Author Archives: Walter McIntyre

About Walter McIntyre

I live in Buford, GA, with my wife. Please check out my website, leanmeanprocessimprovemnt.com. I am the author of "Lean and Mean Process Improvement".

How’s Your GPA

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Remember when you were in school and there was this dreaded thing called GPA that was used to measure your success as a student?  GPA stood for Grade Point Average. Teachers used it to motivate and colleges used it to qualify applicants. My GPA wasn’t stellar, but I understood its importance.

I want to introduce you to another GPA.  In this case it stands for Goals, Plan, and Action. This GPA is a proactive tool to help you be successful. Let’s get right into it.

Goals. Goals are the set point of what you want to accomplish.  I want to reach $70,000 in income this year, I want to complete 5 sales today, I want to make it to everyone of my child’s games this year. 

In a broader sense, goals define what is important to you.  They are either enablers for other goals, step goals, or they are the end game of what you want to accomplish. Either way they should pass the RUMBA test and be highly visible to you when you are in the heat of battle.

RUMBA stands for reasonable, understandable, measurable, believable, and achievable. Goals that do not pass this test will leave you set up for failure.  If I set my goal too high, like high jumping 30 feet, I will not take it serious and will not be motivated by it.  The same is true if I set my goal too low, like high jumping 6 inches.  I will get the same result.

Setting goals that are beyond your reach is not a problem if you have more reasonable step goals in place along the way. Just remember that improvement and achieving goals is a journey.  There are typically many steps and obstacles along the way.

Plan: Next you need to have a plan to achieve your goals.  A goal with no plan is like a car with no gas.  It looks pretty, but will not take you anywhere. Your plan needs to be detailed enough to guide you in decision making and nimble enough to help you when circumstances become less than predictable.

A detailed discussion on planning is beyond the scope of this article.  Even so, there are generally three questions that a plan will answer for you.

What am I going to do?

How am I going to do it?

How will I know I am being successful?

Action: Even with a goal and a plan, you still have to take action to carry out the plan. Building on the car with no gas example above, even if you have a goal and a plan, you still have to get in the car and start the engine to go somewhere.  Action on your plan is needed.

Sometimes action is an activity and sometimes it is a sacrifice.  Either way, there is no room for coasting.  You are moving forward are your aren’t.  One thing for sure is that if you are costing and your competition is isn’t, you are losing ground.

Get the Negative Out of Your Life

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A positive attitude is essential to success in any endeavor.  We all know this, but generally fail to see that our lives are punished by negativity from every side. We receive nearly 100 negative messages for every positive message everyday.  If you don’t believe me, run your own test. Just keep a tally as you go through the day.

Consider the following. These are all points in the various commercials you will see on television. 

You need to lose weight.

You need more hair.

You need help raising your children.

You need to be smarter.

You need help managing your money.

You have this problem that you have never heard of before and did not know you had.

Consider the news.  Negativity attracts viewers. Viewer loading sells advertisements and the news is about profiting from advertisements.  In listening to the headlines, how many emphasize the positive side of issues.  It is the negative side that gets the juices flowing.

All of this skews our perspectives.  I recently spoke to a high school student who gave me the following punch list of goals:

I am going to avoid making bad grades.

I am not going to hang with the wrong crowd.

I am going to avoid getting detention.

These are all negative statements that are meant to describe positive outcomes.  I advised the student to adjust their perspective and restate their goals:

I am going to make good grades.  The higher the better.

I am going to hang with the top performers in my school.  Especially those who are trying to accomplish the same things as I am.

I am going to try to make a positive impact on everyone I interface with.

The negative goals are based on avoidance.  The positive expressions of those same goals are based on accomplishment.

Here’s the back story.  Negativity is an addiction.  It is an addiction that is pushed on us in order to control how we think and feel, how we spend our time and money, how we vote, etc.  Remember that when someone is spending time and money to reach out to you with negativity, they are really practicing the art of persuasion.  They are looking for a return on their investment of time and money. That return is manifested in control over various aspects of your life.

 How do you keep your compass sent on true North? It is a matter of taking control of your internal voice.

You decide who you are and your worth.

You decide what needs to change in your life.

You chose to educate yourself about what and why you believe.  Don’t take someone else’s word for it.

You decide who you are going to associate with or listen to.

Here are the practical steps to independence from negativity:

Minimize the time spent watching the news. Don’t become addicted to the negative.  Look for the needed information and avoid the spin makers. You need the information, but not the spin.

Surround yourself with positive people. These individuals become enablers in your life. If you were choosing sides for a game, you would select persons that would help you succeed.  This is no different.

