Tip

The rule of 5

~ duffry

“We must become more comfortable with probability and uncertainty.” ~ Nate Silver

If you told me that your processing team turned around over a thousand widgets per day and that you just asked five people how long their last widget took to process: 28, 36, 24, 30 and 31 minutes. Now if I say that I predict your median process time is somewhere between 24 and 36 minutes you will probably think that’s a reasonable guess based on the few examples. However, if I then said I was over 93% sure of my prediction, you might think I was being rather over confident. Lets look at the maths behind why I can be so sure with so few data points.

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Faster, Better, Cheaper!

~ duffry

“I felt exactly how you would feel if you were getting ready to launch and knew you were sitting on top of two million parts — all built by the lowest bidder on a government contract.” ~ John Glenn

After the huge budgets of the Apollo project that landed 12 men on the moon and built the Space Shuttle, NASA was tasked “to decrease the amount of time and cost for each mission and to increase the number of missions and overall scientific results obtained on each mission.” This was the policy of Faster, Better, Cheaper.

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Having a good day?

~ duffry ~ 1 Comment

“Your work is going to fill a large part of your life, and the only way to be truly satisfied is to do what you believe is great work. And the only way to do great work is to love what you do.” ~ Steve Jobs

Today we look at one simple trick you can use to raise productivity, quality and customer satisfaction while simultaneously reducing absenteeism, attrition, shrinkage and even safety incidents. Find out how after the break.

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Accuracy Vs Precision

~ duffry

“If you don’t know the answer, just guess and use two decimal places. Nobody will question it.” ~ Anonymous previous manager of mine

As analysts I’m sure we all feel the draw to improve the accuracy of any figures we provide. It’s all too easy, however to confuse precision with accuracy. Unfortunately this is at least as true for the people we deliver to as it is for us. I wouldn’t advocate following the advice in the quote above (despite having received it myself!) but it is all too likely to be effective…   for a while.

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