On occasion I read books on Quality that are basically throwbacks, or what I like to think of as historical documents. Recently I was going through one of Juran's books on Quality to see what I might be able to learn and apply from what Quality Control and Process Design was all about before software. This was sort of inspired by a recent book I read on Toyota and its evolution of Lean Manufacturing leading up to Kanban and its current practices, I also found out some interesting stuff on Toyota cars and how they are designed. Considering I drive a Highlander and my wife a Camry it was cool stuff!
So while reading through Juran's book I noticed the following formula:
Quality = (Frequency of deficiencies) / ( Opportunity for deficiencies)
I wondered how I might be able to use this in my own arena. Dealing with web sites that have hundreds or thousands of visitors a day there is no direct linkage here. So just toying around with ideas I thought I might be able to use something along the lines of Visitors from our web analytics and determine then some number through contacts to our Support Organization to see if I could get an idea of Opportunity and/or Frequency through these numbers. I'm no statician at all, so not sure if this will work at all but I would like to try out, as a mental exercise, whether I can get something useful from this and see if I can get an idea of what our Quality is.
Typically I am against just making up metrics, but in some cases I think its fairly good to be able to give a representable number to Business Users if that number CAN be representative and provide a USEFUL idea of what is going on.
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