Run from negative people or associations. They can only hurt you or keep you from success in your life. 

Practice positive self talk. This is related to the high school student I mentioned above.  What you say to yourself is more helpful, or hurtful, than anything said by someone else. My dad used to say that if you are saying it, you are thinking it, and at some level you believe it.

Turn the lemons in your life into lemonade.  Take action to overcome the obstacles in your life. Want to overcome depression?  Take action, even if it is a small step.  I have found that the majority of the lemons in my life were able to be made into lemonade with a shift in paradigm.

Make a positive impact on others in your life.  Simply put, it is hard to be negative when you are being positive.  Have you ever noticed how good you feel when you are doing something positive for someone?

Change the things you can and accept the things you can’t. Remember the Serenity Prayer? “God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference.” Use your strengths to propel your life forward and overcome your weaknesses. Focusing on your weaknesses makes you weak. Focusing on your strengths makes you strong.

Sales Success: A Shopper’s Journey (short version)

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Knowledge:  The shopper must know that you are there and can provide the service or product they need.  This is a marketing issue.  The shopper can find you in the yellow pages, on the internet, through the mail, word of mouth etc.

Learn:  Once the shopper knows that you are in the market, they begin to learn about who you are, the nature of your product or service, and your reputation. You have to be ready to provide information about your business and what makes you unique in the market place. This is the process of getting them to like what they are learning.

Like:  In order to progress along the path of purchasing from you, the shopper must like what they have learned about you.  This is common sense.  You don’t buy from someone you don’t like or trust.

Prefer:  If the shopper likes what they have learned about you, they may move on to preferring you as a vender. Preference does not guaranty a purchase.  You still have to provide the product or service they need and do it with as little risk as possible.

You may prefer to do business with a vender that is very easy to work with, but they do not have what you need.  Conversely, you may find what you need with a vender who is difficult to work with or is risky to do business with.

Conviction:  If the shopper prefers you as a vender, they can develop the conviction to buy from you. Conviction is based upon low risk, meeting critical to quality requirements, and at some level, a degree of personal connection.

This is a tricky area.  Shoppers do not like to be sold, but they do like to buy.  Most shoppers who will not buy on-line or over the phone are simply afraid of making a mistake.  Not necessarily that they will buy the wrong merchandise, but that they might buy from the wrong vender.

Conviction for the shopper becomes a matter of feeling safe and believing that they are making a good decision.

Buy:  If the shopper has conviction that you are the right person to buy from, then they may move on to do business with you.  The key here is to make it easy to do business with your company.  Remember that buying is an emotional decision, not an intellectual one.

A shopper may know everything that there is to know about you and your product or service and still not “feel” right about buying from you.  Conversely, a shopper may not know everything they need to know, but still feel safe about buying from you. This is why it is better to ask questions and listen than it is to tell the shopper something about your business.  Telling is not selling.  Listening is.

Customer Focus, From Lean and Mean Process Improvement

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Two aspects of customer satisfaction affect every business: satisfaction with the process output and satisfaction with the service surrounding it. In the service industry, businesses understand that providing quality service is a key to customer satisfaction. At the same time, though, they must have concern about the service product. For example, consider receiving exceptional customer service from an associate at a retail outlet, only to find the selection of merchandise too limited. The result is that you may choose a different retail outlet on your next shopping trip.

Conversely, what happens when you receive very bad customer service at a different retail outlet, which happens to have a very wide selection of merchandise? Even though you can find what you need, you will probably decide not to do business with them in the future.

Many product manufacturers miss this connection as well. An edge in technology or functionality gives a competitive advantage in the market place. Although this physical advantage is important, if the quality of service provided to the customer is poor, it will likely negate the advantage. For example, you would probably not rush to purchase a technically superior automobile from a supplier known for poor service after the sale.

To summarize, in order to improve customer satisfaction in a meaningful way, the business needs to distinguish between the process that provides the service and the process that provides the product. Without this distinction, it is easy to blame defects on the wrong process, or to fail to recognize that the other process exists.

Specifically, the service industry must recognize that their customers see a product component associated with the service they receive, while the manufacturing industry must recognize that their customers see a service component associated with the product they receive.

Designing a Business

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I have been starting up a new business division in our company.  Nationwide Parts Distributors has been an inside sales business with connections dating back to 1992.  Now with the advent of Automotive Electronic Solutions, we are also a remanufacturer.

