Quality News » Human Error

Dunbar’s Number, Span of Control and Lean Organization Design

QualityEditor — Thu, 23 Jun 2011 07:13:14 +0000

A few weeks ago I learned about something called Dunbar’s Number while listening to the radio. The relevance of Dunbar’s number to lean organization design struck me immediately. There are such things as magic numbers. Some of these relate to statistics, such as sample sizes, or a minimum 30 repetitions when making observations of a process. Some of them we call them fundamental physical constants and most of the time these do their part in keeping things together unnoticed. Yet other numbers numbers deal with human cognition, behavior and social interaction. We are told that people can keep 7 things in memory, but struggle with more. Within organizations there is a rule of thumb for effective team size as being between 5 and 8 people, whether it be a natural work team or a project team.

Dunbar’s number takes this idea to the next level, possibly defining the maximum effective size of an organization. It needs to be said that this rests on the premise that stable social relationships are essential for effective organizations. These stable social relationships are based on social contact and mutual recognition. These in turn are limited by our cognitive capabilities. Dunbar’s number hypothesizes that there is an upper limit beyond which detailed rules are necessary to maintain stable social order. Based on observations of villages, armies, academic organizations, communities and companies, this number is proposed to be around 150 people. In the words of British anthropologist Robin Dunbar

“this limit is a direct function of relative neocortex size, and that this in turn limits group size … the limit imposed by neocortical processing capacity is simply on the number of individuals with whom a stable inter-personal relationship can be maintained.”

read at http://www.gembapantarei.com/

Are You a Data Breach Victim? Here’s What to Do

QualityEditor — Tue, 07 Jun 2011 07:39:43 +0000

Alas, another day, another data breach. Late Thursday, word broke that the hacker group LulzSec broke into SonyPictures.com and gained access to 1 million user accounts (the group apparently posted details for 50,000 accounts online). If you have a Sony Pictures account, the bad news is that your personal information may be out there. You can’t change that fact, but you can take a few steps to limit the potential for damage.

PC World — Alas, another day, another data breach. Late Thursday, word broke that the hacker group LulzSec broke into SonyPictures.com and gained access to 1 million user accounts (the group apparently posted details for 50,000 accounts online). If you have a Sony Pictures account, the bad news is that your personal information may be out there.

You can’t change that fact, but you can take a few steps to limit the potential for damage.

1. Change Your Passwords.

This should be the first thing you do: Change your password for your account on the impacted site. If you used the same login information for any other sites, you should change your password on those sites too. And this may be a good time to change your approach to passwords–check out Alex Wawro’s story on how to build better passwords without losing your mind.

2. Watch for Phishing Attempts, Malicious E-mail

If your e-mail address gets exposed in a data breach, scammers, spammers, and malware authors may try to send malicious e-mails to you–well, more than usual, anyway–so you may see a spike in spam. As always, be on the lookout for any suspicious-looking e-mail. Don’t open attachments you weren’t expecting–even from people you know. Don’t click links in e-mail messages.

read at http://www.cio.com

Three Requirements for Managing by Fact

QualityEditor — Wed, 01 Jun 2011 06:46:12 +0000

Management by fact is a pillar principle of kaizen and lean thinking. We must go see, observe without prejudice, approach problems rationally and with data, finally take the logical actions that will result in a better outcome. Yet these are nearly impossible tasks for humans. In his book The Effective Executive the father modern management Peter Drucker observed:
Executives who make effective decisions know that one does not start with facts. One starts with opinions. These are of course nothing but untested hypothesis and, as such, worthless unless tested against reality. To determine what is fact requires first a decision of the criteria of relevance, especially on the appropriate measurement.

Chapter 7, Effective Decisions, is especially valuable for the lean problem solver or problem solving coach, and by logical upward extension the executive. Distilling the wisdom in this chapter, we can say that there are three requirements for management by fact. They are

1) decision on the criteria of relevance,

2) testing of hypothesis and conversion of opinion into tested fact, and

3) arriving at consensus through clash and conflict of divergent opinions.

