Tag: Process Behavior Charts

Here's the latest cartoon collaboration with a skilled artist and medical assistant, Carrie Schurman (see past cartoons). You can find her on Twitter as @carrieschurman. The idea for this cartoon came from Maggie Millard, the director of marketing at KaiNexus. Maggie has learned about Process Behavior Charts from me and some of the stories are incorporated into my book Measures of Success.  What does this "out of control chart" look like and why did it make me chuckle?

If you're not a baseball fan, I apologize for a second baseball-themed post this week. Baseball has a lot of historical time-series data to work with and analyze. If you're not interested in "Process Behavior Charts" or similar methods, I guess I will apologize for this post again too. Next, I'll be apologizing for apologizing. But, I am at Dr. Wheeler's four-day workshop on "Understanding Statistical Process Control" as I blogged about on Monday. It's great to learn from Dr. Wheeler in person and I'll be sharing reflections on the class in a later post (and I'm posting a few things on LinkedIn along the way). In Chapter 1 of Understanding Variation, Dr. Wheeler points out how charts or graphs are far superior to tables or lists of numbers. He uses a baseball example:

I recently saw this headline: Baseball on pace for lowest batting average since 1972 Just because it's the lowest average in 48 years... it doesn't mean that this year's MLB-wide batting average is low in a way that's statistically meaningful.

I presented a 30-minute webinar on Monday, August 27 at 1 pm EDT. This one was hosted by Lean Frontiers as part of their summer webinar series.

Here are a few items and thoughts related to "Process Behavior Charts" and my book Measures of Success. I'll share some charts related to sales of my book about charts and management. I'll also share an updated article of mine and two podcasts that had me on to talk about the book.

Hosted by Catalysis, I shared some key concepts from my new book Measures of Success (now available in the Apple Books store among other places). This webinar was geared toward a healthcare audience that is also, likely, interested in or practicing elements of Lean Daily Management. This was held Monday, August 20 at noon EDT.

Here is a recorded webinar... I played host (along with KaiNexus) for this webinar that was held Tuesday, August 14 at 1 pm ET.

Here is a chart from a team in San Antonio, where I teach a class on Lean for quality and patient safety twice a year. This team was basically using the “A3” improvement methodology to look at a problem that really impacted patients. My understanding is that a contaminated blood culture bottle leads to false positive results that indicate that a patient has a bloodstream infection when they really don't.

I started my career in manufacturing, so that's just one reason I'm interested in the topics of offshoring (sending manufacturing work overseas) and what's now called "reshoring," or bringing jobs and factories back to the U.S. Somebody at A.T. Kearney sent me a link to their recent report on reshoring, with the headline: Reshoring in Reverse Again US manufacturers are not exactly coming back in droves. In fact, the 2018 Reshoring Index shows that imports from traditional offshoring countries are at a record high. When you learn to look at data and workplace metrics through the "Process Behavior Chart" methodology, you learn to be skeptical of text descriptions like "a record high." Does "a record high" mean that the data point is statistically meaningful? Not always.

Here is the recording of the webinar I told you about recently, with themes from my book Measures of Success. What is "management by emoji?"

Here is my latest article that I published on LinkedIn: Is the Reported Drop in Major League Baseball Attendance a "Signal" or "Noise" in the Data?

For a long time, I've wanted to attend a "Statistical Process Control" (SPC) class taught by Donald J. Wheeler, Ph.D.  I'm finally doing this in September and I'd like to invite you to join me.