Over the last 20 years, I’ve been to a lot of quality conferences and seen a lot of improvement posters. One of the things I’ve noticed is that most posters are only using line and bar charts, which are the dumb and dumber of charts. The people who are using control charts, and Pareto charts and histograms aren’t showing the before and after of the improvement. They might show the before, but they don’t really show the after—how everything changed.
At a quality conference a Baldrige examiner told me that “people applying for the Baldrige show us the before, but they don’t show us the after.” So, let’s talk about how you can show before and after in control charts, Pareto charts and histograms.