Business Statistics - KeynesYouDigIt/Knowledge GitHub Wiki

Histogram

Measure of how frequently something occurs.

• What our average turnaround time is

Pareto Chart

Type of histogram, ranked in order of most frequently occuring to least. Used for defect tracking.

• What are our most frequent errors?
• What caused a project to be late?
• What processes take the longest?

Weighted Moving Average

Chart that gives the mean over a specific number of values. Takes into account past performance, but weighted toward more recent performance. Used to generate estimates.

• How long will a project take?
• How much will a project cost?
• What is our throughput?

Box and Whisker Plot

Measures the shape of a distribution.

• How consistent is a process?
• Compare same process over time
• Compare different processes

Poisson Distribution

Chart that estimates the probability of rare events. Can be used to predict frequency of errors.

• How many resources do we need to dedicate to troubleshooting?
• How many resources do we need to dedicate to change requests?

Control Chart

Mean, and upper/lower control of +/- 3 sigmas. If something is outside of that, the process is "out of control." Other bad signs are 8+ consecutive above/beow, 10/11, 12/14, trend over 6+, 2/3 are in the outer 1/3, 4/5 are in the outer 2/3s, the centerline shifting from chart to chart.

Pie Chart

Split of our work

Things you might measure

• Cost centers, revenue centers, profit centers
• estimates vs. actuals
• How long do we wait / keep people waiting for info?
• New vs. Returning customers
• Close rate

Process Improvements

• Benchmarking
• JIT
• Reengineering ("Blank Sheet of Paper")
• Map out every process, then Pareto, then Ishikawa