Improvement Insights Blog
Control Charts vs Heat Maps
Heat Maps cause wild goose chases which lead to poor decisions and bad outcomes. Control Charts are the antidote. Here’s why:
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“Hi, I’m Jay Arthur, author of “Lean Six Sigma For Hospitals” “Agile Process Innovation”and QI Macros [software].
“I still find that people out there are still trying to use heat maps to notice when things are shifting. Heat maps are like a snapshot of any given space-time, monthly, weekly, whatever it is, of what may be out of whack or in whack compared to certain goals somebody set somewhere.
“Now, the problem is these things lead to lots of wild goose chases to go try and find why one number’s up and one number’s down, and a lot of people waste a lot of time chasing that. The antidote to a heat map is a control chart, and control charts are incredibly easy to draw now with QI Macros. Just select some data, click a button, get a chart and you can see “Is your process performing normally and statistically in process control or not?” Then you can decide, “Do I need to do anything? Yes or no?” If it’s not in trouble, why bother?
“Had one guy at the Institute for Healthcare Improvement Conference came up to me and said, “Jay, I want to thank you. I took your Yellow Belt training and I used QI Macros to help my company save five million dollars this year. We put all of our metrics into control chart templates and everybody’s monitoring it.” The leadership team has learned to look at the charts and [say], “Well, that doesn’t look like it’s in trouble. Let’s pay attention to this other thing.” So his leadership team has figured out that control charts simplify their life because they’re not going to waste a lot of time chasing things that aren’t broken.
“Control charts are the antidote to heat maps. Heat maps cause wild goose chases, which cause bad decisions, which lead to more rework, waste and whatever. It’s like the essence of ‘tampering,’ as Deming would say. You take one little data point and decide that that’s a big thing and go change something. No, you need to look at the process and see how that works.
“So that’s my Improvement Insight for this week. Get out of heat maps, get into control charts. Let’s go out and improve something this week, like how you manage your business.”
