All Wet

They're predicting rain again, today. The air is already pretty humid, and the sky is overcast. Oh, joy.

I brought my daughter over to band camp. When we arrived, a whole bunch of kids were milling around with various degrees of enthusiasm; just about all were lanky or wiry. I asked who they were, and was informed That would be the TRACK team....with a certain air of superciliousness. Parents are so ill-informed. I guess she was still pissed because she asked me, this morning, what I meant by the term 'process improvement', and in particular my opinion regarding the ineffectiveness of it, generally, and as an example I used people saying just work harder when a student has trouble with math. I said 'that's not very helpful, is it?' I think she believes I was aiming that at her, which I wasn't. Well, not entirely.

I really don't believe in 'process improvement', as it is practiced in the software industry, but I do believe in it when it comes to concrete items. Whenever I see an article about people using it in nebulous areas, I scoff. But I read it, anyway, just on the off chance that they actually are using it in a useful manner. In this case, I'm reading about an episode at the Cleveland Clinic, working on reducing cycle time for surgical instrument sterilization. It sounds pretty obvious to me, but I'm not through reading, yet. I think of what a friend of mine once said relative to process improvement; she knew that her group had improved, and they'd done it because they had made a number of changes, but they couldn't say which of them were effective, and in fact suspected that it was more that people were looking than any one thing. Of course, such talk would be anathema for the Lean Six Sigma Process Improvement Master Black Belts of the world. And no, I'm not making that title up.