IT Data for Six Sigma

Dealing with data is part and parcel of any operation. But how to treat the data in your hands is another question. That is the usual dilemma that CIOs and senior IT team leaders face.

What’s ironic even, is that CIOs and senior IT team leaders often find themselves handling a lot of data, yet they seldom treat these information as something that can help them optimize their organizations effectively. That is because they don’t have the tools that help them sift through and find the relevant data. This is where Six Sigma comes in.

Thus, in the recent Six Sigma in IT conference, this question was asked: “What should we be measuring for our IT organization?”

To know the answers, read IT Measures That Matter.

Source:
Information Week

*Photo from Stock.Xchng

Filed under: Data, Data Analysis, Data Quality, IT, Metrics, Six Sigma, Software/Technology

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The SixSig Roundup

Here’s another serving of the SixSig roundup. Data is very important in Six Sigma, and so the focus of this roundup is data, data management, and data quality.
The ASQ blog needs your thoughts on sizing up the government: For those of us who are schooled in the methods and values of quality and organizational improvement (e.g., Deming, Kaizen, SPC, Lean Six Sigma, etc.), what would the process of assessing government agency missions look like? Are there any best practice examples around the world that our Government Division and other readers know about? What can the Government Division do in the days and weeks ahead, to think about the work of the next Administration, and offer the benefit of our knowledge and experience?

Informatica Data Quality Blog says that you can’t achieve customer data integration without data quality. CDI helps you to address data quality issues, such as accuracy, timeliness, and completeness.

Over at BNET, managers are encouraged to apply evidence-based management. People can make good decisions when armed with complete data.

Joyce Norris-Montanari of Dataflux asks “do you do data?” Doing Data includes any process, model, database, architecture, data stewardship issue, data governance issue, or metadata repositories that include data.

Filed under: Data, Data Quality, Six Sigma

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Alarming Figures that will Need Six Sigma

An article on New York Times about a month ago boasted of a 65% decrease in fatal airplane crashes. It’s deemed as the golden age of safety, the safest period, in the safest mode, in the history of the world.
Should we be happy about this? Look at the following figures:

1. In 1996, two (2) infamous crashes that together killed 375 people.
2. The rate dropped by about 65% to 1 fatal accident in about 4.5M departures, from 1 in nearly 2M in 1997.
3. Around the world, there have been 7 crashes this year that killed more than 20 people each.
4. The Flight Safety Foundation recently calculated that if the 1996 accident rate had remained the same in 2006, there would have been 30 major accidents last year. Instead, there were 11.

There are however sustained efforts to address the problem.

• improving equipment, like cockpit instruments that help planes steer clear of mountains when visibility is poor, and reliable jet engines
• conducting “unstabilized approaches,” meaning pilots had to fiddle with flaps, throttle and other controls just before landing
• developing better guidance for pilots to follow flight paths precisely and stay farther away from mountains in the area
• better signs on taxiways to prevent planes from moving into the path of other aircraft

Policy initiatives:

• acquire new planes
• more “safety summits”
• a national commission on aviation safety and security led by VP Al Gore in 1997

The trend to watch out for: air and runway traffic will double by 2025

Source:
Fatal Airplane Crashes Drop 65%

*Photo from Stock.Xchng

Filed under: Aviation, Data, Data Analysis

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A Quality Quiz from PQ Systems, Inc.

I subscribe to PQ Systems, Quality e-Line, and so I get interesting insights on quality every time. Today, I got this interesting Quality Quiz, which I was able to answer correctly.

I’m posting here the quiz now. Take the quiz and tell me how you fared.

Polly Yurathane considers herself the SPC queen, after successfully explaining the beta coefficient of regression analysis (standardized regression coefficient), to her new boss, Hy O. Pinyon. Now she is preparing a presentation for division manager Emily Dickinson, a poetic manager who leads with an iron will nonetheless. Emily has requested information about the relationship of the cost of coal mined by Blackern Dirt Mine Company to the amount of coal mined and the cost to mine that coal.

Polly, knowing that Emily is a poet, assumes that she knows little about statistics, so she feels quite relaxed about her presentation, seeing it as an opportunity to once again mount her throne as SPC queen.

Opening the Power Point presentation she has prepared, she explains the concept of simple regression, using this data:

DATE	TONS (in 1000s)	TOTAL COST ($1,000s)
JAN	2	2
FEB	5	8
MAR	7	10
APRIL	1	4
MAY	7	7
JUN	8	9
JUL	2	5
AUG	3	5
SEPT	5	7
OCT	6	7

She then shares a printout, generated by software that does simple regression, and explains patiently to Emily that this is a regression model that shows the relationship between the cost (Y) and the amount of coal mined (X).

