In a coaching session with a Green Belt (GB) student I was shown a case where there is no need to baseline the process.  Their process was experiencing 100% defectives for an entire year.  Now, it was not a manufacturing process so the interpretation of defective did not mean that the product was scrapped.  In [...]

I was fishing this weekend for steelhead in Erie PA. We stood next to two local men who used the same bait, tackle and area in the creek. 6 of us caught nothing in 3 days. The locals caught 5 each day. If the probability of catching a fish was constant, we would have done [...]

I am a user of Fathom Software to demonstrate statistics principles in my classes.  The software provides a wonderful visual simulation of many statistical principles.   I use it to show what leverage and outliers are in regression, demonstrate the central limit theorem, and (my personal favorite) random confidence intervals of the mean.  In all of [...]

A past student talked to me about a request from their boss to generate a project list for the year for the department.  In this case it is an IT department with a number of trained belts in a large multinational.  The past student has been working as a senior technologist and MBB for only [...]

A student in this week’s class shared his project progress.  As many students find, the problem statement had changed during the project due to a better understanding of the issues.  An expectation that a problem statement is perfect at the start of an effort is unreasonable.  Most LSS projects are initiated by business leaders because [...]

I see many company scorecards as I coach my students.  Well over half of the companies have adopted a red/yellow/green color coding for their scorecards.  Generally they are made with the conditional formatting functions that are in Excel.  I know that the stoplight symbolism is great, but what the scorecards have done is convert a [...]