Papers & Articles

Articles by Mark Graban on Measures of Success Topics

• React Less and Improve More by Using SPC More Effectively
• One Way to Improve Your Lean Daily Management Board: From Lists of Numbers to Process Behavior Charts
• Your “Lean Daily Management” Approach Would Be Even Better with Some Simple Statistical Methods
• Measures Matter, but Make Sure Your Success is Real, not Fake
• Using Metrics To Determine If Our Events Are Really Improving Or Not
• Younger Workers Crave Instant Gratification. Here’s How to Give It to Them Without Causing Distraction.
• Break the Bad Habit of Overreacting to Metrics — CFO.com
• Mark’s blog posts about Process Behavior Charts

Healthcare-Related Articles

• “Making Data Count“– an excellent PDF guidebook on this whole subject
  • NHS Improvement
• “The problem with red, amber, green: the need to avoid distraction by random variation in organisational performance measures”
  • “We urge managers to start using control charts to help distinguish between common and special cause variation in healthcare data before deciding what actions to take on data that do not meet their target.”
  • BMJ Quality and Safety
• “Considering chance in quality and safety performance measures: an analysis of performance reports by boards in English NHS trusts”
  • “Conclusions: Hospital board members are expected to consider large amounts of information. Control charts can help board members distinguish signals from noise, but often boards are not using them. We discuss demand-side and supply-side barriers that could be overcome to increase use of control charts in healthcare.”
  • BMJ Quality and Safety
• “Performance league tables: the NHS deserves better”
  • “NHS performance league tables are difficult to comprehend and easy to misinterpret, but their publication by an official body lends them credence. We believe control charts are easier to interpret and would provide an intuitive technique for assessing health service performance and promoting a systems approach to monitoring and improving quality.”
  • The BMJ
• “Using statistical process control to improve the quality of health care”
  • “The control chart is a guide to continual action—for common and special cause variation. The control limits continually remind us that the major improvement gains lie in reducing common cause variation.”
  • BMJ Quality and Safety

The Works of Donald J. Wheeler, Ph.D.

• His page with links to various papers and articles
• “When should we use the specialty charts for count data?”
  • “Of course, you can guarantee that you have the right limits for your count-based data by simply using the XmR chart to begin with. The empirical approach will always be right.”
  • Quality Digest
• “When Should We Use Extra Detection Rules?”
  • “Rule one strikes a balance between the consequences of either getting a false alarm or missing a signal of economic importance. Using additional detection rules shifts this balance. It skews the balance toward more false alarms in order to find smaller signals. This is generally unnecessary and should not be done without careful consideration of the situation at hand. Additional detection rules should very definitely not be used just because the software allows you to do so.”
  • Quality Digest