Pyzdek Institute

Lean Six Sigma Black Belt Salary Tops $100K

The web site indeed.com reports that the average Lean Six Sigma Black Belt salary as of March 14, 2011 is $101,000. This value is 38% higher than average salaries for all job postings in the US. Master Black Belt salaries average $115,000.
A Sampling Question

A Six Sigma Green Belt student asked an interesting question about sampling. Here’s the question and my response. QUESTION: Just a question that I thought I would run by you… I work in the Automation industry, and am currently working on two production lines, and logging data for the parts being produced. One line is…
How to Revive a Sagging Lean Six Sigma Program

February 28, 2011. ASQ Lean Six Sigma Conference, Phoenix, Arizona. Conference keynote speaker D. Lynn Kelley, Vice President of Operational Excellence at Textron, Inc. told the audience of Lean Six Sigma professionals that the key to keeping a process excellence effort exciting is to be sure that it is linked to the leadership’s goals for…
Kurtosis

A student asked me if the kurtosis of the normal distribution was 0 or 3. It seems that I’d said both at different times. Strangely, the answer is that kurtosis of a normal distribution is sometimes 0 and sometimes 3. If you look at Wikipedia you see this old-timer equation for Kurtosis, where μ4 is…
Packagers Report Quality Gap

Packaging World reports that a recent survey highlighted a significant gap among packagers regarding the importance of quality and their strength in the quality area. The article, which appears in the February 2011 issue of Packaging World Magazine, found that in most areas there was plenty of room for improvement. However, two areas stood out…
Subjective Probability of Project Success

One of the early lessons in all of our courses asks students to enter a number for the “subjective probability of success” for the project. Several students enter a 1 in this worksheet cell. This indicates that they believe that the project is certain to succeed. In the real world, this is extremely unlikely. Considering…
Why I Hate Hypothesis Testing

If it were up to me, statistical hypothesis inference testing would be entirely replaced by confidence intervals. Both methods provide exactly the same information, however: If you do some research you’ll find quite a body of literature complaining about the hypothesis testing approach. This is my small contribution to that cause.
Has the Process Mean Changed?

Here’s an exercise from Pyzdek Institute Green Belt training. At a pharmaceutical company they have developed an IV drip device that has an advertised drip rate of 5 drops per minute. A sample of 10 “drippers” is taken from the process and tested by counting the number of drips that occur during a 10 minute…
What is the Optimum Team Size?

Back in the days when I studied group dynamics the research indicated that teams of 5-7 were “optimal” in the sense that teams of this size did better in lab experiments at solving problems than either smaller or larger groups. However I’ve recently seen business writing that states that optimum team size is 4-6 people.…
Non-Normal Capability and Negative Z Scores

Here’s a question from a Pyzdek Institute Six Sigma Green Belt student: Question: I’m currently looking at data for my Green Belt project. The primary metric is turn-around-time, and the data is non-normal. I have run the Distribution ID plot and determined that the closest fits for my data are a Weibull distribution and a…