Naval leaders must execute two great tasks simultaneously: 1) fight today’s war; and 2) position themselves for an uncertain future. They also face additional pressures that charge them to be better stewards of taxpayer dollars, with greater efficiency leading to improved effectiveness.
This has led to the pursuit of the following Navy mission: creation of greater [...]

All employees must ‘toot their own horn’ if they want a promotion or payrise, but women are particularly timid about doing so, according to an expert in sales psychology.
US-based behavioral scientist Shannon L. Goodson says the fear of self promotion is holding back competent and deserving workers from being recognized for their contributions and prohibiting them [...]

Adding the element of time will help clarify your understanding of the causes of variation in your processes. A run chart is a line graph of data points organized in time sequence and centered on the median data value. The patterns in the run chart can help you find where to look for assignable causes [...]

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 again. A histogram is a tool that allows you to understand at a glance the variation that exists in a process. Although the histogram is essentially a bar [...]

The affinity diagram is a management and planning tool. Use of this tool is based on the understanding that time invested in planning will produce remarkable dividends as the generated ideas and plans are acted upon and implemented. Unlike the basic tools for improvement that deal primarily with collecting and analyzing hard data, this tool [...]

Pareto (pa-RAY-toe) analysis is named after Vilfredo Pareto, an Italian economist who lived in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. In 1897, he presented a formula that showed that income was distributed unevenly, with about 80% of the wealth in the hands of about 20% of the people.
In a similar way, a disproportionately [...]

Process Mapping with Flowcharts< ?xml:namespace prefix = o ns = 'urn:schemas-microsoft-com:office:office' />
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 like to use. Process mapping with flowcharts can help people:

Agree on the [...]

What is Six Sigma?
The concepts surrounding the drive to Six Sigma quality are essentially those of statistics and probability. In simple language, these concepts boil down to, “How confident can I be that what I planned to happen actually will happen?” Basically, the concept of Six Sigma deals with measuring and improving how close we [...]