February 28, 2011. ASQ Lean Six Sigma Conference, Phoenix, Arizona.  

Conference keynote speaker D. Lynn Kelley, Vice President of Operational Excellence at Textron, Inc. told the audience of Lean Six Sigma professionals that the key to keeping a process excellence effort exciting is to be sure that it is linked to the leadership's goals for the organization. I heartily agree. In fact, all Lean Six ...

The 2011 ASQ Lean Six Sigma conference in Phoenix is underway. More than 400 people are in attendance, a nice increase from recent years. Maybe the economic downturn is finally coming to an end! The Pyzdek Institute has a table so if you have the chance stop by and visit me or Pyzdek Institute Master Black Belt Peter Bersbach. The sessions cover a wide range of topics, from soft skills, to proj...

A student asked me if the kurtosis of the normal distribution was 0 or 3. It seems that I'd said both at different times. Strangely, the answer is that kurtosis of a normal distribution is sometimes 0 and sometimes 3. If you look at Wikipedia you see this old-timer equation for Kurtosis, where μ4 is the fourth moment about the mean and σ is ...

Packaging World reports that a recent survey highlighted a significant gap among packagers regarding the importance of quality and their strength in the quality area. The article, which appears in the February 2011 issue of Packaging World Magazine, found that in most areas there was plenty of room for improvement. However, two areas stood out from the rest in terms of importance: packaging engine...

One of the early lessons in all of our courses asks students to enter a number for the "subjective probability of success" for the project. Several students enter a 1 in this worksheet cell. This indicates that they believe that the project is certain to succeed. In the real world, this is extremely unlikely. Considering all of the possible ways a project might fail, a number in the 90%+ rang...

If it were up to me, statistical hypothesis inference testing would be entirely replaced by confidence intervals. Both methods provide exactly the same information, however: Confidence intervals are graphical Confidence intervals are able to compare more than two hypotheses In any real-world situation the null hypothesis is always false. If your sample size is large enough you will always reject ...

Here's an exercise from Pyzdek Institute Green Belt training. At a pharmaceutical company they have developed an IV drip device that has an advertised drip rate of 5 drops per minute. A sample of 10 "drippers" is taken from the process and tested by counting the number of drips that occur during a 10 minute span. The average for each dripper is found by dividing the total drops by 10. The results ...

Back in the days when I studied group dynamics the research indicated that teams of 5-7 were "optimal" in the sense that teams of this size did better in lab experiments at solving problems than either smaller or larger groups. However I've recently seen business writing that states that optimum team size is 4-6 people. The authors didn't mention the research behind this statement, but they a...