Thanks to ASQ for asking me to write this article for their “Statistics Digest” newsletter in October of 2019 – click here to access the whole issue if you’re a member. I’m posting the article here with their permission. Readers…
Hi All – here’s a collection of the most read Mixtape links from 2018. I compiled the links with the greatest number of viewers and then organized them into some themes. Enjoy! Setting goals and developing effective and actionable KPIs is a…
It was a busy year for me in the podcast realm. I produced 33 “Lean Blog Podcast” episodes of interviews about the various aspects of Lean. Click here to view them all (to listen, really… but each page has show…
Today marks 25 years since W. Edwards Deming passed away in 1993. I remember sitting in a statistics class as an undergraduate at Northwestern University — it must have been January 1994. My professor said something about Dr. Deming’s passing and…
I had a great time and learned so much as a guest of Honsha and their Executive Development Mission trip to Japan in October. The formal site visits to factories and companies were great, but a lot of the learning…
You might remember the podcasts that I did with my friend Skip Steward, the Chief Improvement Officer at Baptist Memorial Health Care in Tennessee (links below).
Skip recently created some excellent videos that explain the basics of "Process Behavior Charts," a method that I explore in my book Measures of Success: React Less, Lead Better, Improve More.
See those videos below the podcast links.
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.
It's been a while since I've contributed something to the Lean Enterprise Institute's online publication, The Lean Post (see past articles).
Today, they're allowing me to introduce some ideas from my book Measures of Success. Many "Lean thinkers" just haven't been exposed to these ideas. Many haven't read Deming or Wheeler... it's not their fault for not knowing of Process Behavior Charts and methods like this.
But, I hope this post helps people see that "bowling charts" and "red/green" analysis are not the only way (or the best way) to look at metrics.
My article:
"React Less and Improve More by Using SPC More Effectively"
Here is my latest article that I published on LinkedIn:
Is the Reported Drop in Major League Baseball Attendance a "Signal" or "Noise" in the Data?
I'll be teaching my "Better Metrics" workshop (aka "Measures of Success," ala my book) twice in June:
Cambridge Investments - Open for Public Registration (Fairfield, Iowa) -- June 5
Lean Healthcare Transformation Summit (Chicago) -- June 13
After facilitating the Red Bead Experiment in the workshop, one other way I've found to simulate variation is an online simulation that's available, of all places, on the BBC website:
"Can chance make you a killer?"
Today, I’m giving a keynote talk at the Lean & Six Sigma World Conference being held in Las Vegas. I don’t normally attend or speak at “Lean Sigma” events, but I had an opportunity to give a new talk that touches on two of my favorite themes in recent years – the need to apply statistics and psychology to our “Lean Management” practices or Six Sigma or whatever.
