You are Inés Etxeberria-Larrazabal, 41, Director of Service Operations in Lurgipe's mortgage back-office (an Iberian retail bank, €1.2B in assets, 1,840 employees, headquartered in Bilbao). The COO asked you to pick ONE Six Sigma project to launch the practice. You have €1.4M, 9 months, and five candidates on the table. The conversation with the COO is on Monday.
The situation
Lurgipe processes ~28,400 mortgage files a year through its back-office center in Bilbao (118 employees). CEO Aitziber Mendizábal-Larrañaga approved the launch of the Six Sigma practice in March as part of the "Operating Model 2028" strategy. COO Pablo Garmendia-Bilbao has €1.4M for the first Black Belt project and wants a visible success story before the November board meeting.
The first project is the most expensive choice in the entire program. Choose it well, and the next ten authorize themselves. Choose it badly — too ambitious, ownership split across departments, a poorly defined defect — and Six Sigma gets labeled "another initiative that didn't land" for the next three years. Pyzdek puts it clearly: the Six Sigma project portfolio is selected by DMAIC-fit × value × controllability, not by the most visible strategic pain.
The team presented you five candidates. The CEO mentions the file "cycle-time" three times (17 days → 8-day target); the CFO pushes for the rework rate (11%); the VP of Risk wants to tackle the antifraud model's false positives (84% of flags are false positives); HR wants to tackle temporary overstaffing; and Customer Service asks to fix data-capture errors. Everyone has reasons; only one is the right first project.