My last column, “Can We Please Stop the Guru Wars?” made the case that the various improvement approaches are all pretty much the same. To recap, there are seven sources of problems with a process. The first three sources help frame the situation.

They are:
Source No. 1. Inadequate knowledge of customer needs
Source No. 2. Inadequate knowledge of how the process currently works
Source No. 3. Inadequate knowledge of how the process should work

In applying improvement theory, there is a gap (variation) in a situation between what is actually happening vs. what should be happening—much of it caused by nonquantifiable “human” variation. This can be reduced through the (nonstatistical) tools of a flowchart and the 13 questions to ask about a process.

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