Tag: Metrics

Year-to-date metrics often mislead leaders by hiding meaningful system improvements and exaggerating routine variation--making Process Behavior Charts a far better way to evaluate performance. Why...

Shout out and hat tip to Dan Markovitz for his excellent blog post: "WHEN LEADERS TORTURE THEIR EMPLOYEES" He makes a strong case that displaying three...

TL;DR: Year-over-year charts look analytical, but they often hide routine variation and invite overreaction. Process Behavior Charts make real improvement--and real risk--visible without guesswork. The...

I'd like to thank CFO Magazine (their CFO.com website) for publishing my article: "Break the Bad Habit of Overreacting to Metrics" If you've read my book...

TL;DR:Single webinar numbers and year-over-year averages often distort reality. By using run charts and Process Behavior Charts, you can separate signal from noise, avoid...

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...

tl;dr: Two data points aren't a trend. NCAA Final Four TV ratings swing up and down every year, but Process Behavior Charts show this...

Joining me for Episode #325 of the podcast is Andrea Hardaway, an operational leader and the executive director of the Association for Vocal Disorders. Andrea and I first crossed paths through LinkedIn, seeing what she shares there and vice versa. We also had a chance to visit a hospital together in Florida last year to learn about their Lean improvement work. We have enough professional interests in common, I thought it made sense to record a conversation and share it here with the listeners. Andrea has worked in manufacturing, healthcare, and other parts of the service sector and has seen common themes across industries. This includes the opportunity to better use metrics in a way that resonates with staff and is connected to improvement work, something I'm also very interested in. So, we talk about that and more in this episode.

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). 

Thanks to editor Roberto Priolo and "Planet Lean," the online publication of the Lean Global Network for hosting this discussion about author Michael Ballé about my book Measures of Success. "Metrics Matter"

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?"

Measures matter. The proper analysis of data and performance metrics allow us to separate good changes from bad, progress from stagnation. The methods in my book, Measures of Success, help us determine if our performance is getting better, getting worse, or essentially remains unchanged. Having the right set of balanced scorecard metrics is important. But the role of leaders is important, too. How do leaders interpret measures? How do they respond to changes in metrics? How do they know if a change is worth reacting to?