Surveys, statistics and statistically significant economic tremors

Once in a while, an article would pop up in the news and make me go, "oh great, here comes another guy who is talking about statistics, but knows nothing about it". This article on the BBC made me feel just like that, but luckily only in the first half: How one woman can cause economic boom or bust. However, having finished reading it, I came to appreciate his point. He is portraying how the world, especially when in crisis like these days, is reacting to 0.1% changes in unemployment rate or deviation from economic forecasts, without fully understanding the data source the conclusions are drawn from, or the statistical significance level it can be trusted to.

The author goes quite the distance to move his reader's emotions, and raise my suspicion:

She (the lady in the fictitious story who just lost her job and by chance was surveyed by the Labour Force Survey) is just one of those surveyed. But Eve, unknowingly, is about to move mountains. She will make economies tremble with a 30-minute interview and a cross in a box on a laptop questionnaire.

Vast sums of money will lurch round the world's financial system. Politicians will reel and businesses be broken.

But then he comes back across the line and is in my good books again:

Check the ONS (Office for National Statistics - UK) and it states clearly that the figure is accurate only to 0.2 per cent, most of the time. This means that a rise of 0.1 per cent in the unemployment rate could be consistent with an actual fall in unemployment across the whole economy of 0.1 per cent.

I like his final point the best, suggesting how people should treat survey results - more like clues, not knee jerk reactions to trigger panics:

... feverish times make attention twitchy. Every piece of evidence about the state of the economy is interpreted, explanations offered, forecasts recalculated, and much is made out of little, perhaps too much.

The difference between a rise and a fall is judged with solemn faces when the truth is the change we observe may not even be there. Economic data is never a set of facts; it is a set of clues, some of which are the red herrings of unavoidable measurement error.

Happy Birthday to ThinkOR.ORG - 2 years old

Happy Birthday to ThinkOR!

We are 2 years old. :)

Feb 10, 2008 was when I first registered and started the blog to promote Operations Research (also because I was looking for any reason not to study for exams). As a newcomer to OR, it bothered me that people did not know what OR was/is. It still bothers me, but a bit less now, knowing that I'm doing something (albeit very little), to try to change that, an article at a time.

I've since got a few more contributors to ThinkOR.ORG (thank you guys!), have met a few fellow OR bloggers (hi! *wave*), and have a small group of regular readers. Every month, hundreds of people all around the world (130 countries to be exact) visit the blog. How can you not love technology?

In return, I am always on the look out for interesting topics to write about to share with you all. Now I'm going to pack my backpack in the most optimal way with the objective of minimising space and weight for my trip to India tonight. I have a hunch that I'm going to have a few interesting posts coming up in the next little while. ;)

Happy blogging!

Bachelor Efficiency.

It seems to be a known fact that confirmed bachelors are at times amazing inventors of time and labor saving methods, gizmos, and procedures. Here is another one.

Recently I was visiting my bachelor friend John at his house and when I was rummaging in his drawers, searching in vain for a spoon, he has proudly shown me his latest labor saving device, (which also explained the lack of spoons in the drawers). He didn’t claim the idea as his own, on contrary; he said it is becoming a trend among their bachelor brethren, but I have seen it for the first time.

He has purchased himself two dishwashers, installed them side by side and is using them alternatively. Filling the one with dirty dishes and taking the clean dishes out of the other. He owns just enough dishes to fill one dishwasher up. This way, when he runs out of dishes, he switches the one full of dirty dishes on and reverses the process. He reports with an extreme satisfaction that he never needs to unload the dishwasher and file the dishes back into the drawers and cupboards. I think there is a lesson here for OR in it.

I’ll call it “The Bipolar Dishwashers Method”.

Healthcare system improvement project management: making a big team work

It's tough chairing meetings, tougher chairing a big meeting (10-15 people), and tougher yet chairing a big meeting that's supposed to last an 8-hour day, one day a week for 6 months. A lot of planning goes into making such a day work with team members varying from the analytical kind to the "feeling" kind, from the surgical kind to the managerial kind. I'm slowly to get a hang of it having done it for a couple months now. The following is a lot of common sense, but if one doesn't have the chance to go through this kind of work with big teams, one may not think it so obvious as an approach. Thought I'd share for whatever it's worth.

• Make sure everyone is doing something - feeling of usefulness in the group, or else people will feel disengaged.



• Assuming natural progress of project is from problem discovery, to analysis, to design and implement, and assuming that everyone in a team needs to participate in all phases, then keep telling self that as soon as we get through to design, things will become more exciting. Analysis phase is not everyone's cup of tea, even though geeks like me find it most interesting.



• Spend the time and create a big poster out of rolling parchment paper. It becomes a live document of all work done on the project to remind team in every meeting of key aims and work accomplished so far. It is a pat on the shoulder for work well done, as well as always showing the direction for the team. Sometimes, one can't see the forest for the trees.



• Big team, big scope - recipe for getting lost or losing sight easily; remind team of aims frequently; relate how current tasks contribute to the aims.



