Re: Ford embraces Six Sigma

["John Bruman" <jbruman@precisiondie.com>]

The Wednesday, Washington Post had a story from Sarah Schafer
discussing the changes being made at Ford Motor Co. regarding
their employee performance evaluation process.
As originally deployed in 1999, it involved all managers to be
appraised by their supervision, and given a grade of either A,B,
or C.
The supervisors were forced to give a grade of C to at least 5% of
their staff, identifying them for possible layoff.

 Per Jacques Nasser, the new changes (in the wake of several
discrimination suits) involve awarding of "categories" rather than
grades. That is now all managers will be categorized as either
"top achiever", "achiever", or "improvement needed".

Furthermore, there will no longer be a policy of requring 5% of
the managers to be categorized as "improvement needed".

Does this last sentence take this policy out of the "forced
ranking" arena?

How about some opinions?
J Bruman
QA Manager