Quality and Innovation

A couple of weeks ago, I got this email:

Comment: I am basker from NJ, and I have a PMP certification, I want to get a six sigma black belt certification — are there other certifications out there other than one from ASQ ? that you would suggest and what is the cheapest and quickest way to pass the black belt certification ?

Kind Regards,

Basker.

Basker would like to know the quickest and cheapest way to get a Black Belt certification. Here are the routes I know about to obtain the certification: 1) you could go to http://sixsigmaonline.org, whose training and certification program costs about $1000, 2) you could attend the 4-week program offered by http://www.6sigma.us which runs about $8000, 3) you could go to Villanova and pay $7000 for their three-course package, or 4) you can study on your own, complete two projects and get a Project Champion to sign an affidavit, become an ASQ member and pay $299 to take the exam, or don’t become an ASQ member and pay $449 to take the exam.

The ASQ option is probably the quickest and cheapest if you’re good at self study, and dedicated to the task of Six Sigma problem solving. However, with the ASQ certification you also get a lot of clout. I don’t think any other organization has more than 10,000 Black Belts supporting the program, working on updates to the new exams, and keeping the curriculum current. I just personally think it’s a much more viable Black Belt designation than the other programs.

I also asked Jeanine Becker, who works at ASQ in Milwaukee and is responsible for the Six Sigma Forum, what she thought. Jeanine says:

ASQ certification is a formal recognition by ASQ that an individual has demonstrated a proficiency within, and comprehension of, a specific body of knowledge. Nearly 150,000 certifications have been issued to dedicated professionals worldwide.

Anyone can give you a “certificate” for simply attending a course, but an ASQ certification is the recognized gold standard for certification for quality professionals.  ASQ is the only third-party provider of certifications for the quality professional.   Those that are ASQ certified have the potential to earn a higher salary than their counterparts.    The majority of positions companies recruit for that require certifications specify an ASQ certification.

I totally agree. And as a result, Basker, I’d say go with the ASQ cert.

Nicole

The Problem: You are a Chair for a SPIE conference, your review team has provided numerical ratings for all your oral and poster submissions, and now you have to sort through all the numbers and prepare a draft program.

The Solution: Use R!

1. Go into MySPIE into the “Review Presentations” section

2. Click on the Excel icon for “Reviewer Results” (with comments)

3. Save that file as a CSV into some directory on your machine. I saved mine to C:/SPIE12/PresRevs.csv

4. Download the R Statistical Software from http://www.r-project.org if you don’t already have it.

5. Open R and cut and paste the following code onto your R command line. (Note: Use YOUR OWN directory name or it won’t work… mine is SPIE12 on my hard drive for this year’s conference.)

setwd("C:/SPIE12")
spie <- read.csv("PresRevs.csv",header=TRUE)
names(spie)[1] = "tracking"
names(spie)[2] = "conference"
names(spie)[3] = "papernum"
names(spie)[4] = "title"
names(spie)[5] = "reviewer"
names(spie)[6] = "rating"
names(spie)[7] = "recommendation"
names(spie)[8] = "comments"
names(spie)[9] = "more.comments"
papermeans <- aggregate(spie$rating,by=list(papernum),FUN=mean,na.rm=TRUE)
t <-unique(spie$title)
all <- cbind(papermeans,t)
names(all)[1] = "papernum"
names(all)[2] = "mean.rating"
names(all)[3] = "title"
sorted <- all[rev(order(papermeans$mean.rating)),]
write.csv(all,file="ProcessedReviews.csv")
write.csv(sorted,file="SortedProcessedReviews.csv")

6. This will export two CSV files, one with all your processed reviews in order of the paper number, and the other in order of the highest ranked paper first.

7. Have fun preparing your program.

Note: If ANYONE uses this, let me know – would love to know that my solution for making my SPIE Chair life easier actually helped someone else too. Or, if you can think of improvements to make, I might be interested in coding those for future use too Leave a comment or send an email. Thanks.