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Many companies in the publishing industry are facing the task of developing new business models and becoming more efficient and effective in execution. Lean Six Sigma (LSS) is a unified framework for systematically developing efficiency and quality improvements; it can help realize significant results and breakthrough improvements in the publishing industry, as demonstrated with many projects from a Dutch multinational publishing company. The purpose of this paper is to facilitate the process of defining LSS projects in publishing, because lack of a clear definition is an important cause for project failure.

The paper discusses and categorizes 49 project definitions based on two elements: the critical to quality flowdown and the corresponding set of operational definitions and shows how this simple categorization and subsequent standardization of approaches can help LSS teams simplify the definition phase.

The strategy presented in this paper provides seven standard LSS project definitions (“generic templates”).

Project leaders can use the templates presented in this paper as an example and as a guide in the project definition phase. This helps them to formulate crystal‐clear project definitions, which have explicitly stated goals and a solid business rationale.