This is a completely different business model for Nationwide Parts Distributors.  We designed the work flow, defined the core competencies for each position, set up infrastructure, hired employees, and opened for business.  The ROI for the business turned out to be less than one month.

We did all of this in a new business format and performed well enough to maintain the highest possible rating with the Better Business Bureau. This is remarkable in that we avoided the typical start-up quality issues of a new business venture.

We are now in our third month of operation and have raised enough working capital to begin the process of purchasing the building we are operating in.  This will increase our valuation in the market place and reduces our monthly cost of operation.

It has been hard work managing  the changing design of the organization as we went through a steep growth curve. Even with a flexible, lean, organizational design, we have doubled the number of employees in the new business to accommodate the increase in throughput that our customers demand.

I am very proud of the team of professionals that work here at Nationwide Parts Distributors and Automotive Electronic Solutions. Their belief in the vision, and commitment to achieving it, has made it all possible.

Listening Strategies

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We spend our lives being taught how to read, how to write, and how to speak. We generally have very little training on how to listen. This is big problem since listening is a top-level skill in a world where the spoken word is so important.
To understand the skills involved with listening, we need first to understand that our minds provide us with 128 bandwidth window to the universe. Any information from the outside world must enter through this window. The problem is that part of that bandwidth is used up with process functions things like I’m hot, I’m cold, I’m hungry, I need to go to the restroom. Do you remember how hard it is to pay attention to someone when you have to go to the restroom really bad?
The remaining bandwidth is used up with all of your other senses. What you see, what you smell, what you feel with your fingers. The practice of good listening involves moving these other senses to a subordinate mind function so that they are out of the way of incoming sound.
Good listening is not a simple function, although it is instinctual. Our ancestors on the savannah thousands of years ago relied on listening skills to survive. Movement in the brush could mean dinner had arrived or you were about to become dinner.
This began to change as language functions developed. The change was specific to what was being listened for: movement in the brush or fundamental language components or both. When you consider that language components also include the evaluation of emotion, the complexity of listening becomes evident. It is no longer just what is said, but how it is said.
The importance of contextual information, such as emotion, can be seen in the modern day court room. Lawyers and judges are relying more and more on reading court room transcripts to evaluate what was said and make life changing decisions. The problem is manifested in what is lost in a transcript. A transcript cannot tell you anything about tone of voice, voice inflection or emotion. To understand this problem, consider how many ways that you can say the words “shut up” and how the meaning changes with how you say it.
Listening involves several sub processes. There is the physical aspect of hearing, which is a physical process of sound waves hitting the ear drum. Listening also involves the processing of language and critically analyzing the received information. Lastly it involves formulating action. This can be a verbal response or maybe even a mechanical response such as “fight or flight”.
There are four basic listening strategies. These are “not listening”, “listening for reinforcement”, “listening with the intent to reply” and “listening with the intent to understand”.
The first strategy is “not listening”. Not listening is the process of tuning out sound coming into your brain. This is the most used listening strategy in humans. It involves tuning out one noise source in favor of another. An example might be listening to someone speak while sitting in the food court of your local shopping mall. You are selectively tuning out the noise coming from other people around you in order to selectively hear the voice of the person that you are communicating with. Not listening may seem to be a bad thing, it is actually essential to communication.
The next strategy is “listening for reinforcement”. This involves listening with little to no critical analysis. This is how you listen when you are being told what you want to hear. An example might be listening to political opinion or spin makers. Sometimes this is a listening strategy we apply when we are sitting in church. Its overriding characteristic is the lack of critical analysis. In other words, this strategy’s weakness is it failure to challenge the information that is coming into your brain in order to interpret its correctness or truthfulness. Does this sound familiar in your culture?
The third listening strategy is “listening with the intent to reply”. This is how you listen when you are emotional or in an interesting discussion. We utilize this strategy anytime we feel that what we want to say is more important than what anybody around is saying. An example of this type of listening skill would be a situation where you are arguing or you are listening defensively. You wind up subordinating the words of the people speaking to you in favor of the words you are formulating in your mind. The critical analysis applied here is not applied to the words you hear. It is applied instead to the words you want to say. This makes it very difficult to accurately get the other person’s meaning. Have you heard a person ask a question and receive an answer to a completely different question? If so, you probably witnessed someone listening with intent to reply instead of with the intent to understand.
The fourth listening strategy is “listening with the intent to understand”. Specifically, this is listening with the intent to understand more than the spoken words. This is how you listen when you watch television. Visualize how you feel when you are watching a program you are interested in on television and right at the moment that you are paying the most attention someone comes in and begins to speak to you. How does that make you feel? It probably makes you feel uncomfortable, stressed and maybe even angry.
This listening strategy involves listening between the words for meaning, truthfulness and motive. When using this strategy you are able to critically analyze the information coming into your mind. This allows you to get the speakers story, to fully understand their angle, their motivation and what their true needs and wants might be. In consultative sales for example, this type of listening is critical. You have to understand what the shopper needs, what they are afraid of, and what their potential objections are. Without this information, the sales person is not likely to close the sale.
The point to this discussion is this. Just like our ancestors on the savannah needed good listening skills to survive, we too must have good listen skills to survive. The specific strategy may have changed over the past millions of years, but the results of poor listening have not. Our ancestors might get killed by a predator if they listened poorly, we on the other hand will be used up by lies, missed opportunities and a general failure to recognize the predators in our culture.
I cannot finish this discussion without giving you a couple of ways to improve your listening skills. Here is a practice strategy that works for me. I practice evaluating what listening strategy I am using anytime I am involved in communication with another human being. Once determined, I will consciously switch to listening with the intent to understand. The idea is to understand the person speaking to me at a deeper level than they understand me. That places me in a more informed and powerful position than the other person. It also means that I am in a better position to help that person, explain my opinion or defend myself.
Another practice strategy is to go to a social function and learn as much about the people you talk to as possible, while reveling as little as possible about yourself. This exercise involves asking open ended questions that get others to talking while you listen with the intent to understand. People like to talk about themselves and you can learn a great deal about someone both by what they say and what they don’t say.
My last point. Do not misunderstand my motivation in writing this piece. The object is not to become a person who uses words to subvert others, to become a predator. Instead it comes from my desire to make a contribution to the culture in which I live. Imagine how the world would change if everyone began listening with the intent to understand.

