Homework 1
Describe a work task, a hobby, or another activity that you regularly do, and sequentially list the various actions you take in order to complete this activity. Consider the complexity of your list and the amount of steps required to complete the activity.
Answer the following questions in the space provided below:
1. Differentiate the main actions between doing and improving your activities.
2. Determine the overall manner in which variation has affected your activities.
Homework 2
Answer the following questions in the space provided below:
Explain the importance of variation to health-care organizations and answer the following questions.
What might be the key processes for health-care organizations?
What are the potential common causes of variation that would have an impact on the key processes of health-care organizations?
What special causes might be more important than the others?
How might health-care organizations' business environment be dynamic and change over time?
Homework 3
The following data consists of the actual time used and potential (the best time possible for this review process) to complete each step in the review process. The actual times are based on the review of 30 projects. The potential times are subjective engineering judgment estimates.
Use the data in the table above and answer the following questions in the space provided below:
What are the sources of value-added and non-value-added work in this process?
Where are the main opportunities to improve the cycle time of this process, with respect to both actual time used and the potential best times? What strategy would you use?
Step 10: Resolve Open Issues required 104 hours (potential) versus 106 hours (actual). Is there an OFI here? Why or why not? If so, how would you attack it?
What do you think are the most difficult critical issues to deal with when designing a sound cycle time study such as this one?
Discuss one (1) project where you used a problem-solving approach to address what turned out to be common-cause variation, or where you used a process improvement approach to deal with a special cause.
If you do not have a personal experience that echoes either of these situations, you may use Internet to search for a case that reflects either of these situations.
Examples:
one's personal investment strategy since 2008
reducing waiting times at the local hospital or emergency room
reducing difficulties trying to connect to a Wi-Fi Internet provider
Answer the following questions in the space provided below:
Describe the experience in the project.
What were the solutions used to address the problem?
Was the case you described a special-cause or common-cause?
Do you feel the solution or approach used appropriate for the cause?
What would you do if you could do it again?
What conclusions can you draw from the problem-solving or process-improvement techniques?