Avoiding Squeaky Wheel Syndrome

Ever been in a meeting where the person screaming the loudest got their way even though the majority of the team didn’t agree with them? If yes, you know that’s a squeaky wheel!

Organizations often end up prioritizing the squeaky wheel when making crucial decisions. The consequences of such decisions — misallocation of resources, inefficiency and ineffectiveness.

Therefore, experts use several decision-making tools to avoid the downsides. One such tool is pareto chart, a bar chart that ranks defects from largest to smallest and helps prioritize quality problems. Knowing which problem requires immediate attention helps to focus improvement efforts on areas where the yield is the most.

The Pareto Principle is based on the law of vital few (the factors which require the most attention and cause severe defects) and trivial many (the factors that cause minor defects and should not be prioritized before the vital few). It follows the rule of 80/20 which states, 80% of effects are caused by 20% causes.

Let’s say, your phone storage is full and you decide to free up some space. You are overwhelmed with the inflow of new images and videos (your squeaky wheel here) every day. A layman would start deleting these elements and get tired when the desired result is not achieved.

Now, if you know that 20% applications occupy 80% of storage in your device, you will prioritize what to delete first instead of wasting time and efforts deleting 80% of videos and images that account for 20% space. Therefore, you successfully override the squeaky wheel using the Pareto Principle.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

CMMI

The Capability Maturity Model Integration (CMMI) is a dynamic tool for businesses worldwide. It aids in consistent development of better products and services. The model has gone through multiple iterations over the years so that its applicability can be inclusive of various businesses. The CMMI Model focuses on improving organizational maturity. The levels of the model are: i)    Level 0: Incomplete Any work or task undertaken barely gets completed, it may or may not. The unknowns are present everywhere. ii)   Level 1: Initial The work gets completed but there is a complete chaos. Problems like going overbudget or reworks are common. iii)   Level 2: Managed Anything that is planned, organized, and then performed is said to be managed, there are processes for projects, but the organization is still reactive. iv)   Level 3: Defined The processes are defined for the organization as a whole and not silos. The approach is proactive in identifying ...
Read more

Lean Six Sigma Green Belt and Work Experience

  Ask yourself — am I proactive or reactive ? Being former, I believe it’s better to be well prepared for what is to come instead of not being curious and letting things happen to you. I am a Lean Six Sigma Green Belt certified by Grant Thornton , and can certainly vouch for it from my experience. ·        Fresh : A student with no prior work experience, I was a clean slate which enabled me to grasp the sessions without any confining thoughts. I was curious and asked more questions. The trainer was equally enthusiastic and responsive. ·        Diversity: If your batch comprises of people from multiple specializations, it increases the quality of case studies being discussed. It is good to have knowledge about the domain you are interested in but even better to know what’s happening in other domains too. Our trainer explained that we would be interacting with people from various backgrounds, future is highly unc...
Read more

Capability Benchmarking

An organization does not operate in vacuum therefore it’s inevitable to not compare its capabilities against the best practices in the industry. Capabilities of a business refers to the competencies, skills, resources, and strategic assets that enables it to deliver value to customers, perform core functions and achieve goals. Benchmarking capabilities allows businesses to compare against the best in the industry. In this article we will discuss the steps involved in Capability Benchmarking. 1.Identify the area of focus: Determine the capabilities or areas that are to be benchmarked. It can be anything like a process, product, service, department, technology etc. It is here that you need an expert that can help you navigate your benchmarking plan further . Grant Thornton Bharat has a top-notch business excellence team that will help in Capability Diagnosis . They have 12+ years of industry experience and work in multiple domains. 2.Select Benchmarking Partners: These are rec...
Read more