Collecting Data

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Collecting data for analysis is more than a statistical process. All of the math in the world will not compensate for not understanding the behavior of the process you are trying to measure.  Not everything is settled in numbers.  Some things will be discovered in context.  For example, “We really have problems when it is raining.”

 As a result, data collection plans embody four qualities of collected data that are essential to optimize its usefulness. These qualities have to do with the data’s ability to represent the process’ performance.

 

  • There must be sufficient data to see the process’ behavior.
  • The data must be relevant.
  • The data must be representative of the process’ normal operating conditions.
  • The data must be contextual.

 

Sufficient

There must be sufficient observations to see patterns of variation and shifting central tendency in the process’ output. As part of building a data collection plan, the team will seek to understand the process’ history so that all expected sources of variation are captured.

Consideration must also be give to the size of the performance gap that the team is trying to measure. As the size of the gap gets smaller, the number of samples needed to measure the gap, with statistical confidence, increases.

 Relevant

 The data must be relevant to the problem that is being investigated. For example, if a process associated with back injuries is being analyzed, data regarding the availability of safety glasses will likely not be relevant. The central question or objective behind the data collection plan will be to point to what data needs collected.

 The data must also be relevant to an important business metric. Since data collection is an expensive process, the project team should give due diligence to verifying the relevance of the data that they want to collect. The buy-in of stakeholders and process owners will waver if they discover that the team’s focus has drifted away from the central core of the project.

 Representative

 The data must represent the entire range of actual operating conditions of the process. For example, if checkout cycle times are being studied, data must representative of all levels of customer loading.

 Operating conditions can include a multitude of factors. Some examples are the time of day, sales or promotions, experience of employees, changes in process inputs, and so forth. The smart project team will brainstorm a list of the potential factors that must be considered when building the data collection plan.

 Contextual

 Contextual information pertains to conditions that surround, but are not part of, the process and can affect its performance. By collecting this information, we add relevance to the data. For example, if the checkout cycle time was longer than usual on a given day, you may also wish to know how many cashiers were on duty, what the customers were buying, and weather conditions. This sheds light on how the process behaves under various conditions.

 Summary

 To keep cost down and improve the story telling ability of data, a comprehensive data collection plan will be needed. Process owner participation will improve the quality of the plan. Owners of peripheral processes will also make a valuable contribution since they are not directly involved in the process improvement effort (forest or trees effect).

Variation Analysis

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Variation

 First, remember that not all variation is bad. Planned variation, like that in an experiment, is a process improvement strategy. Unplanned variation, on the other hand, is nearly always bad.

 Two types of variation concern a process improvement team. These are common cause and special cause variation. All processes will have common cause variation. This variation is a normal part of the process (noise). It demonstrates the process’ true capability. Special cause variation on the other hand is not normal to the process. It is the result of exceptions in the process’ environment or inputs.

