of the DMAIC is the same! The process owner needs to monitor and make adjustments if your newly-established, higher quality process begins to encroach on either side of the lane—going out of control!