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How Did A Physicist/Statistician From Indiana Completely Change The Business World

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The History of “Lean” How did a physicist/engineer/statistician from Indiana completely change the business world? In the twenties, Walter Andrew Shewhart was obsessed with what he called, statistical quality control. At Bell Telephone, Shewhart used carefully managed production processes as experiments for statistically measuring variation. His work there reduced variation in manufacturing processes by making continual process adjustments. This was where he developed his infamous Shewhart Cycle. Using this methodology, he was able to predict future output and manage a process economically. If you are interested in learning more about his work read in his book, “Economic Control of Quality” and “Statistical Method from the Viewpoint …show more content…

However, lean methodology is a bit closer to Deming’s cycle only it has different jargon for some of the same things. Lean has seven key principals, with waste elimination as a central tenet. My background is in business and operations, not programming. The knowledge I have of scrum came from taking the Certified Scrum Master and the PMI - Agile Certified Practitioner program courses. In the software world, there are several (scrum/lean) methods that you can learn about and research. Crystal is the most popular, Feature Driven Development (FDD), Dynamic System Development (DSD), Adaptive Systems Development (ASD), and XP (Extreme Programming) are the most popular. Currently, there are so many acronyms floating around that you could just discuss how the Deming cycle works, make up an acronym, create some waterfall phases, and brand your version, but it is still Shewhart and Deming’s PDCA. Eric Reis, author of The Lean Startup has become well known for doing expensive seminars on the lean startup mentality. There are even people who believe that Reis created the lean methodology and therefore has some special insight. However, now you know that his philosophy is not new or original, and is just an iteration of Deming and Shewhart’s cycle of experimentation over planning, customer and employee feedback over intuition, and iteration over big

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