Just as a gardener carefully selects the finest seeds & soil for growth, your team meticulously plans your projects. If you’re like me (at my previous jobs in automotive and home appliance engineering) you’ve never heard of Minitab Workspace. You just use whatever software you have on your computer to plan and document your experiments… which can be a little messy. The templates are constantly being messed up by your colleagues...
… those types of comments used to drive me crazy!
Minitab Workspace is a toolkit and improvement-project management software designed to help teams plan, execute, and report on CI, OPEX, Six Sigma (or whatever your program is called) improvement projects. It provides tools for project organization, data collection, analysis, and visualization, making it easier for teams to collaborate and drive continuous improvement initiatives. Workspace integrates with Minitab Statistical Software, creating a comprehensive solution for quality professionals looking to streamline their project management processes and achieve tangible results.
Note: There is a sibling to Workspace called Minitab Engage… this has all the tools in Workspace that I will show you below, but also a dashboard for leadership that shows savings, projects by location, and about anything management needs to know about your program!
I didn't use that for my gardening project since it was just me, but for a team, Engage might be the better choice! Both offer over 100 problem-solving tools but only Engage has the feature that would have made my life much easier as the Global OPEX leader at my previous company: real-time KPI dashboards for all the VPs to view.
Here are a few tools I used to get started with this simple gardening experiment:
Project definition is critical… because like any project, scope creep is likely unless you write down the problem, objective, etc.! In this case, with my full factorial mind, I’d love to test every possible noise… but that would take far too many resources than I’ve been approved for this year. I’m lucky to get the budget and lab space for this project. Thanks wife!
If you can’t read the picture above, the gist is this: I want to avoid paying for things that won’t help me. I know that I can’t just use soil from my prior outdoor garden to sprout seeds inside… that has always led to gnats in my house that are unacceptable! So, I need to buy seed starting mix of some sort. There are numerous options, some costing more, some less. I’m testing many replicants of cheap soil vs expensive soil. One thing making this a little more challenging to analyze is that I am not just doing pure replicants (same seed type planted over and over) … I’m really doing sort of a massive general full factorial with numerous categorical level-settings for plant types. See the list of plants I’m growing in the next tool, pictured below.
As you can imagine, there would be multiple meetings throughout the project, and each could have its own minutes form like the one above. Have you ever had an important meeting, agreed on some things and then lost track of those brilliant ideas?! Have you been unable to explain why the decision was made? That’s a benefit of documenting meeting minutes.
This simple Gantt chart helps keep us on track to move veggies outside to the main garden by May. It also helps show my colleagues I’m trying to recruit what type of commitment this is and why they need to start sooner than later. It’s not hard, but you’d need to start in March or April for most of these plants.
This mind map was part of the original scoping for this project… and will lead us into the next blog in this series: analysis options. I was super excited to see how some new methods (like Minitab’s new machine learning algorithms) helped find signals that trusted classical methods struggled to find. We will save those for another day though!
The Minitab Solution Center has the option to use AI to help you brainstorm!
You’ve seen text-based forms and graphs above; this RACI represents another category of tools you will see in Minitab Workspace: tables. I love how they are compact yet automatically resize as you add (in this case names or activities). I like how they are color coded and standardized. If anyone on the team sees this chart, they immediately know how to read it, what the colors and letters mean… because it’s standardized. I did not have this luxury in prior companies… lack of standards really slowed some teams down.
We may as well end with the famed fishbone! I like these Ichikawa-style diagrams. When I first came to Minitab, I only knew one or two versions… but Workspace comes with several templates. The 4S-fishbone is great and simple. This 8P-fishbone is maybe more than I needed for this project, but I like it.
Don’t worry if you have a specific version of any tool your company needs. At the time of deployment Minitab will help you edit your templates to be exactly how you want them. We’ll also teach you how to make your own templates so you can improve and grow on your own in the future. You always have the opportunity to buy more deployment services in future years from Minitab, but it’s so easy to do this yourselves. I doubt you will need that after the first time.
If you haven’t already, take a look at the first blog in this series Sprouting Spring and be on the lookout for blog #3 coming this summer. Now that we’ve planned the data collection, we can focus more on data analysis. Talk to you again then! --Jim