Are You Wasting Time in Six Sigma?
Are you wasting time in Six Sigma on unnecessary steps?
Here’s how to kick start your improvement efforts.
Improvement Insights Blog
Latest Posts
Your Friend, The QI Macros Website Search Box…
If you’ve used QI Macros for any length of time, you’ve undoubtedly run across something you had questions about. Let us clue you in to a secret weapon: The QI Macros search box.
Located on the top right corner of every page of the QI Macros website, this can come in handy if you’ve got questions
- Show Process Change: If you’ve got a chart of your process before and after you changed a process that affected the results, how do you show that? Input “show process change” into the QI Macros search box and one of the results will be this video.
Continue Reading "Your Friend, The QI Macros Website Search Box…"
Six Sigma Triage
People sometimes hesitate to tackle the Big Hairy Audacious Problems (BHAP) using Six Sigma. They start with something trivial. Trivial problems have limited data. The BHAP problems have better, more detailed data.
Tackle the Worst First!
More Six Sigma Project Mistakes
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.
Collapsing the Six Sigma Learning Curve
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:
Show-Do-Know – The Secret to Accelerated Learning
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"
Six Sigma Green Belt Project Problem
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…
IHI 2017 Quality Tool Usage
Most of the improvement posters at this year’s Institute for Healthcare Improvement (IHI) conference are still using line, bar and pie charts, not the tools of quality improvement. There were several posters using QI Macros control charts, Pareto charts and fishbones this year from Sutter Health and Howard University Hospital.
Statistics are Simple
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?
Top Down Change Doesn’t Work
Everyone seems to think that top down, leadership-driven is the only way to implement Lean Six Sigma. It’s not.
50 years of research proves that it fails half the time. Yep, 50% failure rate. That’s less than 1 sigma.
This type of failure is so common that it even has a name: The Stalinist Paradox.
