Tag: Variation

Thanks, as always, to Ryan McCormack for this. He always shares so much good reading, listening, and viewing here! Subscribe to get these directly...

tl;dr summary: Starbucks' mobile order system demonstrates significant variability both in the organization of pickup areas and in how beverages like the Nitro Cold...

I'll be teaching my "Better Metrics" workshop (aka "Measures of Success," ala my book) twice in June: Cambridge Investments - Open for Public Registration (Fairfield, Iowa) -- June 5 Lean Healthcare Transformation Summit (Chicago) -- June 13 After facilitating the Red Bead Experiment in the workshop, one other way I've found to simulate variation is an online simulation that's available, of all places, on the BBC website: "Can chance make you a killer?"

Are minor league games taking longer? Well, yes and no, depending on the league. My next book, Measures of Success, is about the use of this Process Behavior Chart methodology in the workplace, as applied to our performance measures.  This post explores some data, how asking for more data can be more helpful, and how to use charts to evaluate a metric over time.

As I blogged about yesterday, things went well at the Oscars... or, at least, no errors were made in the announcements. But that thing that didn't go well was the TV ratings. Two Data Points Are Not a Trend The headlines I saw had a lot of two-data-point comparisons. Headlines sometimes gave the percentage decrease in viewers or how many million fewer viewers there were. Many talked about "record low" but if you're tracking a metric "record low" or "all-time high" doesn't mean there's a "special cause." That "record low" could still be noise in the system.

My favorite book, as I've written about before, is not a "Lean book" -- it's Understanding Variation: The Key to Managing Chaos by Donald J. Wheeler, PhD. It might look like a book about statistics...

As I've done before (and written about), I'll be facilitating the famed "Deming Red Bead Experiment" on Thursday at the Society for Health Systems...

I was quoted in two articles that appeared in "Today's Hospitalist": "Discharging Mr. Wood: Time to get serious about waste" and "Standardized work: Improving quality by reducing...

My wife and I just got back from four days in Napa and Sonoma counties doing, ahem, "gemba walks" at a number of wineries,...