Improvement Insights Blog

One of our users said she had some “troublesome data.” Do you have troublesome data? Here’s what to do about it.

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

“I was at the American Society for Quality Lean Six Sigma Conference and one of our users came up and we were talking. I said “I’d be happy to do a webinar for your people.” She said, “Well, we have some troublesome data. We could really use some help with our troublesome data.”

“One of the things I know is that very often, doing improvement isn’t hard, but getting the data that’s out there into some sort of useful format is often crazy and takes a little effort. Sometimes people chop it up like at a Ginsu knife demonstration and put in many different spreadsheets. I don’t know what people are trying to do: They’re trying to make their spreadsheet readable by humans. Guess what? Humans cannot read your spreadsheet. They don’t want to, right?

“So what do we have to do? We have to get that data in an order or a sequence or a group that we can actually do something with. It might be all pivot table kind of stuff where we have line-by-line event data and we have to summarize that with pivot tables to turn it into something we can actually analyze and figure out what needs to be fixed.

“So that’s my Improvement Insight for this week: If you have troublesome data, you go out to our website. Down at the bottom it says “Chat.” Chat in with us.” We’re happy to help you think through your troublesome data, just send it to support@qimacros.com. We’ll be happy to look at it for free and see if we can help you understand what to do with it. Very often, I don’t know what they’ve done to the data, but people seem to find ways to make it more messy than it needs to be.

“So let’s go out and improve something this week maybe it’s your troublesome data.”