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Issue Logs and Risk Registers
Every product development project includes uncertainty over what will happen. The uncertainty—each assumption or best guess—reduces our chances of project success. The job of the project manager and...
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Combining Expert Judgements
Both product development and project planning often require making educated guesses. There are two models that I’ve seen for doing this. The first is to have a designated subject matter expert (SME)...
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Combining the Voice of the Customer with the Voice of the Process
Setting product specifications is an iterative and challenging process, combining lab test data, historical data and educated guesses. All too often, the result is a set of product and process...
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Can We do Better than R-squared?
If you're anything like me, you've used Excel to plot data, then used the built-in “add fitted line” feature to overlay a fitted line to show the trend, and displayed the “goodness of fit,” the...
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Flowing Requirements from the VoC or VoP
In a previous post, I talked about the voice of the customer (VoC), voice of the process (VoP) and the necessity of combining the two when specifying a product. Here, I’d like to offer a general method...
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The Most Useful Data Plot You’ve Never Used
Those of us working in industry with Excel are familiar with scatter plots, line graphs, bar charts, pie charts and maybe a couple of other graph types. Some of us have occasionally used the Analysis...
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Sample Size Matters
I find that Six Sigma and Design for Six Sigma courses are often eye-opening experiences for participants. There is an experience of discovering that there are tools available to answer problems that...
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Sample Size Matters: Uncertainty in Measurement
In my previous post, I gave a brief introduction to populations and samples, and stated that sample size impacts our ability to know what a population really looks like. In this post, I want to show...
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Sample Size Matters: Design and Experiments
Previously, I introduced the idea that samples do not look exactly like the populations that they are drawn from, and had a closer look at what impact sample size has on our ability to estimate...
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Sample Size Matters: Design and Cost
We’ve seen in the previous posts that in designing products we need to know characteristics like the mean and standard deviation of the population, but are limited to only being able to measure sample...
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Explorable, multi-tabbed reports in R and Shiny
Matt Parker recently showed us how to create multi-tab reports with R and jQuery UI. His example was absurdly easy to reproduce; it was a great blog post. I have been teaching myself Shiny in fits and...
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Update to plot.qcc using ggplot2 and grid
Two years ago, I blogged about my experience rewriting the plot.qcc() function in the qcc package to use ggplot2 and grid. My goal was to allow manipulation of qcc’s quality control plots using grid...
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Introduction to R for Excel Users
Download the PDF As the saying goes, when all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail. Excel was designed to do simple financial analyses and to craft financial statements. Though its...
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Understanding Data
When analyzing data, I have often found it useful to think of the data as being one of four main types, according to the typology proposed by Stevens.[1] Different types of data have certain...
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Time to Upgrade?
A full data analysis My friend Guy has been monitoring electricity consumption of his old refrigerator, and he wants to know if the refrigerator is still as efficient as it should be, or if it’s time...
View ArticleR package numbr 0.11.3 posted
My simple package of useful numeric functions, numbr, has been updated to version 0.11.3 and posted to GitHub. You can install it with the command devtools::install_github("tomhopper/numbr") 0.11.3...
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