“Without data you're just another person with an opinion.”
- W. Edwards Deming

When companies try to implement continuous improvement in their business, they sometimes jump headlong into the process without a clear idea of how or where it’s going to land.

They start by announcing that they want to get everyone involved in sharing their ideas for improvements, and supervisors are instructed to encourage people to come forward with those ideas.  Oftentimes, though, the openings and opportunities for sharing ideas get bolted on at the end of some other daily stand-up or regular team meeting. Supervisors acknowledge the ideas and say they will look into them, but not much attention is paid to visibly tracking progress or calculating the value of the improvements that get implemented.

Bottom line, they aren’t being systematic about it, and the process doesn’t get a lot of traction.

When it comes to calculating value, being systematic starts with being clear on what you want to measure and why you want to measure it.

The next important step is deciding how you are going to gather and display the data. Some of the standard methods for displaying data are bar charts, line charts and pie charts.  Those work well for many applications, but there is a vast array of other visualization methods that offer excellent options for displaying data and information when the standard tools aren’t quite right for the job.

A remarkable tool for exploring how data and information can be displayed is A Periodic Table of Visualization Methods (visual-literacy.org). Check it out and discover a whole new world of ways to make data and information come to life with various kinds of visualization tools.

Click on the link before to learn about more tools and processes for Systematic Continuous Improvement.

Begin your improvement journey today!

“Great is the enemy of better”