Home »
Blog » Improvement Insights » Page 43
Improvement Insights Blog
Latest "Improvement Insights" Posts
I believe we are teaching people things they don’t need to know to solve problems they don’t have to impress people they don’t like.
You don’t have to know everything about statistics to do Six Sigma projects. What you need to know adheres to the 4/50 Rule: 4% of the knowledge will deliver over 50% of the results.
And if you automate the formulas and decision trees using QI Macros, you can collapse the learning curve in such a way that “No Belts” can go from zero to hero in a matter of hours. Here’s how:
Continue Reading "Collapsing the Six Sigma Learning Curve"
Posted by Jay Arthur in Improvement Insights, QI Macros, Six Sigma.
Remember how you learned things when you were a kid? That’s not how anyone teaches Lean Six Sigma, but it could be.
Continue Reading "Show-Do-Know – The Secret to Accelerated Learning"
Posted by Jay Arthur in Improvement Insights, QI Macros, Six Sigma.
One of our QI Macros users sent me a Greenbelt Project to review. The team did a great job of using the tools and connecting the dots. There was only one small problem…
Continue Reading "Six Sigma Green Belt Project Problem"
Posted by Jay Arthur in Improvement Insights, QI Macros, Six Sigma.
People have been trying to make statistics simple and easy to understand for decades.
But statistics aren’t simple. Maybe we should change how we teach them?
Continue Reading "Statistics are Simple"
Posted by Jay Arthur in Improvement Insights, QI Macros, Statistics.
Everyone seems to think that top down, leadership-driven is the only way to implement Lean Six Sigma. It’s not.
50 years of research proves that it fails half the time. Yep, 50% failure rate. That’s less than 1 sigma.
This type of failure is so common that it even has a name: The Stalinist Paradox.
Continue Reading "Top Down Change Doesn’t Work"
Posted by Jay Arthur in Improvement Insights, Lean, QI Macros, Six Sigma.
“Our evolutionary instincts sometimes lead us to see patterns when there are none there. People have been doing this all the time – finding patterns in random noise.” – Tomaso Poggio
People just need a way to separate the Signal from the Noise.
Here are some insights from the book by Nate Silver.
Continue Reading "Signal versus Noise"
Posted by Jay Arthur in Data Mining, Improvement Insights, Jay Arthur Blog, Six Sigma.
People often get stuck before the “Analyze” phase of DMAIC because of ugly data.
You can’t analyze data until it is in the right format for analysis.
In this data about medications that might affect patient falls, we have to:
- Transpose the data
- Use Excel’s Text-to-column feature to split the meds into separate cells
- Use QI Macros UnStack Columns tool to get all of the meds into a single column
- Use QI Macros Data Mining Wizard to create a PivotTable and Pareto chart of medications involved in patient falls
You can watch the video below:
Continue Reading "It’s Hard to Do Data Analysis on Ugly Data… Part 2"
Posted by Jay Arthur in Data Mining, Improvement Insights.
