Posts tagged data

Skill requirements for today’s workplace

Meandering Genius 1 Comment

Information Technology skills have been in high demand over the past ten to fifteen years and countries like India have capitalized on this, leveraging their people’s desire to grow and their low labor rate.

IT will remain a high demand field into the future, especially with app development and miniaturization of electronics to get everything to the wearable market.

However, IT is a commodity today and the market of IT professionals has become over saturated with available talent, especially with business process outsourcing companies literally knocking down your door to get at your work.

This issue really pressures employees today, especially the Baby Boomers and Gen Xers, to fear daily for the job their doing today and future prospects. Let’s face it, almost anything repetitive is at risk of both outsourcing and automating. And, both options are cheaper and normally improve the service.

So, today, what are the things that are much more difficult to outsource and automate?

That would be Analysis and Problem Solving.

To gain a competitive edge in today’s job market, whether you’re in IT or not, is to build skills in data analysis and problem solving. IT systems can evaluate large pieces of data, if it’s structured, and data can be reported in predetermined manners, but the employee of today can truly demonstrate value if they have the skills of analysis and problem solving.

Additionally, these aren’t overly obscure skills for employees to learn that you have to earn through a degree or spend hours going to training. With a little bit of education, and a fair amount of common sense, you can apply these skills.

Also, these are the type of skills you can apply today in the job you’re doing. You don’t need to find a job somewhere that fits these skills…every job today needs these skills and often we outsource the job because it lacks these two capabilities.

So let’s look at these two items:

Analysis. If you haven’t heard the words Bid Data by now, you’re living under a rock. Companies today aren’t looking at just one piece of data to make decisions anymore, they are tying together everything they have in their company and whatever they can get their hands on to make much more informed decisions.

I’m not proposing you become a big data wizard…that is a specialized capability, although I think that is the new frontier in business. What we lack in most companies is armies of workers who can analyze the data they have in front of them every day.

This means they understand one of the most basic of tools most people have–pen and paper–and can organize and collect the right information to start to make decision. Additionally, workers today don’t need to know any in depth data analysis tools like Minitab that your local process improvement expert uses, but the everyday Microsoft Excel program is your powerful weapon in this new normal.

To properly analyze data, all employees today need to have a small, but effective tool bag to work from. They need to know things like affinity and tree diagramming…sounds difficult, but it’s a simple skills. This works well with data, information, and ideas. Additionally, there are seven basic charts that every employee needs to be able to create, read, and understand: bar chart, line chart, histogram, Pareto chart, control chart, box plot, and radar or spider chart. The Pareto chart is a type of histogram that combines both bar and line charts together. Pareto, box plot, and radar charts allow you to compare data for deep analysis. Control charts are much more powerful line charts. Along with this skill, you need to learn the anatomy of charts and how to use multiple axis’ to analyze and report data.

Lastly in the analysis realm, the employee of today’s workplace needs to know root cause analysis. It’s one thing to be able to review and report data, but to truly use data to dig to the root cause is powerful.

Problem Solving. The start of problem solving is problem identification. Being able to even see that you have a problem is the first step in problem solving.

Problem solving, to be effective, must follow a repeatable process. There are many problem solving approaches that people can learn, but understanding the core of PDCA is pretty powerful. Once you understand how all–and I do mean all–repeatable methodologies are based on PDCA, you’ll have cracked the base code on the problem solving system.

Another key component to problem solving, which is in line with following a problem solving approach, is to be able to establish and follow a project. A project is a series of steps that have a beginning and an end. Effective and efficient problem solving works best when performed in a project. Once you can think in project speak, you can plan out how you will solve any and every problem and you’ll be able to tell anyone how long it will take and where you are in the process of solving the problem.

The biggest key to problem solving is being able to define the problem and the goal, without trying to solve the problem up front. Many of us think that we are really good problem solvers, because we jump into a problem once identified and immediately put a fix in place. I’m here to ell you that you are part of the problem. Learning true data-driven problem solving and applying it, is a skill. Fighting fires is not.

These two skills of analysis and problem solving are key in today’s workplace and they are also very absent! Both compliment each other and they are fairly easy to learn. Mastery is another thing, but with time everyone can get there. Be a data-driven problem solver and you’ll never fear again the threat of outsourcing and automation. You’ll have a skill set that you can apply in any job anywhere.

I am going to start a weekend blog much like my Think Big, Take Small Steps, weekly blog to focus on this topic. I will walk through both of these skills and feature a specific approach or tool. I plan to post this blog every Sunday and apply graphics and screen shots to help with the understanding. Follow my blog to keep up with the story.

What’s best for who…Lean, Six Sigma, Design for Six Sigma

Meandering Genius Process Improvement

Lately this item has come up for discussion. What is the best approach to process improvement, should we teach all, how much of each should you employ?