In a process improvement project, the first step is to eliminate special causes of variation and the second is to reduce common cause variation. Eliminating special causes of variation brings the process into a state of control and exposes the sources of common cause variation.

 Common Cause Variation

 Common cause variation is intrinsic to the process. It is random in nature and has predictable magnitude. Process noise is another name for it. An example would be the variation in your travel time to work everyday, with the absence of accidental, mechanical, or weather-related delays. When a process is expressing only common cause variation, its true capability for satisfying the customer is discernable. In this circumstance, the process is in control. Note that being in statistical control does not mean that the process is meeting customer expectations. The process could be precisely inaccurate.

 Continuing with the travel time example above, one source of common cause variation would be the typical ebb and flow of traffic on your route to work. Remember from the Define Phase that Y = f(x1 + x2 + … + xn). In the example, Y is the travel time and each x is an input that contributes to travel time; examples of x might include time of day or the day of week.

 Special Cause variation

 Special cause variation is the variation that is not a normal part of process noise. When special cause variation is present, it means that something about the process has changed. Special cause variation has a specific, identifiable cause. An example of special cause variation would be the effect of an accident or a mechanical problem on your travel time to work.

 Special cause variation is the first focus of process improvement efforts. When special cause variation exists, it is not possible to determine the process’ true capability to satisfy the customer. This is due to the effect that special cause variation has on inferences about central tendency (average) and standard deviation (spread in the data).

 Statisticians have developed specific control chart tests that describe the presence, timing, and behavior of various special cause variation components. These tests point out the impact of variation on the process’ output.

 Standard Deviation

 Process improvement teams use statistics to describe datasets and to make predictions about the future based on past events. Two important data characteristics used in descriptive statistics are standard deviation and central tendency (average, mean).

 Standard deviation is the measure of the dispersion or spread of a dataset. It is one of the more important parameters in statistical analysis. There are different ways to measure this parameter. Some of these are:

 Range: This is the difference between the largest and the smallest observation in a dataset. The range has a variety of uses, including the calculation of control chart control limits. In a normally distributed dataset, with no special cause variation, the range divided by six is an estimate of standard deviation. This is because 99 percent of the observations in a normally distributed dataset, with no special cause variation, fall within ±3 standard deviations from the mean. If the presence of special cause variation is unknown, divide the range by four. Th

Practical Significance versus Statistical Significance

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Anytime we draw conclusions from statistical inference, other process evidence must support the conclusion. Statistical evidence is only half of the voice of the process. The big picture includes a thorough look at the practical significance of the statistical result.

One area that gives many process improvement teams difficulty is the selection of an acceptance level that is consistent with the reality surrounding the process. There are no hard and fast rules that can help to ensure the selection of the best acceptance criteria. This requires the observation of the process, an evaluation of the business’ objectives, an understanding of the business’ economic realities, and most importantly, the CTQs of the business’ customer base. For example, the acceptance criteria for the safety of an airplane might be set at 0.2 instead of 0.5.

Another problem area is in the interpretation of the statistic result. Since the data creates a picture of the process’ behavior, is this picture consistent with reality? Some important questions to answer are:

Does the statistical result make sense within the process’ current reality?
Does the statistical result point the way to defect reduction?
Does the statistical result point toward a reduced COPQ?
Are there any negative impacts associated with accepting the statistical result?
Does the customer care?

A good data detective will always question statistical conclusions. Performing reality checks throughout the statistical analysis process will help to prevent costly mistakes, improve buy-in, and help to sell the recommendations made by the team.

Practical Significance versus Statistical Significance

When hypothesis-testing tools are used, we are working with statistical significance. Statistical significance is based upon the quality and amount of the data. Process significance involves whether the observed statistical difference is meaningful to the process.

This can work two ways. First, a statistically significant difference can indicate that a problem exists, while at the same time, the actual measured difference may have little or no practical significance. For example, when comparing two methods of completing a task, a statistically significant difference is found in the time required to complete the task. From a practical standpoint, though, the cycle time difference had no impact on the customer. Either the team measured something unimportant to the customer, or a larger difference is needed to affect the customer.

The opposite is also true. The team can find that the observed time difference from above is not statistically significant, but that there is a practical difference in customer or financial impact. The team may need to adjust the acceptance criteria, collect more data (i.e., increase the sample size), or move forward with process changes.

When statistical and practical significance do not agree, it indicates that an analysis problem exists. This may involve sample size, voice of the customer, measurement system problems, or other factors.