• Identify one lead for each main task to be done in the implementation phase. Give team members enough time to develop own plans on how to implement, and write the document themselves to instill ownership from the start (do not use admin resources to do this). Sometimes it takes 2-3 days just to write and re-write the implementation plans, but the time is worth while, not because we need to have a perfect plan as that is unrealistic, but because it forces people to think of all nitty gritties of how get things done and how they would get around specific change management problems. Provide a good example from a colleague of theirs (real examples from real people = trust), but encourage and give them room to be creative. Then everyone on the team should peer review each other's plan with specific review criteria.



• Once you have all of the above done, engagement level should be pretty high by now, as a healthy amount of sweat and tears will have gone into the implementation plans. I bet anything that you won't be able to hold people back on actioning out those implementation plans.
  

There you have a much happier and motivated team. There is no sure recipe. This isn't one by any means, but it is working for me so far.

CORU Clinical Operational Research Unit - London health care OR team

CORU - Clinical Operational Research Unit, based in UCL (University College of London), is a London health care OR team - the first I've come across working in OR specialising in health care, since I moved across the pond last year from Canada.

Needless to say, I was very happy to meet up with Martin Utley, Director of CORU, last week. Thanks for a great chat, Martin. I'm genuinely excited to link up with the CORU group, as I have not yet met any OR bodies in health in UK yet. Reading up on some publications that Martin sent over - I do miss the academic side of Operational Research.

It was said that OR used to exist quite healthily in UK's health sector before (very close to the Canadian system). After some reform / re-org within the National Health Services (NHS), most of the OR groups within the NHS disappeared (more or less). What a pity.

Psychotherapy and Operational Research / Change Management

Happy New Year to the ThinkOR readers and the Operational Research community.

What better way to celebrate the new year than learning something new!

1. "Although there are many details about our patients that we cannot know, nonetheless, our task is to delimit a system of observation in which we can trace the essential causal chains, and find accessible points, or handles, where interventions can be made."

2. "...It is perhaps clear... that the choice of a system is not only dependent upon the nature of reality, but also upon the means we have to investigate it and the purpose of the inquiry. The larger the system we choose, the safer we can be in assuming that it will include the relevant causal relationships. However, such a system may not be manageable and therefore of no help at all."

Upon first glance, these would look like quotes from an Operational Research book. However, they are in fact quotes from a book titled Integrated Psychotherapy, published in 1979 by the wonderful family friends, Doctors Ferdinand Knobloch and Jirina Knobloch, who are renowned Psychiatry Professors specialising in psychotherapy. I want to share with you the similarity of a psychotherapist's task and an OR practitioner's.

Never would I have thought that there'd be anything in common between Operational Research and Psychotherapy, a branch of Psychiatry, treating patients with mental health problems through communication and contact, without medication. Wikipedia's definition of Integrated Psychotherapy is:

Integrative psychotherapy may involve the fusion of different schools of psychotherapy. The word 'integrative' in Integrative psychotherapy may also refer to integrating the personality and making it cohesive, and to the bringing together of the "affective, cognitive, behavioral, and physiological systems within a person".

The first quote from the Integrated Psychotherapy about a psychotherapist's task made me think of my work immediately. I am currently a project manager at a children's hospital in London working on process improvement and transformation projects. When we go about solving systematic problems within a process to improve it, it is impossible that we understand all details of such a process. Our goal is, as exactly Dr Knobloch's describe, to find out enough information to diagnose the problem, understand why the problem exists ("trace the essential causal chains"); then we need to identify the levers to improve upon it, to successfully apply any change management ("find accessible points, or handles, where interventions can be made").

The second quote about the choice of a system rings rather true for any simulation projects. The perfect system is the real world itself, but it would be rather impossible to simulate it.

Healthcare system improvement project management: how not to manage projects

Lately, I am finding it difficult to not do the work myself in the projects I'm leading/managing. The excuse I've been using is "well, it's just easier to do it myself than asking someone else for it". However, I end up paying for it with way too many late nights working around the clock. I'll be the first to admit: this is the wrong way to manage projects. I end up feeling burned out and tired doing work that should have been done by others in the team, leaving me without enough energy or time to actually 'manage' the projects. Ultimately, if I continued this way, it would be both bad for me and the projects.


However, I used to lead projects like this before, and it worked charmingly. What changed?

Well...

Here I talked about the Master of Management in Operations Research program that trained me as an OR professional (great program by the way). During this master's program, each student is a project lead on a 4-6 months project with a real company doing real projects. The students are fully capable of carrying out all tasks within the project, but have data analysts to help out, because there is just too much analysis work for one person usually. A project lead in this scenario is both the leader and largely the doer - what I'm used to do at work both before and after the master's program.

Why isn't it working now? In my humble opinion, leading 2 projects with relatively large project teams is quite a busy job. One simply doesn't have the time to both lead and do. I did, so I paid for it. Then I learn. I guess in this case, it would probably be overall easier to ask someone else to do it than doing it myself.

Got any tips to share with me? Comment here or email me at dawen [at] thinkor [dot] org

Healthcare system improvement project management: what's the right balance?

