Certified Six Sigma Black Belt (CSSBB)

Everything the Green Belt covers, at greater depth, plus enterprise deployment, advanced experimental design and the responsibility for other people's projects.

The paper carries 165 questions in total: 150 that are scored and 15 unscored pretest items that do not count toward your result.

What the CSSBB examination covers

The Body of Knowledge divides into 9 sections.

Section	Topic
I	Organization-wide Planning and Deployment
II	Organizational Process Management and Measures
III	Team Management
IV	Define
V	Measure
VI	Analyze
VII	Improve
VIII	Control
IX	Design for Six Sigma

Section by section

I — Organization-wide Planning and Deployment

Deployment as an organizational problem. Project selection, sponsorship and the negotiation that turns an unmeasurable objective into a chartered one. Sustained gains twelve months on are treated as the only real deployment metric.

II — Organizational Process Management and Measures

Process management, benchmarking and the measures that connect a project to the enterprise. Rolled throughput yield is worked in full, because averaging step yields hides exactly the compounding the metric exists to reveal.

III — Team Management

Leading people who do not report to you. The primer treats groupthink structurally rather than morally: when the highest-status voice speaks first, the room converges on it, and sequencing input is the remedy that costs nothing.

IV — Define

Define at Black Belt depth — charters that can be closed, scope that holds, and stakeholder work that happens before the project becomes public rather than after it stalls.

V — Measure

Measurement systems, capability and the traps in both. A gauge study can return an acceptable percentage and still fail on distinct categories when the parts chosen span too little of the real process range.

VI — Analyze

Multi-vari studies, hypothesis testing, regression and the discipline of reading residuals. A high coefficient of determination with curved residuals is a model that will predict badly at the extremes, whatever the summary statistic says.

VII — Improve

Design of experiments, including fractional factorials and what each resolution asks you to give up. The primer teaches the question backwards — here is what I need to distinguish, what resolution does that require.

VIII — Control

Control charts beyond Shewhart, control plans and sustainment. EWMA and CUSUM are introduced by the question they answer: small sustained shifts a Shewhart chart will not signal for a long time.

IX — Design for Six Sigma

Design for Six Sigma, quality function deployment and transfer functions. Once the response is expressed as a function of the inputs, tolerance allocation becomes arithmetic instead of opinion.

Practice questions

The CSSBB bank is still being written. Every item has to be traceable to the published Body of Knowledge before it goes on the site, and nothing goes up until it is. The certifications that are ready are listed below.

Other certifications