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Statistics—The Good, the Bad and the Ugly
The quality and process improvement professions tend to rely heavily on statistical information. The very science of quality control can be said to have begun with Walter A. Shewhart’s development of the control chart and discovery of the concepts of special cause and common cause variation. And where would Six Sigma be without statistics? But […]
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Operational Definitions of COVID-19
Those of us in the process excellence and quality professions know the importance of operational definitions. Without a good operational definition, a metric is meaningless. An operational definition is a definition that includes a detailed specification of measurement. In process excellence work you will frequently discover that the opportunity your project is addressing can’t be […]
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Can SPC Save the World?
As we navigate through these uncertain times, it becomes apparent that our understanding and response to the situation could greatly benefit from improved data quality and analysis. The complexity of the current health situation calls for a time-tested tool from the industrial world: Statistical Process Control (SPC). For over a century, SPC has been guiding […]
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Daily COVID-19 Cases
This post is for the data nerds like me who want a simple way to keep track of the reported new cases of the COVID-19 coronavirus in the United States. Data are from the European CDC and are reported at midnight central European time each day. How ECDC collects and processes COVID-19 data Since the […]
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The Great Swedish COVID-19 Experiment
While most of the world is locked in, Swedish citizens are not. Sweden has decided not to participate in draconian economic shutdowns, giving us a “null hypothesis case” with which to compare our actions. This policy may seem radical by world standards, but it is exactly the policy advocated by expert epidemiologist Knut Wittkowski. According […]
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The Pandemic as an Opportunity for Radical Change
In my book The End of Management I describe how complex managed systems such as businesses change. The short version is: they usually don’t. Most business systems are in stable equilibrium most of the time. This state can be thought of in terms of chaos theory and complexity theory. The gist of it is that […]
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The Inspired Labor & Delivery Nurse
Charlene was a nurse in the Labor and Delivery Department of a large metropolitan medical center. The hospital had the highest Cesarean Section rate in their state, which was the source of some rather large headlines and an embarrassment to the hospital. It was also the source of millions of dollars in costs. The Board […]
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Let’s Return to Simple
I recently re-read my original book An SPC Primer originally published in 1978. It brought back my early days in process excellence. At the time I was the only quality control person in a factory that covered an area of 1 mile plus. I was working the graveyard shift and my task was twofold. As […]
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A Change Agent’s Most Important Personal Attribute
Today I received a call from a person interested in becoming a certified Lean Six Sigma Black Belt. Of course, we value him as a customer and he will learn a great deal if he decides to enroll in our Six Sigma training. Among the things he’ll learn are both “hard skills” involving statistics and […]
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What Are SIPOC Maps and How Do You Use Them?
Kirby had been a service agent at the sales contact center for a long time. And he was a good one, one of the best. But his promotion to supervisor for a small group of agents was a new job to him and he wanted his team to do their job better. There were many […]