In the following article, taken from his book, Making Sense of Data, Dr.

Wheeler discusses the three basic questions of improvement as a framework for Discovery through Data Analysis.

The Three Questions

Continual Improvement requires a framework. We all need some way to align our efforts and focus on a specific objective. To this end I have found the following questions to be especially helpful. What do you want to accomplish? Until you have a clearly stated objective, you risk everyone running off in different directions, working on their own pet projects, and not cooperating for the common good. Whether it is a specific project with a limited scope, or the general day-to-day operations of your organization, a clearly stated purpose or objective is important to help focus the thoughts and efforts of everyone involved. Any situation in which this question remains unanswered will rapidly deteriorate into chaos. However, merely specifying your objective will not be enough. By what method will you accomplish your objective? While it may be necessary to have a goal, merely having a goal is, by itself, not sufficient. Remember the old saying, If wishes were horses then beggars would ride. Until you have a plan for achieving your objective, it will be nothing more than wishful thinking. All of our targets, all of our goals, and all of our plans are merely wishes and hopes until we have some specific method for making them come true. This book contains specific techniques for using data to learn about your current process and to predict what to expect in the future. Since these two activities are fundamental to making constructive changes they are the basic elements of any methodology for improvement. How will you know when you have accomplished your objective? If you are going to have a goal, and if you hope to move toward that goal, then you will also need some way to measure how far you have come and how far you have yet to go in reaching that goal. Moreover, you will need a way to evaluate that measure to determine if a change has occurred. Any measure you might use will, in the normal course of events, vary. Some months it will go up, and other months it will go down. If you do not know how to determine when a change has occurred, you will have difficulty in separating these meaningless changes from a signal that you have made progress toward your goal.

Thus there are Three Questions that need to be answered before real improvements can be made: What do you want to accomplish? By what method? How will you know? We are very good at telling others what we want them to accomplish. Managers do this all the time. But we are much less accomplished at answering the last two questions. But until these last two questions are answered, we are just wishing for horses. While we may need a goal, we also need a method and a way of measuring our progress. So what is Continual Improvement? It is more than wishes and hopes. It is more than graphs and data. It is more than using the right bit of arithmetic. And it is more than a technique. It is the ability to understand the messages contained in your data. It is the ability to differentiate between routine variation and exceptional variation. It is the difference between reacting to noise and understanding signals. It is ultimately an incredibly powerful way of thinking that will enable you to conduct your business more effectively. How does Continual Improvement differ from traditional improvement programs? Rather than attempting to improve a process by throwing resources at the problems, Continual Improvement allows you to utilize your current resources to the fullest extent. Once you use Continual Improvement throughout the organization as the way of doing business you will discover that it allows you to get the most improvement from the least effort and with the least expense.

By What Method? What Do You Want to Accomplish? How Will You Know?

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