Lies, Lies, and Statistics

When I took my first statistics class I remember the first class and the teacher saying there are lies, lies and then statistics and how true he was.

 When doing Six Sigma you need to collect a lot of data and use statistics to help fine tune your process.  However, I have seen many companies and skilled consultants collect this information and make interpretations of that data without looking at how it affects other measurements or processes.  You need to understand how those measurements work with other measurements or processes.  This is a concept behind the Balance Score Card and the Digital Dashboard.  How changing one number affects the other numbers or process.

 For example, the Steeler’s football team has a horrible record of getting their quarterback(QB) sacked.  If you look at their stats you would think they have the worse offensive line in football even though they won the super bowl last year.  Well if you just looked at those stats you would start replacing the offensive line and still end with the same results or worse.  However, if you look at the sack stats with other measurements you actually get to see the bigger picture like they throw more then other teams and their QB holds the ball almost twice as long as other QB’s allowing him to make bigger plays and get more yardage – which in the end is what the offensive is trying to achieve.  So just looking at one measurement and making changes base on that can be very harmfull.

Another example is when I did knowledge management and helped many companies setup their portals to share internal information.  One company that I worked with counted their portal as a success with 70% of this company hitting their web site one week after it was created.  They bragged and got articles written about how successful they where in trade magazines and other publications.  Yes, if you just put up a portal and 70% of the company is using it in one week then that is a successful.  However, the content that got 90% of the hits was the companies march maddens results.  Now if the intent of the site was to create good moral in the company then great – that was not the intent of the portal.

So just looking at measurements and making adjustment base on that measurement and not understanding how it relates to others could cause serious harm.  You must understand all the measurements and process and how changing one can and will affect other process in your company.