Saturday, February 27, 2010

The Mythical Man Month - Anniversary edition

The original book - very good. The add-on - overrated and not worth it.

The author have spoilt the whole book by adding a reprint from the book and making the book worse than the original. Being a scientist one could very, very easily have had a coffee with two-three colleagues and come up with the same conclusions.

The only thing that is for the authors: Congratulations for making a good book worse! and to the people (like me) who bought this book - You have been fooled!

Sunday, January 31, 2010

Lean Six Sigma and indicators

ISO/IEC 15939 favours the concept of an indicator. An indicator can come in many flavours and colours, but its main purpose is to serve as a metrics with interpretation.

Six Sigma has two related concepts: the concept of metrics in DMAIC and the concept of controlling. Using run-charts or Pareto-charts requires further interpretation and this is where the indicators come into play. The indicators can help the users of Six Sigma to judge whether the information require action or not.

So, ISO/IEC 15939 and its concepts of indicators can be a great deal of help to the users of Six Sigma - taking down the costs is just one of the applications.

Saturday, January 30, 2010

Lean Six-Sigma

I've recently read a book about Six Sigma. It seems that this approach is very much oriented towards customers and providing customer value. This means that the quality related to the customer value is the main focus of Six Sigma.

Another important observation is that the following parts are similar to the approach of ours:
- the flow diagrams
- the CTQ and the need for control/monitoring
- the use of Run-charts and Pareto Diagrams.

An open issue is how exactly we can make sure that our approach is compliant with Six Sigma. That is the subject for the next paper.