Book excerpt: You've been trained and tested and you've been successful. Now, where will you take it from here? This book is intended for the Green Belt or anybody who has attended Six Sigma training and has been coached through a complete project, and who now wants to or needs to step out on their own and manage improvement projects without a dedicated coach. For a Green Belt, it is probable that the first project was coached by another Six Sigma practitioner, either within the organization or consulting for them, and that the coach’s performance may have been evaluated based on the success of the Green Belt’s project. Now that the first project is done, the coach has likely moved on to the next new Green Belt candidate. So, what happens to yesterday’s Green Belt? Detailed in these pages is a user-friendly guide to completing an improvement project quickly and thoroughly. The author has identified the nine most critical elements of a project and presented the tools needed to deliver those nine. A person who has been exposed to Six Sigma training will not have a difficult time understanding and applying the tools and techniques presented. Even a non-Green Belt will find this material to be usable with only a little coaching. Dotted throughout the book are descriptions of team meetings, five in all, that will serve the purpose of delivering the nine critical elements in a 90-day time frame. The book’s final chapter is intended as a guide to process management and process improvement in or outside the context of an improvement project. Once the concepts and topics become familiar to the reader, Chapter 10 can be read independently and repeatedly to help the organization manage its processes and improve them every day.