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 had a talk with a past student this week about the problems that their IT organization was having in writing a problem statement for a DMAIC improvement effort.  After talking about their issues, I came to realize that there was an issue because IT was a support group without out any real business relationship.  [...]

I was talking with a Master Black Belt candidate, in the process of being certified, who asked about other statistical tools that a practitioner should learn.  Since the candidate is in a company that has a lot of time based continuous data, time series analysis comes to mind.  I learned all of these tools as [...]

One presidential candidate is saying that the US government needs to implement Lean Six Sigma (LSS) and it can start cutting expenses.  It is a great political sound bite, but is this a reasonable claim? In my view it is not reasonable.  Every LSS project starts with an unspoken assumption that the process is required [...]

Have you ever heard of this method? I have hear people talk about using this method for years, but have never used it myself.  I called my two most experienced DOE mentors and one had seen someone else use it the other had never seen it. What is d-optimal design?  In short it is a [...]

In my class this week, a question on Measurement System Analysis(MSA) arose; Can you compare measurement tools with the operator column and use the MSA nested option in Minitab?” My first reaction was that the math would work and it would give you a result, but it was not a proper use of the tool.  [...]

I am feeling out of touch from the world of process improvement.  I am researching a few topics and have found that what I know as simple process mapping is not “the thing to do” any more.  I learned my process mapping 20 or more years ago and it has done me well.  Rectangles for [...]

  One of my students sent an email and asked me to explain why the paired t-test provided a different result than the orthogonal regression function in Minitab.  Well, I had no quick answer because I had never heard of Orthogonal regression.  So I looked it up and found that it is a function that [...]

We had a potential client call about getting Design for Six Sigma (DFSS) training for their Black and Master Black Belts.  This client said the right thing, that they were looking to “sharpen the saw” for their belts.  Think about it, most of us went to training and then nothing more.  We run a few [...]