Davis Balestracci
My last column, “Can We Please Stop the Guru Wars?” made the case that the various improvement approaches are all pretty much the same. To recap, there are seven sources of problems with a process...
Davis Balestracci
The various improvement approaches are, in essence, all pretty much the same. Any competent practitioner would neither want to be called a “guru” nor have any problems dealing with another competent...
Davis Balestracci
I remember all too well the “quality circles will solve everything” craze during the 1980s, which died a miserable death. During this time I was exposed to Joseph Juran’s wisdom about quality...
Davis Balestracci
Twenty-five years ago, I learned a wonderfully simple model summarizing the four stages of a change process, whether personal or organizational.
• Awareness • Breakthrough in knowledge • Choosing...
Davis Balestracci
For all the talk about the power of control charts, I can empathize when audiences taking mandated courses on quality tools are left puzzled. When I look at training materials or books, their...
Davis Balestracci
As many of you know, I hate bar graphs. They are ubiquitous, and most of them are worthless. I'll make maybe two exceptions: 1) a Pareto analysis; 2) a comparative set of stratified histograms...
Davis Balestracci
I just got through looking at an expensive 186-page quarterly summary of (alleged) customer satisfaction data for a hospital. My head was spinning by page 28.
There were lots of bar graphs, “...
Davis Balestracci
As improvement professionals, part of our learning curve is the experience of facilitating project teams that fail miserably. Then, despite the necessary lessons learned, there still remain some...
Davis Balestracci
TQM, Six Sigma, lean, lean Six Sigma, Toyota Production System—wrong focus! It’s time to move the focus from “method” to “improvement.”
All of these methods are based in the same theory and rely...
Davis Balestracci
I’m in the middle of a hot, humid stretch of weather, as are many of the U.S. readers. I can hardly think straight, so I’ve decided to lighten things up a bit today.
Many of you have seen me...
