Improvement Insights Blog

Ask for the Tools You Need to Do Quality Improvement

Employees often try to make do with whatever they have instead of asking for the tools the need. Here’s what to do about it.



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“Hi, I’m Jay Arthur, author of “Lean Six Sigma Demystified” and QI Macros [software].

“One of my employees was having trouble with her computer, but for some reason she was afraid to ask, and she kept trying to fiddle with it, to figure out whatever was going wrong. And she drug one of our other employees who’s more technical in on it… and I said, ‘What are you guys doing?’

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Posted by Jay Arthur in Improvement Insights.

Tools Looking for Problems to Solve

People trained in Six Sigma want to take an advanced tool and apply it to a problem. They spend a lot of time looking for a problem where they can use the tool. That’s the wrong approach. What should you do instead?



“I’ve been detecting sort of an interesting pattern, at least recently. There’s all these people being trained as Green Belts and Black Belts, and when they’re done with all that training they have all these tools and then they decide they’re going to take one of those tools – maybe it’s Attribute Agreement Analysis or Design Of Experiments or something more complicated – and then they go out and they look for a problem to solve using that tool.

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Posted by Jay Arthur in Improvement Insights, Lean, Six Sigma.