TL;DR: OKRs often fail because leaders react to month-to-month noise instead of real improvement. Process Behavior Charts (PBCs) show whether key results reflect true system change or routine variation–helping leaders coach better, avoid blame, and focus improvement efforts where they…
TL;DR: Process behavior charts show when apparent performance differences are driven by the system rather than individual skill. Comparing individuals without this context often leads to unfair judgments and poor leadership decisions. This post is Part Three of a series…
Process behavior charts can be used for more than tracking performance over time. In this post, I apply PBCs to compare knee surgeons’ complication rates–and show why many apparent differences are just noise, not meaningful signals. This post is a…
TL;DR:Process behavior charts help leaders compare hospitals (or any organizations) without overreacting to rankings or small differences. By separating signal from noise, they show when performance differences are meaningful — and when they are simply the predictable result of a…
I'm presenting a webinar on December 18th at 1 pm ET.
You can register here:
How to Use Process Behavior Charts to Improve: Case Studies
Learn more about how to register in this post.
Eric Ries and Lean Startup Co. have been really helpful friends in spreading the message about "Process Behavior Charts" in their community. They invited me to give a talk at last year's Lean Startup Week and Eric was kind enough to endorse my book Measures of Success (paperback coming soon - get notified or pre-order)...
Recently, they invited me to be a guest for their webcast series, where Marilyn Gorman asked me questions about my book and the Process Behavior Chart methodology. It was a challenge to talk about this visual method without slides and charts, so I did my best to create air charts with finger gestures :-)
This content originally appeared in a post about my Halloween metrics webinar, but I decided to carve it out (not like a pumpkin) into its own post.
A reader asked: "Should we be using financial statements in that way or is there a better approach given our knowledge about different types of variation? Or am I completely off track?"
The other day, I saw a post on Twitter that included a few photos related to what's often called Lean Daily Management practices in a hospital.
The spirit of my post is not meant to come across as "they're doing it wrong" but more in the spirit of "they're doing a lot of great things, but it would be better if..."
If Lean Daily Management is supposed to be, at its core, about identifying opportunities for improvement, I'd hope they wouldn't be offended by my recommendations, but I also don't want to link to the Twitter post or call them out by name. I will pass along private feedback through a channel I have. But, I'm writing a post because what I see here is VERY common in different organizations (not just healthcare).
Skip Steward, the Chief Improvement Officer at Baptist Memorial Health Care in Tennessee, was a guest on Episode #314 of the podcast talking about TWI and Toyota Kata in healthcare (he was joined by Brandon Brown).
Today, I've asked Skip to come back and chat 1x1, in Episode #320, about his experience with Don Wheeler, learning from W. Edwards Deming, and more. I hope you enjoy his reflections, our discussions about healthcare, and connections to my book Measures of Success (Skip undoubtedly has a book in him too).
If you're not a baseball fan, I apologize for a second baseball-themed post this week. Baseball has a lot of historical time-series data to work with and analyze. If you're not interested in "Process Behavior Charts" or similar methods, I guess I will apologize for this post again too. Next, I'll be apologizing for apologizing.
But, I am at Dr. Wheeler's four-day workshop on "Understanding Statistical Process Control" as I blogged about on Monday.
It's great to learn from Dr. Wheeler in person and I'll be sharing reflections on the class in a later post (and I'm posting a few things on LinkedIn along the way).
In Chapter 1 of Understanding Variation, Dr. Wheeler points out how charts or graphs are far superior to tables or lists of numbers. He uses a baseball example:
I recently saw this headline:
Baseball on pace for lowest batting average since 1972
Just because it's the lowest average in 48 years... it doesn't mean that this year's MLB-wide batting average is low in a way that's statistically meaningful.
I started my career in manufacturing, so that's just one reason I'm interested in the topics of offshoring (sending manufacturing work overseas) and what's now called "reshoring," or bringing jobs and factories back to the U.S.
Somebody at A.T. Kearney sent me a link to their recent report on reshoring, with the headline:
Reshoring in Reverse Again
US manufacturers are not exactly coming back in droves. In fact, the 2018 Reshoring Index shows that imports from traditional offshoring countries are at a record high.
When you learn to look at data and workplace metrics through the "Process Behavior Chart" methodology, you learn to be skeptical of text descriptions like "a record high." Does "a record high" mean that the data point is statistically meaningful? Not always.