No matter what you do or what you say, there’s a hidden “metamessage” back to yourself.
What metamessages have you told yourself about Lean Six Sigma?
Continue Reading "What are You Secretly Telling Yourself About Lean Six Sigma?"
The Joint Commission Journal on Quality and Patient Safety (Feb 2018) has an article entitled “Temporal Trends in Fall Rates with the Implementation of a Multifaceted Fall Prevention Program.” Ouch!
I believe the story could have been told easily with quality improvement tools, so here’s how I’d go about it. First, there are a number of tables (i.e., spreadsheets of performance data) like the one below.
The first year, 2003, had only 200 falls because they started measuring in July. The first full year of measurement was 2004.
It would be easy to turn these into control charts, but the authors chose a boxplot with a trend line of predicted falls.
Are you wasting time in Six Sigma on unnecessary steps?
Here’s how to kick start your improvement efforts.
If you’re not getting the results you want from Six Sigma, there might be a problem in the development of your projects.
Here are some of the mistakes I see in Six Sigma projects.
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:
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"
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…
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?
The recent collapse of GE stock price has led to a lot of discussion. Here’s my two cents.
Jack Welch implemented Six Sigma at GE which drove many CEOs to do the same. From scuttlebutt I’ve picked up over the years, this lead to crazy rules like every employee had to do two Six Sigma projects a year. This would violate Pareto’s Rule: if only 20% of the business is creating 80% of the defects, waste and rework, having employees try to fix the remaining 80% of the business is a waste of resources. Six Sigma needs focus, not spread.
Jeffery Immelt reduced leadership support for Six Sigma.
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