Statsolver: using bp chart/data chart/excel/ dots

Part 2:

Take a weekly / monthly (even quarterly) important number from your everyday work that makes you (and your department or bosses) “sweat”…
…and do a run and control chart analysis.

If it’s monthly, try to have at least 2 years’ worth (24 data points).
• If it’s weekly, try to have at least 6 months’ worth (~25 data points), but a year (~50 weeks) is fine, too.
• If you try to use a quarterly figure, you’ll need 5 years of data (~20 data points) to get a decent chart (as in the Bacteraemia example in the tutorial).

After describing your analysis, also answer these two questions:
• Has this analysis made you think differently about the situation?

• Given this knowledge, is there an alternative action to what’s normally done in the weekly / monthly “How’re we doin’ ?” meetings?

• Go ahead and share this specific personal example at appropriate moments in this week’s DQ dialogue and Lessons Learned.

I’m not looking for profundity here — just evidence that your thinking is beginning to change. So, this is more of your personal “AHA!” rather than deep analysis. I’m more concerned with innovative application and not necessarily the ‘right’ answer.

Please submit your assignment in a Word document with appropriate control charts pasted in.

— Be aware, I have Office 2003: Please make sure that you save your file accordingly – as a “.doc” — so that it can be read (and make sure that the graphs don’t get obliterated in the process).


There seems to be some problems using “Load” in Excel 2007/2010 for some of you. I have e-mailed my friend who wrote BPChart and should hear from him soon. Meanwhile, all you have to do is OPEN (in regular Excel) the data file, highlight and “COPY” the data, then open up BPChart and “PASTE” your copied data into the database worksheet that appears when you open up BPChart. You can then close out the original data file and should now be able to get your charts. I hope this helped. Your feedback with BPChart issues has been very helpful — keep it coming!

Remember: the very left column is for your TIME factor. Make sure the first piece of actual data is pasted into cell C14.

Monday, June 04, 2012