I know many of you won’t have access to this article from the latest Industrial Engineer magazine (from the Institute of Industrial Engineers) but I had to comment on it anyway. The piece, by Richard Shonberger, has the headline “Faltering…
Emily Swaney, VP of Operational Excellence at OhioHealth, explains how a Lean Promotion Office of 11 people supports a Lean management system for 35,000 associates. The approach relies on developing leaders as problem-solving coaches and on connecting daily huddles and…
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…
TL;DR: The NHS backlog gets narrated one month at a time, and millions in bonus money ride on the moves. A Process Behavior Chart shows most movement is noise — and the trusts that stay on top are running structurally…
Most hospital quality dashboards are designed to answer one question: Are we OK? Green means yes. Red means no. The trouble is, once the answer is green, nobody asks the more useful question: what did we do, and is it…
If your emergency department metric improved this quarter and you felt good about it, the problem might not be your emergency department. It might be your metric. Most hospital leaders have been in this meeting. The percentage of patients seen…
Headlines say Bourbon is in crisis: Yeah, this looks bad. Look at that decline! This chart supports headlines like: And it’s not just Bourbon, it’s wine and alcohol in general. There were plenty more like this. These headlines are written…
Charts like this always make me wonder why we throw away the additional context of data from 2016 when we start the 2017 chart.
It's unlikely that January 1st in any given year is the magical creation of a new system or a new process. In other words, January 2017 was likely the same process as December 2016. The annual cutoffs are arbitrary. Sure, people are accustomed to thinking in annual cycles, but is this helpful for improvement?
Process Behavior Charts help leaders distinguish signal from noise in their metrics, so they can stop overreacting to routine variation and focus on real improvement. Instead of asking people to explain every up and down in performance, these charts provide a…
tl;dr: If leaders have to “do the math in their heads” to see trends, the chart isn’t doing its job. Bowling charts hide signals and exaggerate noise. Process Behavior Charts reveal what’s really happening so leaders can react less, learn…
Scroll down for how to subscribe, transcript, and more My guest for Episode #522 of the Lean Blog Interviews Podcast is Jacquie Maupin. She joins the podcast to discuss her upcoming workshop at the Healthcare Systems Process Improvement Conference (HSPI)…
Scroll down for how to subscribe, transcript, and more My guest for Episode #520 of the Lean Blog Interviews Podcast is Bill Remy, CEO of TBM Consulting. Bill is both an accomplished business executive and leader who is frequently called…