(Click on the printout for a larger version.)

Where

dependent variable

independent variable

“You can use the model to predict your cost if you know the amount of coal mined,” she says slowly to the division manager, who has remained quiet through the first part of Polly’s presentation, reinforcing Polly’s inaccurate conclusion that Emily is not absorbing the message. Now, however, Emily asks a question:

“What assumptions are you making to assure that this model works?”

Not expecting such a sophisticated question, Polly stumbles for a minute, then asserts firmly, “It is very important that the dependent variable is a parameter and the independent variable is a random variable.”

Is Polly’s response to Emily’s question appropriate and accurate?

a) Yes; now she has really assured her permanent position as SPC queen.

b) No: Polly Yurathane can consider herself only a princess at best.

You can also click here for a more complete video explanation.

Filed under: Data, Data Analysis, Regression Analysis, Statistics

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Six Sigma News Round-up

Here’s another round of Six Sigma News as talked about by fellow Six Sigma bloggers.

Let me start with iSixSigma Blogosphere. Michael Cyger is giving a teaser on the Six Sigma story of Lonmin. The whole story will be featured on the May/June issue of iSixSigma Magazine. Being a producer of platinum group metals and involved in mining, Lonin’s story will be an interesting one.

News at The Sixth Sigma is about KXEN, a data mining vendor, that adopts Six Sigma DMAIC as its standard implementation methodology for inegrating analytics into corporate business processes.

Ron Pereira of Lean Six Sigma Academy has an interesting take on DOE. He is demystifying the monstrous concept of DOE. You should read it.

Filed under: Data, General, Six Sigma References, Tools/Toolkits, iSixSigma

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Control Chart and Six Sigma

A Control Chart is one of the seven basic statistical tools often used in Six Sigma, along with the Pareto Chart, histogram, check sheet, cause-and-effect diagram, flowchart, and scatter diagram.

Also known as the Shewhard chart or process-behavior chart, it can monitor processes and assure that they remain stable.

Six Sigma on its part is data-driven and aims for processes to be stable and continue to improve for as long as the processes are working.

When you use a Control Chart therefore in your Six Sigma project, you can better evaluate your data and monitor your processes.

Business Knowledge Source, Manufacturing Info reports that:

Control Chart Control charts help distinguish process variation due to assignable causes from those due to unassignable causes. Both these types of process variation are charted on a control chart. Assignable causes or special causes are meaningful factors of a process and are not always present or normal. These types of causes can be avoided and should be investigated. Unassignable causes are also known as common causes or chance causes. These are factors that occur by chance. They are not always present, but are normal and expected within a process. They are unavoidable and inherent in a process.

Continue reading…

Source:
Business Knowledge Source, What is a control chart and how is it used in Six Sigma? with a link from Six Sigma Zone

Filed under: Control Chart, Data, Manufacturing, Processes, Statistics, Tools/Toolkits

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Pareto Chart and Six Sigma

If your organization is going though some quality improvement, I’m sure you have asked the following questions:

• What is the largest issue facing your company or organization?
• What 20% of sources are causing 80% of the problems?
• Where should we focus our efforts to achieve the greatest improvements?

These questions can be answered by using a Pareto chart, also called the 80/20 Rule. The assumption is that most of the results in any situation are determined by a small number of causes.

For example, 80% of process defects arise from 20% of the process issues or 80% of delays in schedule arise from 20% of the possible causes of the delays.

BusinessKnowledgeSource.com shares that a Pareto chart:

…is a type of bar chart where the values being plotted are arranged in descending order.

…graphically summarizes and displays the importance of the differences between different groups of data.

…is constructed by splitting your data into groups. These groups are also known as segments, bins or categories. The left-side vertical axis of the Pareto chart is then labeled Frequency, Cost or some other unit of measure depending on your data.

Continue reading…

Source:
BusinessKnowledgeSource.com Manufacturing Info, “What is a Pareto chart and how is it used in Six Sigma” with link provided by Six Sigma Zone

Filed under: Data, Pareto chart, Statistics, Tools/Toolkits

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Using Six Sigma to Determine Business Value

For most companies, they determine their business value through return of investments, or ROI. To me that is not a very accurate way to get the real value of your business.

For one, a company’s bottomline has to be checked against the defects in the processes and evaluate. The ROI may register positively but how far is your business processes from the standard deviation, and how are you able to sustain your ROI through the years?

