The Six Sigma method in healthcare recommends that once the project has been signed off by the management for launch, the lead creates a 5000 feet understanding of the project.  In fact, it is recommended by most of the change management processes.  SIPOC is a very well suited to assist in development of this view.  SIPOC stands for Supplier-Input-Process-Output-Customer.  It is a quite standard tool used by leading companies in their project managements.

A project lead will create a preliminary set of customers.  These customers are generally those who benefit and use the outcome of the project.  They could be customer as in regular sense, management who is looking for solution, and upon time compliance organizations.  Lately the definition of the customer is also being extended to cover the users of the process as well as suppliers as they might get impacted by the project output too.

With the preliminary list of customers ready, next step is to identify the outputs that is delivered to them, the definition of that output as well as the process that is used to create that output.  An illustration of the output from a doctor after checking a patient could be a prescription and the definition of those could be the name, dose, and frequency of intake of those medicines for the pateint and the administering period would be the output definition for the pharmacist to decide the quantity to be dispensed.

Once the process is mapped, lead can identify the input to the process, and who supplied those inputs.  These inputs could be thougth of at least in two groups.  One that is going to be processes, and the other that is going to do the processing such as people, machines, gages etc.  In the cases of conformity to compliance standards, many believe that conformity criteria are inputs.

Getting a complete picture of outputs and customers is an interative process.  Once the initial SIPOC is done, a lead should indentify new customers for the outputs or interview the customers for any other output that they might expect.  The process of collecting customer or the output requirement will be discussed in separate topic ‘Voice of Customer, VOC.

SIPOC enables the project lead to have better understanding of the project, the customer as well as what might it take to provide solution, which is very important for creating a credible project plan.