Articles by Steven Bonacorsi

Trying to map the flow of your process before improving it? Here's a primer on the 3 different kinds of flowcharts you can use. Includes step by step instructions on creating Top-Down, Deployment and Detailed flowcharts. A flowchart is an outline or schematic drawing of the process your team is trying to measure or improve. It can also be a picture of an ideal process that you would...Full Article »

Box-and-whisker diagrams are useful when you've got a relatively small amount of quantitative data, especially if you need compare the output of two processes creating the same characteristic or to track improvement in a single process. Steve Bonacorsi explains how to use and interpret them. Box-and-whisker diagrams, or Box Plots, use the concept of breaking a data set into...Full Article »

Got something to do and want to know the tasks that are critical to on-time completion? Here's how critical path mapping with activity network diagrams can help help by determine where little extra effort to will have the greatest payoff. The activity network diagram is a method of displaying the timelines of all the various subtasks that are involved in any project. By doing this,...Full Article »

Want to understand variation within a process at a glance? Look no further than a histogram. Contributor Steve Bonacorsi explains everything you ever wanted to know about this statistical tool but probably didn't know to ask. An important aspect of total quality is the identification and control of all the sources of variation so that processes produce essentially the same result again and...Full Article »

A disproportionately large percentage of errors or defects in any process are usually caused by relatively few problems. Pareto analysis helps identify those significant few problems so people can target them for action. Steve Bonacorsi explains how. Pareto (pronounced "pa-RAY-toe") analysis is named after Vilfredo Pareto, an Italian economist who lived in the late 19th and early...Full Article »

Lots to do but limited time and resources? Steve Bonacorsi looks at the seven steps to using prioritization matrices - especially useful in the project bounding and analyze phases of Lean Six Sigma quality.   A Prioritization Matrice can help you decide what to do after key actions, criteria or Critical-To-Quality (CTQ) characteristics have been identified, but their relative...Full Article »