By Mike Lopez: Before Lean, many of the activities that are presently structured as Lean projects used to take place anyway. They flew under corporate radar because the communication pathway was not established to let management know about these grassroots…
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.
I first met Davis Balestracci at a conference a few years back, where I heard him give a very spirited and insightful presentation. That's why I'm happy to have him as my guest for Episode #323 of the podcast.
We'll talk about a range of topics, including some of the key lessons that you'll find in his book (as a much deeper dive than we can get into here) Data Sanity: A Quantum Leap to Unprecedented Results (2nd edition). Davis has been a long-time columnist for Quality Digest, and you'll hear his thoughts on Process Behavior Charts, W. Edwards Deming, Lean Six Sigma, and more.
Here are a few items and thoughts related to "Process Behavior Charts" and my book Measures of Success.
I'll share some charts related to sales of my book about charts and management.
I'll also share an updated article of mine and two podcasts that had me on to talk about the book.
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"
Are minor league games taking longer? Well, yes and no, depending on the league.
My next book, Measures of Success, is about the use of this Process Behavior Chart methodology in the workplace, as applied to our performance measures.
This post explores some data, how asking for more data can be more helpful, and how to use charts to evaluate a metric over time.
Last week, I saw a headline about a drop in NCAA college football attendance.
I wasn't satisfied with the two data point comparisons or other written descriptions of the metrics. I wanted to see data. SHOW ME THE DATA, JERRY! (with apologies to "Jerry Maguire"). I wanted to see a chart. So, I found the data on to NCAA website and created "process behavior charts" that tell you much more about the data than text numbers ever could.
When managing a process and looking at results, the type of chart we use matters. The way we react to the chart matters too. In this blog post, I explore two different types of charts and explain why I like the "process behavior chart" format better.
As I've been writing about "process behavior charts" - a simple, yet effective method for charting and reacting to (or not overreacting to) metrics, it's made curious what some of the modern Toyota books say about metrics and performance measures.... or at least the first two in The Toyota Way series.
I’m traveling internationally for ten days and I turned on one of the British news channels. There’s a major story about NHS England. First, the awful reality that a nurse would willfully kill babies in the NICU. Then, the second…
A pitch from a personal injury law firm showed up in my inbox. The subject line was about older workers dying on the job. The numbers were real. I checked them against the Bureau of Labor Statistics’ Census of Fatal…
An executive says, after hearing about a major quality defect: “You said we solved that. Why’d the problem come back???” That might sound like an attempt at accountability. But it’s not necessarily Lean thinking. The “Study” step of the Plan-Do-Study-Adjust…