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Comment by winslett | Hacker News Reader

I stumbled upon Deming's "Out of the Crisis" when wandering through the library in school. It has changed how I thought about system improvement ever since.

I use the things I learned for marketing, product, and engineering systems.

Want to improve a system? Before doing anything, collect data and measure. A system must be stable, else you cannot improve it. Marketing campaigns. Funnel optimizations. Performance improvement.

Most "stability" is achieved by simple things like squashing bugs (campaign bugs, performance bugs, or UX bugs).

Once you achieve stability of output (i.e. low standard deviation), then improve the system.

Simple, uh?

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Well, keep in mind that "improvement" here implies non-transformative change (we usually call this "optimization" on informatics). If you are not sure you have the correct system running, stabilizing it is the last thing you want.

I think that may be a too narrow vision of “transformative” improvement.

I worked in a factory where one of the biggest, and hardest, improvements we made was coaching the managers and engineers to leave the technicians alone when they were doing maintenance.

We collected data on how often they were interrupted, how much time it cost, and how interruptions could lead to RIT changes in procedures that affected quality.

Previously the engineers and managers saw the checking as helping because they could se ethe status of things and observe and answer questions, many would even lend a hand. Oversight and engagement was seem as a path to improved quality. To let go of that was a huge transformation. It started with data - a lot of data - that allowed us to identify that weekend and night maintenance generally went faster and better.

Well, I claim that is a way too broad definition of "transformative". The people kept creating the same products, by almost the same procedure.

> If you are not sure you have the correct system running, stabilizing it is the last thing you want.

Stable in this case just means you are clear what the system is and can keep operating it if you want to.

That is a prerequisite to evaluating the system in order to determine whether it is what you want.

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