Last month I showed you a process to use to save money, time, and sanity when doing any type of research, including applied problem solving and quality improvement (“Don’t Design the Experiment Until You Research the Process”), However, I didn’t have room to go through the steps to show you how it works. That’s exactly what I am going to do now.

Again, here is the cycle I’ll be using.

Figure 1: The research design process (from Design of Experiments in Quality Engineering, by Jeffrey T. Luftig and Victoria S. Jordan, McGraw-Hill, 1998)

Remember, my experience is that Six Sigma practitioners are not trained, or don’t use, a process for research design. This process is more than define, measure, analyze, improve, control (DMAIC), although you will see how it integrates into that.

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