I am happy to share a simple visual tool to visualize process performance I have used with numerous frontline teams in manufacturing and healthcare. This has been done without getting into statistical analysis (sorry if I offend some of my purist friends.) Equipped with an 11x17 paper template, a pencil, and a highlighter, frontline teams got a deeper understanding of their process and made targeted experiments to learn and improve their work.
Here is a quick description of the elements of the tool:
(1) Process performance goal (the definition of the goal would deserve a discussion on its own)
(2) Daily performance of the process for a given month
(3) Issues impacting the process performance
(4) Issue occurrence or impact, depending on what makes the most sense, for a given day
(5) Aggregation of the occurrence or impact of the issues (updated daily) to form a Pareto graph. This helps the team identify where to conduct root cause analysis and experiments
(6) Prior months’ performance
After helping hundreds of frontline teams see and improve their processes with this manual tool, I hope this post will help many more do the same, removing some of the burdens in their work, and improving their customer satisfaction.