Tom Bowers, writing for SearchSecurity.com, shares his experience with working in the security department at a large pharmaceutical company. In his own words, they had success using Six Sigma to identify relevant data that can show the value of initiating a new project or technology. Instead of attempting to prove ROI, we used Six Sigma tools to define what can be measured, conduct the “measurement” and provide an analysis of that data to show business value to the CFO. The bottom line is always showing “business value” — hopefully in real dollars saved.

Basing on DMAIC, Tom’s department only used the DMA and added their own methodologies:

Define. The goal in this case is simply to identify events that can be measured. Let’s consider, for example, the theft of laptops storing valuable data. Another example might be a paper-based information risk audit thrown into a regular (versus shred) trash basket.

Measure. We decided what “units” will be used to define the measurement. What is measured and what units to use are completely based upon the process being measured. For example, a forensic examination can be measured as “each” or in dollar terms based on the information recovered or lawsuit won. The measurement for the example of the stolen laptops might be each or a dollar value (of the information and/or the device itself) – or both.

Analyze. We evaluated the business value of our measured events versus a planned security project, a headcount increase – anything that requires approaching the CFO for funding.

Next we looked regulatory compliance breaches, and then used external events such as information theft reports and regulatory noncompliance reports at other firms.

To create a larger statistical sample, we used freeware and commercial risk assessment tools.

For the IT security data points, we looked at our SEM/SIM, which provides log and event correlation that supports events seen in one location by providing corroborating evidence in other locations. These tools provide data points that are of higher quality and can speak more clearly of the ROI/business value provided by security in protecting infrastructure.

Read more…

It’s good that Tom’s company uses the tools of Six Sigma, and enjoys the benefits brought by it. While the complete DMAIC process, may not be the answer to all process improvement initiatives, I think the Improve (continue to do better) and Control (institutionalize the improved system) phases of DMAIC will still prove useful in determining or presenting the ROI to senior management.

The popular question from management is always, “What’s in it for us?” or “What do all those figures mean to our business?” I believe the Improve and the Control phases will determine the impact or implication of ROI or data leading to the determination of ROI. This is where the value lies.

Source:
SearchSecurity.com, “Forget ROI; Use Six Sigma to prove business value” with link provided by iSixSigma.com

*Photo credit: MorgueFile.com

Filed under: Benefits and Savings, Data, Finance, Processes, Statistics, Tools/Toolkits

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Six Sigma Reference Feature: ASQ

The American Society of Quality, or ASQ, is the world’s leading membership organization devoted to quality.

This website is like a one-stop shop for all your quality needs: education, government, healthcare, manufacturing, service, and more!

It stands by its slogan, Make Good Great^®. If you are a member you will have access to the latest in technologies, concepts, tools, and trainings for quality professionals, quality practitioners, and everyday consumers.

Also, you will find networking opportunities, careers, and recommended books and publications that you can use in your field.

Check out the site and find out about the wonderful world of quality.

Filed under: Certification, Data, Deployment, Finance, Healthcare, Information Mapping, Lean Six Sigma, Processes, Public Sector, Six Sigma References, Tools/Toolkits, Training

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Six Sigma Round-up

Today, I made the rounds of Six Sigma blogs to know the what the other blogs are saying about Six Sigma, Lean Six Sigma, or other quality strategies.

Over at iSixSigma Blogosphere, Sue Kozlowski plans to write a book, which she will title The 27 Lean Six Sigma Leadership Secrets of Abraham Lincoln: Uniting your organization to a common purpose. Sue shares her remarkable observations of how management and leadership books are titled: some number and, to use her term, leadership-oriented nouns. I say go for it, Sue!

Six Sigma Blog reminds us what Six Sigma is: a disciplined, data-driven approach and methodology for eliminating defects in any process. Failing to understand the concept of Six Sigma, an organization cannot begin to work toward near perfection, or so it says. Well, Six Sigma does not necessarily promise perfection at the end. Instead, it promises continuous improvement. An organization becomes aware of its processes, the defects, and will be on the look out to improve every non-comformant along the way.

Lean Six Sigma Blog poses the questions: Why do Lean Six Sigma consultants continue to deliver training using an inflexible batch method that also carries the highest cost? Shouldn’t Lean Six Sigma methods be used to deliver Lean Six Sigma training? There’s a point there. There is an underlying issue on which method is more effective and less expensive, online or classroom training. Espousing on lean, these trainings should be streamlined (i.e., be lean) to get the most out of one training.

And for some Six Sigma statistics, Quality Hero is giving a sample t-test. It is simply presented and explained that renders the information very useful.

Filed under: Data, Lean Six Sigma, Six Sigma References, Statistics, Training

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