Further to my comment on the Crosby Quality College in the last post, here are the basic quality tools any manager should be aware of (regardless of your function):
- The cause-and-effect (a.k.a., “fishbone” or Ishikawa diagram)
- The check sheet
- The control chart
- The histogram
- The Pareto chart
- The scatter diagram
- Stratification (alternately, flow chart or run chart)
To this day, axis still uses the “fishbone” diagram on many projects—it is a universal tool for discovery, mapping, analysis, etc.
As an aside, histograms are a great tool to use for presenting a set of sales or marketing data… Histograms are easy to make, but if they’re going to be representative of the data, the size of the bins has to be reasonable. Bins that are to narrow make the data set look less regular than it is; bins that are too wide throw away information and are biased away from the underlying density function at the edges of the bins.