From a practitioner’s point of view, this matters, but in reality, out on the floor, managers and workers need Common Process Sense. Recently, one of the managers I work with went through Lean Six Sigma Yellow Belt training which is much more Six Sigma than Lean. She had already taken Green Belt because that was all that was available, but that course overwhelmed her.

What she came back talking about we’re tools. That’s great, but I realized that she’s not going to be a practitioner, she needed real world ideas that she could apply immediately when she returned to her office.

I believe that true Lean has more common sense approaches, but they can be just as confusing, especially when they use odd names and such, like Huddleboards, Gemba Walks, Ohno Circle, 5S, A3, Hoshin Planning, etc. Let’s face it, true Lean requires a Rosetta Stone course to fully understand.

Long ago, the Air Force created the Air Force Quality Program. They had some very basic courses that focused on Awareness of the program, how to manage Teams and use Basic Tools. The Air Force program was around from about 1990 to 2000–about 10 years. The basic common sense training that I started with is what really got me involved. I understood it and was able to apply it every day.

These are the basic skills that people working on the front lines need to know…they need to be taught and then mentored through application.

Process Mapping. Everyone needs to know how to write down their step-by-step process so that anyone can pick it up and follow it. I’ve said it before that leaders tend to say “Map to X level,” but that’s based on a belief that process improvement practitioners are doing the mapping…no. Everyone that works in a repetitive process should have a process map that outlines every single step of the process written in narrative form and if it uses a computer, the narrative should include screen shots and file locations. If there are physical steps that need to occur, then photos of those physical activities should be included. In Lean you would call that Visual Work. No one can tell me that this is a waste of time for the person doing the work. Additionally’ no one but the people doing the work and the managers that manage the work need these process maps. You don’t need any special software to do this…you can write it down with paper and pencil or use a simple word editor.

Basic Workload Data. Now that I know exactly what I do, I can actually identify key workload data that I would like to capture. There are three things that I want to know…they never vary from process to process.

Time: What is the average time it takes to perform this process from start to finish. Every cell phone today has a stop watch, use it. Here is the very simple way that I recommend you time your process. Assign an individual that will time an individual that will perform the process. Don’t change these people until you’re done. Every day the process is performed, take three timings of the process every hour that the process is performed. Unless only one person does the process, collect timings from at least two people and a maximum of four if a lot of people perform the same process. Make sure the person timing is the same every time. This seems like a lot of work, but it really isn’t and if you don’t know the true average time it takes to do the process, you really have no idea what is happening. Add up all the timings and divide by the number of timings you have…simple average. Find someone that knows how to analyze data, preferably with Minitab, and have them analyze the data–they will provide you a great deal more information that you can use.

Volume: You need a way to collect the number of times that the process is completed. Also, you need to know by individual the number of times they performed the process if more then one person performs the process. Truly you want to know how many times the process is performed and the actual volume of the finished product that left the work center. The reason is to know how much rework occurred–in other words, they performed the process more times because of errors than the number of finished products that went out. But, for basics, you need to know how many times the process was performed or the total number of finished products from the process that went out. If you don’t know how much work you do every day, well, I really don’t know what to tell you. By combining the amount of work every day and the average time it takes to perform the process, you now know the productivity of your process. If you perform the process 1000 times in the day and it takes 1 minute to perform the process, then it takes 1000 minutes to perform that process. That’s 16.66 hours of work, which equates to just over 2 full time positions working 8 hours a day. If on Monday’s the volume doubles, then you know you need staffing that equates to about five people.

Defects: When you write down every single step in the process, you will probably run into this situation where there is an “if then” statement. If the product received is incomplete, then send it back; if the the paper printed is blank, reprint; if the expected block isn’t filled out, call so and so; etc. Normally, we just treat those things…those if thens…as part of the process. They are not. Those are “exceptions,” which are better known as defects. As you write down the steps, document these exceptions to your “clean” process and then create a way to collect the number of times that these exceptions occur. By simply looking at the totals for the various process defects over a period of time–maybe a month–you identify which ones are the most frequent. Common sense can tell you how much time each of these defects actually takes or how much impact these defects cause in your process. This gives you enough data to determine what you want to work on to improve your process. Otherwise, you might work on improving the wrong thing just because it’s easy or more glaring/visible.

Just think if everyone at the lowest level were doing this? Problems would be identified and solved at the lowest levels. Work would constantly be improved and everything would operate smoother in the work center.

Those experts in Lean and Six Sigma are there to help you analyze all this data you’ve collected around your process. They can help you build key charts to examine and analyze and they can recommend some just in time methods. If you run into a major process issue that spans multiple parts of the organization, they can develop a full blown process improvement effort and can facilitate everyone to solve the problem.

Bottom line, process improvement is simply business common sense with a fair amount of elbow grease thrown in. It’s the way you should act every day and you’ll take these basics to every job from here forward.