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| MoreNews about Lean Six Sigma May 2010 | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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March of the Pretendacons
Lean Six Sigma Profession Under Siege
 Lean Six Sigma certification is not unlike the process of earning a pilot's license: ground school -to-
flight school -to- flying solo -to- pilot's license -to- flying others. Pilots experience ground school in the classroom and flight simulators, but they follow this with flight school because there's no other way to experience the full complexity of real flight in a real airplane in the real air. In the Lean Six Sigma world, many training and consulting firms have been tempted by commercial interests to relax certification standards and eliminate Belt flight training. "If you don't have the ability to work on a real project, it's no problem," they say. "We'll furnish you with a project case study that can be completed online." That's right, a pretend project. No real-world experience. No difficult application in a complex environment that pushes back in unanticipated ways. Just a case study. I call these organizations Pretendacons: predatory firms whose pretense of serious certification is dragging the profession into the dirt. Are the real customers asking for this? Do the Pretendacons even know who their real customers are? Here's a wake-up call: the customers are not the "belts" being "certified" based on pretend projects, even though they are the ones paying the bill. The customers are really the companies who hire those "belts." Read full blog.  When Bullets Kill Critical Thinkers
Don't Be Rendered Defenseless by PowerPoint
 Visual literacy is commonly defined as the ability to see, understand, and create visual representations. It is our skill to communicate graphically. The old adage “A picture is worth a thousand words” should be updated to “A GOOD picture is worth a thousand words; a BAD picture renders us speechless.” A recent example of visual illiteracy was captured by NBC’s Richard Engel in the form of a PowerPoint slide shown at a top military briefing last summer. The slide along with a photo capturing the bemused expression of Defense Secretary Robert Gates has been widely circulated on the Web. Continue reading and see the original New York Times article.
RESOURCES
Recommended Reading: Edward Tufte, "the Galileo of Graphics"
 Pictures shape our understanding of everything. It takes more than being an Adobe geek to
effectively use images for their greatest impact in illustrating complex
concepts. Anyone who compiles reports filled with charts and graphs or compiles PowerPoint slide presentations will benefit from the guidance offered by Edward Tufte. Never heard of him? Tufte has received more than 40 awards for content and design. He is Professor Emeritus at Yale University, where he taught courses in statistical evidence, information design, and interface design.
Beautiful Evidence, Tufte's fourth book on analytical design, looks good enough to put on your coffee table. Beyond its visual appeal, it contains a number of ideas for getting rid of "chartjunk" in favor of high impact informational graphics. His design principles are basic: Show comparisons. Show causality. Think multivariate; show multivariate data. He advocates "sparklines," wordlike graphics that can be used to present trends and variation. He also has some pointed guidance for PowerPoint templates: don't use them.
The book has received considerable critical acclaim. It was named to the list of "Best Innovation and Design Books" by Business Week, listed as one of the "Best Business and Technology Books" by ZDNET, and recommended by the editors of Scientific American. You might also want to check out his original book, The Visual Display of Quantitative Information, deemed to be a classic book on pointing out the flaws in how statistics are frequently presented and suggesting ways in how these approaches can be corrected. EngineRoom®: Tips and Tricks  Q: I am using EngineRoom for Excel 2007 and have a data file in Excel XP/2003 format. Is there an easy way to convert that file to Excel 2007 format so that I can use it with EngineRoom?A: The most likely cause for this is that Excel 2007 has entered "compatibility mode" by opening a file from a previous version of Excel. Even if that file is closed, compatibility mode will cause problems with EngineRoom. Follow the steps in this FAQ for a workaround.
Sound Bytes of Success: BOD Reduction at Kahiki Foods
Kahiki Foods is a premier provider of high quality Asian frozen foods whose products are found in grocery stores and food service operations. In late 2008, Kahiki began incurring charges attributed to its Biological Oxygen Demand (BOD) waste levels. Six months after the Six Sigma team was chartered, BOD was reduced almost 70% and is expected to result in $195,000 in hard cost reductions. Read the Final Tollgate summary.
Local Communities of Practice: Recap of Toronto Event  On Tuesday, April 13th, Xerox Canada and MoreSteam co-hosted a one-day Lean
Six Sigma program for education and networking. The free event, held at the
Xerox Toronto Learning Centre in Markham, Ontario, featured a morning program of
Lean Six Sigma experts, followed by an afternoon demo of MoreSteam's SigmaBrew
InBox Lean Office simulation. Read the recap.MoreSteam.com is planning several similar educational events in other
locations in 2010. If your company would be interested in co-sponsoring a
mini-conference, and developing a local community of LSS practitioners, we would
be glad to discuss such an opportunity with you. Contact us at marketing@moresteam.com.
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