These are beautiful ideas and decades ahead of their time, sharp enough to hone the cutting edge of any competing management theory today.

What is a fact? In essence Drucker tells us that it depends. To a chef, taste is a fact. To a physicist it is not. Facts are a question of relevance.

Read at http://www.gembapantarei.com

Learning and Change R. Edward Zunich

QualityEditor — Sat, 07 May 2011 12:01:45 +0000

This article is excerpted from Ed Zunich’s book, Practical Process Improvement: A Program for Market Leadership in the Twenty-First Century. This program is being successfully used in a multi-national technical corporation. This book and other books by Ed Zunich are available from SPC Press at www.spcpress.com.
The objective of Practical Process Improvement is profit. Profit comes from reducing waste and costs as well as increasing revenue through customer satisfaction and growth. PPI achieves results by improving the processes of production in ways that optimize the entire system of production, not merely the components in isolation.

Results are often confused with better numbers. There are many ways to get better numbers. The easiest way is to simply change them. I once knew a plant comptroller who did this regularly to give upper management the numbers they wanted. It happens more often than we would care to admit.
Another way to get better numbers is to change the formula—the way the numbers arecomputed. Denominator management is an example. We can get much better numbers by changing the way we measure or compute the denominator in a ratio. The earlier example regarding DPMO
computation for circuit board quality level is an object lesson of this practice.

There are certainly other ways to get better numbers without changing anything substantially. These will only be limited by the ingenuity of creative people. But, they are false improvements. The only true improvement comes from improvements in the processes of production, and these must support efforts to optimize the entire enterprise, or they too will be false improvements.

read at http://www.spcpress.com

Human Error: Tenerife runway collision (1977): concurrence of errors…

QU-King — Sun, 07 Jun 2009 18:51:16 +0000

n March 27th 1977, the biggest accident in airline history took place (at least if we leave the attack on the Twin Towers out of the equation).

The accident happened due to a concurrence of circumstances and an accumulation of human errors escalating to a disastrous 583 casualties.

A few of those circumstances and/or causes were:

* Stressors: fog and drizzle (limited sight of 1000 to 3000 feet), pilots were stressed out because both Boeing 747’s were (inconveniently) diverted to Tenerife instead of their original destination, Las Palmas. They couldn’t go there because of a bomb alarm, causing serious delays.
* Human error: due to the limited vision, the PanAm reaches the junction too late causing them to remain on the runway (too long).
* Technical problems: part of the lighting (center line) wasn’t ready yet and they were experiencing radio interference.
Authority: the KLM captain was (internationally) known for being ‘the exemplary pilot’ of KLM. He was a pilot and a flight instructor at the same time and KLM used him in advertising.

How many hours are you working on correcting errors?

QU-King — Wed, 03 Jun 2009 08:46:31 +0000

Research has proven that, when questioned, about 50% of employees of a company or organization are stating that they are spending an average of 1 to 2 hours a week on correcting errors. Theirs and their colleagues’. 17% of the questioned admit to losing more than 4 hours weekly. This not only costs a lot of money (mostly hidden costs) but leads to a lot of frustration with personnel. Read more here

Resilient organizations

DrZoom — Mon, 01 Jun 2009 12:09:51 +0000

resilience

ISO9001, TQM, Lean, Six Sigma, Human Error Reduction, Quality, Environment, Safety, Health… are all ways of seeing (the same) things from a different perspective. Full of energy, we jump on every new hype or wave. Our ultimate goal: to create an ideal organization where nothing goes wrong.

But step by step, we start to realize that “zero fault tolerance” is out of reach, it’s an illusion. If we ever achieve to proactively track and tackle all the thinkable conditions that might influence the risk of error, some new conditions will loom up out of nothingness. We have to face the fact that we live in a very complex and dynamic world. Today’s reality will be completely out of date by tomorrow. Our organization … Read more on source