How are you doing? It’s a good question to ask at the end of the year. Next month I will fill you in on how Chalmers St. is doing and things we have planned for 2026. In this newsletter l’ll focus on “How is the process doing?” This is the question that we need to answer in the Measure phase of DMAIC. Everyone has their own answer to this question. The value of the measure phase is that we put facts around the answer and we use those facts to gain alignment. Said differently, if everyone has an aligned perspective on “How we are doing?” then we’ll be able to agree on how to improve.
Answering this question requires a set of tedious activities. Go to the Gemba! Observe the process, possibly for hours. Create a process map. Share the map with people and have them adjust it based on their understanding. Create a data collection plan. I have written about how to go about data collection. Summarize all of this information into Pareto charts, trend charts, cause and effect diagrams, etc; the list goes on. We typically spend no less than a month working on the Measure Phase. Given all of this, it should be no surprise that this step is often skipped. I remember an engineering manager that would get so frustrated with my questions. “Why do we need to do all this?! Then this manager would write a new process on the white board and say, “Here is the answer!” To which I would respond with a simple question, “If that is such an obvious answer, then why has it not already been implemented?” The reason it was not implemented was that there was no alignment around this person’s new process and it was not clear to all that this would resolve the issue. The causes of the issue had not been fully explored. I would not receive a reply, just a frustrated expression.
This is the point of “collecting the facts to gain alignment” that I mentioned earlier. A solution that looks obvious from one person’s perspective may not look obvious to another. This is not because one of the people is ignorant. It is because, in a complex system, each of us has specialized knowledge that affects our perception of what is broken and what needs to be fixed. Collecting facts allows us to check those perceptions and validate or invalidate them. Some will be accurate. Some will be blind spots that others don’t see. Some will be anecdotes that don’t fully characterize the process. Until a team works their way through all of these facts and opinions, they will not be aligned. A team that is not aligned will not collaborate effectively on the solution.
Collecting facts is not the only thing that makes the Measure phase important. We have to answer the question of how do we know a fact is a fact. One of my favorite Pixar moments illustrates this well. This occurs, poetically, while they are riding on “the train of thought.” You do the hard work of data collection and organize the information. Then you put the data up in front of the team and someone says, “That isn’t right,” or, “Your data is wrong.” We recently had this happen with a client project. We captured operations cycle times over multiple weeks and segmented the data by process steps. We put it into a Value Stream Map, and the client said, “That isn’t right.” It takes the wind out of the sails of the presentation. A crucial part of the measure phase is validating the measurement system.
The Measure Phase requires that you perform measurement system analysis. This might sound intimidating, but at the end of the day, you are just trying to prove that the results you share are repeatable and reproducible. If you know that the numbers you are about to share are going to be unpopular, you better be ready to defend the method you used to collect them. This is the point. Part of alignment requires that you surface people’s biases and address them with facts. The first defense people often resort to is denial of the facts. The method you used to validate your measurements and collect your data needs to be socialized along with the data itself. You will only make progress on alignment and understanding once you make it impossible, or at least hard, to attack the quality of the facts.
In the situation with our client we had the collection process and samples to back up our cycle time data. Our client could not refute the specifics. Keep in mind this is not about “winning” an argument or being “right.” It is about aligning on the answer to “How are we doing?” Frankly, we did not come out of that meeting with alignment. It took a few more weeks of data collection and building our own credibility to get everyone aligned, but we did eventually get there. Only then were we able to start asking, “So then what is wrong?”
The measure phase is about collecting facts, nothing more than this. We try to avoid assigning judgement to the facts, because this is where we create defensiveness. We avoid jumping to what we do with the facts because we don’t know yet what is actually wrong. This slow and methodical method helps to ensure we focus on the right areas of the process and bring the whole team along the way.