You may also view our newsletter archive at http://www.moresteam.com/morenews/archive.cfm.
 | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
|
| ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| MoreNews about Lean Six Sigma June 2010 | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
|
The last time that I took my daughter to the emergency room, I marveled at how the ER staff continued to turn on a dime to address the priority of the moment, for every moment of the five hours that we were there. It made my head spin to think about how frequently and how quickly the nurses and docs had to shift gears and re-focus their attention. Granted, I’m a person who by nature prefers concentrative tasks with few interruptions. I’d probably be on the ER admissions list if I ever had to juggle all the incoming stimuli of an ER attending on a busy night. Recent research findings revealed that regardless of preferred work style, multitasking takes its toll on productivity. A study published last month by Australian researchers found that interruptions result in ER physicians spending less time on their assigned tasks and leaving almost a fifth of their tasks incomplete. Read a summary of the study published in Quality and Safety in Health Care journal. The Lean Perspective – Push vs. Pull In a transactional setting such as a hospital emergency department, being “demand driven” is inherent in the environment. It is not a case of the organization adopting pull scheduling to manage the workflow. Emergency department personnel do nothing until there is a customer order. As soon as there is demand, all activities are focused on meeting that demand in a pull execution strategy. Read the full blog.  How Will Your Future Belt Candidates Learn Best? Sloan Study Reports That Online Courses Continue to Expand  Today’s students – your future employees and Belt candidates – are learning in different ways than their predecessors, and this will impact your training program. We know this from “Learning on Demand: Online Education in the United States, 2009,” the latest report on online education from SLOAN-C, a consortium of institutions and organizations committed to quality online educationIn this report, based on responses from more than 2,500 colleges and universities, SLOAN-C reveals that: • More than 1 in 4 college students takes an online course. • Over 4.6 million students were enrolled in an online course in higher education (a 17% increase over the previous year as compared to a 1.2% growth of the overall higher education student population). • 73% of institutions had increased demand for existing online courses. • 74% of public higher education institutions view online education as critical for long-term strategy. Online training is here to stay, and growing more popular by the year. To read the full report, visit our White Papers section. RESOURCES A Deeper Dive into Simpson's Paradox  Earlier this year, we referenced a Wall Street Journal article, “When Combined Data Reveal the Flaw of Averages”. The article discussed Simpson’s Paradox, a statistical phenomenon based on the differing sizes of subgroups. Simpson's Paradox refers to the situation when an aggregated dataset appears to reverse what seems to be a clear trend of the data subsets. Smita Skrivanek, MoreSteam's Principal Statistician, recently used an everyday example of a weight-loss study to demonstrate how to avoid the anomoly. Read the white paper to better understand Simpson's Paradox.Sound Bytes of Success: NewPage  Mark Suwyn, NewPage Corporation Chairman, commented on the importance of their Lean Six Sigma deployment in the company's 4th Quarter and Year-end 2009 Financial Report. "We also continued our relentless focus on Lean Six Sigma (LSS), and now have 3,800 people trained in LSS," added Suwyn. "Our employee efforts have had a significant impact on our costs and productivity is growing every day. In 2009, we realized $60 million in hard savings through 470 completed LSS projects. Since deployment, LSS has realized $149 million and completed over 900 LSS projects."Recommended Reading
 The original version of The Fifth Discipline was published in 1990 and honored by Harvard Business Review as one of the seminal management books of the past 75 years.This updated edition of Peter Senge’s classic contains over 100 pages of new material including a new Forward sharing his fifteen years of experience in putting the book’s ideas into practice. The revision also added interviews with practitioners at organizations such as Unilever, Intel, Ford, HP, and The World Bank. In The Fifth Discipline - The Art & Practice of The Learning
Organization, Senge distinguishes a learning organization from more traditional organizations by their integration of five 'component technologies': systems thinking, personal mastery, mental models, building shared vision, and team learning. It's a read worthy of periodically pulling off the shelf. We need to remind ourselves how important the underlying, softer side is to the ongoing success of Lean Six Sigma and business process improvement in general.
Got Motivation?  Generate inspirational quotes with The MoreSteam® Motivationizer. You can browse our bank of quotes and suggest others to add. Here's one to get you started, "Pressure makes diamonds." (George S. Patton) Got motivation? Then share it. |
| |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
|
| ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
