Here’s another post on the theme of performance metrics, as I’m talking about next week at Lean Startup Week (see yesterday’s post or others in this series). At the risk of becoming a broken record, it saddens me to see…
As next week’s Lean Startup Week approaches, I’m pretty laser focused on preparation for my: Eric Ries, author of The Startup Way and the founder of this event, cited Dr. W. Edwards Deming multiple times in his first book The Lean Startup.…
TL;DR: Cherry-picked metrics can make performance look better without actually improving it. Process Behavior Charts help leaders distinguish real improvement from noise, stop overreacting, and focus on improving the system instead of explaining fluctuations. What Is Success Theater? One of…
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.…
As Eric wrote about in The Lean Startup (and as many others say), time is the most precious commodity anybody has. I think that's true in startups and it's true in other organizations. Everybody says they don't have enough time. So, we have to use it wisely.
If you don't care about sports or statistical process analysis, this isn't the post for you... but it was interesting for me to try to wrap my head around the data behind a headline ("Blazers player secures $500,000 bonus by not taking 3-pointer in final game of the season") that I'll write about here in this post.
I forget what hospital these charts are even from, but it doesn’t really matter. It’s become more common, in my gemba visits, to see hospital departments charting metrics. They are often part of “huddle boards” that teams gather around on…
Two pet peeves of mine are hearing people say things like “Lean is all about reducing waste” and or “Lean is all about cost cutting” (and thankfully others are also trying to dispel that myth). Another pet peeve is people…
tl;dr: Red-green charts push leaders to react to every up and down, turning normal variation into false drama. Process behavior charts provide the context needed to see signal vs. noise–so leaders improve the system instead of chasing each data point.…
I recently saw a tweet that referenced a May 2014 that was sent to President Obama and his administration: “Report to the President – Better HealthCare and Lower Costs: Accelerating Improvement Through Systems Engineering.” The report was written by the “President’s Council…
TL;DR: Understanding Variation by Donald J. Wheeler is the most influential book in my Lean journey. It taught me how to distinguish signal from noise in data, avoid overreacting to normal variation, and focus leaders on improving systems instead of…
I recently received two emails that are worth sharing, in anonymous form here. One was from somebody I know who just quit a Lean role at a major academic medical center after a few years there, as he’s looking to…
