for answers to your 2nd question:
By the way, a few months ago I received an LSS Green Belt at work. I did not have to pay for it out of my own pocket, but, to earn the certification, I did have to spend over half a year working on a DMAIC project with verifiable annualized savings of more than $500K. Now, my boss's boss is urging me to work on an LSS Black Belt project, and I have only reluctantly agreed to get on with one due to the implied time commitment, which, as is often the case everywhere, is above and beyond one's ususal fultime job responsibilities. (At our company, Black Belt certification currently requires a minimum savings of $1.5M.)
Just how useful is a Green Belt? I suppose the answer to a large extent depends on the culture of the company. Ours is going through a huge push from the top to embrace LSS methodologies, which explains why it is almost a fad for everyone to jump on the wagon. In general, I am sold on LSS principles; in practice, though, benefit calculation math of an LSS project is often fuzzy, more so where benefit validation is not closely scrutinized.
