Written by Rick Haynes on April 3, 2012 – 7:26 am
I am boarding a flight in Austin this morning and I see the TSA checking people and their carry-on bags at the gate. This check is clearly non-value added, since each of us and our bags were x-rayed within 1.5hrs before the flight. Why re-check us? No answer to this question is acceptable. 1. The [...]
Written by Rick Haynes on March 27, 2012 – 8:53 am
The Wall Street Journal had an article this weekend titled “When Risk is a Red-Meat Issue” by Carl Bialik on March 23, 2012. This may be behind the WSJ pay wall, but if you can read it, please do. The article starts with a study that concluded that eating one serving of red meat per [...]
Written by Rick Haynes on March 22, 2012 – 10:47 am
This blog is intended to address issues about re-introducing Lean Six Sigma (LSS) into an organization but would also apply to the initial adoption of LSS practices into a company that has existing Black Belt-trained employees that could be involved in the LSS deployment. When an organization restarts or re-introduces a LSS program, there are [...]
Written by Rick Haynes on March 20, 2012 – 4:17 pm
Smarter Solutions receives many calls from prospective clients that want Lean Six Sigma (LSS) training, which we provide, but they generally only want the training with no other support. It is usually a money issue, where the company is trying to spend the minimum amount. Good training is expensive, but what truly costs more? Wasting [...]
Written by Rick Haynes on February 25, 2012 – 9:38 am
Many students of Lean Six Sigma struggle with the task of determining if an extreme value is a random event or a special-cause event. It may sound easy in class, but it is not a simple task. First of all, every data point has conditions that can be assigned as causes: A new operator was [...]
Written by Rick Haynes on February 7, 2012 – 11:02 am
I am preparing to speak to a Project Management group in Austin this afternoon. My preparation included reading a few PMI articles, one of which was quite interesting to the Lean Six Sigma side of me. What Causes Bad Estimates… and What You Can Do About It by James T. Brown. It was found on the [...]
Written by Rick Haynes on February 5, 2012 – 3:40 pm
At Smarter Solutions we routinely discuss a move to electronic media for our Lean Six Sigma and consulting efforts. We have converted one book to an electronic format, with good reviews, but wonder about the applicability of text books to electronic media. The top Lean Six Sigma programs still provide courses with Instructor Lead Classes. [...]
Written by Rick Haynes on January 24, 2012 – 4:31 pm
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 [...]
Written by Rick Haynes on January 5, 2012 – 3:12 am
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 [...]
Written by Rick Haynes on December 27, 2011 – 5:19 pm
As I traveled for the Christmas Holiday this year I was in Seattle, near where I grew up. It is a long ways from Texas where I currently live. All of the people I saw were living their lives with very little conception of the world outside of their hometown, possibly just what can be [...]