Page 99 - Lean six sigma demystified

78 Lean Six Sigma DemystifieD

The Advantages of Reuse

George reminds me that with reuse you
1. Avoid long lead times.

2. Reduce the challenge faced by your teams because they can focus on the
vital few, not the reusable many.
3. Reduce time to develop a new product or service by 50% or more.
4. Use smaller teams which will be more agile and productive. In Fast Innova-
tion, I especially like Buca’s Law of Gilligan’s Island: Try not to have more
people on a team than were on Gilligian’s Island.

QI Macros Software Reuse

I reuse the QI Macros SPC templates all the time to create measurement dash-
boards for companies. I just create an input sheet and link the input data to the
p chart or XmR template. It makes it easy to create dashboards and scorecards.

Writing Reuse

Many people ask me how I write so much. Truth be told, I write a little and
reuse a lot. Small ideas go into the blog. Bigger ideas go into the ezine. The blogs
and ezines provide the basis for articles and books. I try never to write anything
that I can’t eventually use somewhere else. I even used them to create XmR c,
np, p, and u dashboards for multiple measures. Reuse is a powerful tool.
It’s very expensive to sell once, do once. It’s manual labor. But if you can do
once and sell many times, then you start to get tremendous benefits from
reuse.

Invest in Reuse
It takes a little more thought and a little more time to create things that can be
reused, but the instant you can reuse it, the payoff is huge. And each time you
reuse it, the ROI increases.
Ask yourself

• What’s common?
• What could I reuse?

• How can I take what seems unique and make it reusable?
• What is truly unique and requires customization?