My guest for Episode #462 of the Lean Blog Interviews Podcast is Professor John Grout, the former dean of the Campbell School of Business at Berry College in Rome, Georgia. He was recently a guest on “My Favorite Mistake” — Episode 186, so I…
Scroll down for how to subscribe, transcript, and more My guest for Episode #450 of the Lean Blog Interviews Podcast is Professor Torbjorn Netland, Ph.D. Tor is the chair of production and operations management in the department of management, technology…
Scroll down for how to subscribe, transcript, and more My guest for Episode #424 of the Lean Blog Interviews Podcast is Balaji Reddie, the founder of The Deming Forum of India. An engineer by trade, Balaji was exposed to W. Edwards…
Process behavior charts offer a way to move beyond emojis, colors, and single data points by showing whether a metric is actually changing or merely fluctuating. This post explores why many common visual scorecards unintentionally drive overreaction — and how…
Here's the latest cartoon collaboration with a skilled artist and medical assistant, Carrie Schurman (see past cartoons). You can find her on Twitter as @carrieschurman.
The idea for this cartoon came from Maggie Millard, the director of marketing at KaiNexus. Maggie has learned about Process Behavior Charts from me and some of the stories are incorporated into my book Measures of Success.
What does this "out of control chart" look like and why did it make me chuckle?
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"
For a long time, I've wanted to attend a "Statistical Process Control" (SPC) class taught by Donald J. Wheeler, Ph.D.
I'm finally doing this in September and I'd like to invite you to join me.
Thanks to Eric Ries and the organizers for Lean Startup Week for allowing me to share video of my 15-minute talk from last year's event.
One reason for sharing this today is to celebrate yesterday's initial release of the in-progress version of my book Measures of Success. If you buy the book now, you'll get a PDF of the first three chapters, or about 40% of the book's expected content.
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.
TL;DR: Leaders lose sleep because they react to every up and down in their metrics. Most fluctuations are just noise. Process Behavior Charts help filter noise, identify real signals, and focus leadership attention on meaningful improvement instead of constant firefighting.…
I received another reader question (submit yours here) and it’s about statistics, “daily Lean management,” and visualizing performance data. Hey Mark: I like your posts about control charts and data. Our health system is rolling out a “Daily Lean Management” system…
I’m talking about the use of “bar charts” vs. “line charts” when tracking performance measures through Lean Daily Management, Strategy Deployment, or other methods.
