Improvement Insights Blog
The Two-hour Improvement Week to Maximize Results
Big Sigma wastes time and money. You can make a lot of progress in just two hours a week. Here’s how.
“Hi, I’m Jay Arthur, author of “Lean Six Sigma for Hospitals” and QI Macros [software].
“One of the things that’s irritated me for a long time is the whole Six Sigma idea (I call it “big sigma”) where it’s like, “We have to do it wall-to-wall, floor-to-ceiling; everybody has to be on a Six Sigma project.”
“That’s wrong, okay? A very little portion of your business is broken – not the whole enchilada, right? So you can spend a lot of time trying to fix things out there in various places and never get to the few things that really are key to moving the business.
“I don’t think you have to spend 40 hours a week on this. I think if each one of you spent two hours a week – two hours – and simply focused on trying to find exactly the data to pinpoint exactly where the problem is, then the next week get up a handful of people together to do root cause analysis for a couple hours, and then the following week spend a couple hours implementing those countermeasures, you would make massive progress, massive progress.
“So that’s my Improvement Insight for this week: spend a couple hours really focused and move the needle each week – each week – and guess what? When you do that, magic will happen… magic will happen.
“You know, if you’re stuck and you can’t quite figure out what your data is and you don’t know what to do with it, send it to me: jay@qimacros.com, and I will see if I can turn it and look at it and make some sense out of something. All right? I’m not afraid to help you, so don’t stay stuck… don’t get stuck; I hate that, all right?
“So let’s create a hassle-free America, hassle-free healthcare. Let’s go out and improve something this week.”