I now live in London, UK, and work for a rather famous hospital, renowned for its medical reputation internationally. My role is a project manager on 2 system improvement projects. Such projects are also labeled as "transformation" or "modernisation" projects, depending on where you work. The idea is to work with doctors, nurses, managers, clerical and administrative staff, as well as patient families, who live and breathe the hospital, so that this group of people take ownership of the problems and solutions. We meet one day a week for a full day, and project managers like me and lean improvement facilitators are thrown into the mix to try to help the projects move along. The key is all about implementation, which may make some external management consultants jealous, since they almost never get to implementation. It is a luxury as one can see one's work flourish.

Great idea, isn't it?

Is the team too big?

• 20% of 8-12 people's time is huge! On paper, the staff are 'back filled' for that 20% of work, but in reality, finding the right people with the right skill mix to do 1 day's work is quite difficult. Therefore, these people often end up working 120%. Commitment to the team starts high but then lacks off a bit.
• With the amount of time invested, people outside the group have very high expectations. They want to see things getting churned out from the team quickly, and often ask "when are you going to deliver what". When in reality, such projects have a research nature to them. There may be the best of project plans, but research will always take as long as it does until you can move onto solutions.
• Keeping 8-12 people 'entertained' and interested in the same topic is challenging. Some people are very detailed. Some want to talk big concepts. Some just want to start getting into the issues and start tearing it apart. Keeping everybody happy is never easy.
  
• Big groups also suffer from democracy. It takes time for everybody to have their say, and one person can dominate the whole discussion and shut others up. The good facilitators will still find this difficult.

But is the team too big? I've definitely experienced the same group, but with fewer people, and we were very productive for the small group days. True, everybody in the team should be there because of their functions within the hospital, but perhaps they don't need to all be there every week.

Ideas on how to tackle the big group:

• We are now trying to break the team into smaller groups to be efficient, and to break the group dynamic. Each sub group also has a sub lead, so more people can feel true ownership within the team. We then reconvene after half a day to update each other on progress. It seems to be working so far.
• Send team members out to the hospital to observe, collect information, shadow someone else, and then update. It breaks the 'classroom' feeling when in a meeting room.
• Of course there are many facilitative ways to deal with it as well when they are all doing this: :)
  

I find these projects are shaping like way more people talking than actually doing the work. It is especially frustrating for the ones who actually joined up for doing the work. I've definitely done successful projects in the past that didn't involve such an elaborate set up. This way of working should make implementation easier. I am waiting and seeing.

Introducing variability, flow and processes in a funny video to anyone

I'm leading on two variability & flow management projects at the hospital right now, and the terms "variability" and "flow" are certainly not something the medics hear much about. I needed a quick way of explaining what the projects are about, what these terms mean, and what kind of problems we are trying to resolve. A colleague suggested this video from the ever popular "I Love Lucy" TV series, episode "Chocolate Factory". It does a wonderful job of making people laugh, as well as acting out some strong parallels to a process, and the variability and flow within the process. Take a look at the video (it's a funny one!) and read on for the parallels to the operation of a hospital. The doctors, nurses and patients on my team all found the video not only hilarious but also made it clear to them what we are trying to do in the variability & flow management project.



The parallels:

• Process: the chocolates can be patients coming into the hospital 'conveyor belt'. Lucy and her friend Ethel can be the nurses, for example, (or the various clerks, doctors, pharmacists, radiographers, etc.) handling the patients, 'dressing' them up or giving them care to make them better so they can go on to the next hospital professionals, i.e. the pharmacists to receive medications in the next room down the conveyor belt. The patient traveling through the conveyor belt is a process. Similarly, Lucy and Ethel picking up the chocolate from the conveyor belt, taking the wrapping paper, wrapping up the chocolate nicely, placing the wrapped chocolate back onto the conveyor belt, and returning to the position to be ready for the next chocolate, is a process. Lucy and Ethel are the 'servers' within the process. The things they do to the chocolate are 'steps' within the process. The girls feeding the chocolate onto the conveyor belt for Lucy & Ethel in the previous room are the servers of the upstream process to Lucy & Ethel's wrapping process. Similarly, the girls boxing the chocolates in the next room, perhaps, are the servers of the downstream process.
  
• Flow: The chocolates going through the Lucy & Ethel's wrapping process is a flow.
• Variability: The speed the chocolates are placed onto the conveyor belt is a source of variability, because the speed changes, and so is the speed that Lucy & Ethel wraps the chocolate, as they have very different styles of wrapping. This results in the variable speed of the wrapped chocolates flowing out of the Lucy & Ethel wrapping process.
• Queuing & waits - When Lucy & Ethel were running behind and when they started to collect the chocolates in front of them and in their hats, so that they can wrap them later, that's queuing the chocolates, and those chocolates are experiencing 'waits'.
  
• Mis-communication: When the supervisor meanie lady shouted to the upstream girls to "let it roll" and nothing happened so she had to go to the previous room to sort it out, that's mis-communication or signal failure. :)

The video also shows some classic examples of problems around processes:

• Isolated processes and working in silos – what is going on 'upstream' and 'downstream' is absolutely unknown to Lucy & Ethel.
  
• Lack of issue escalation procedure - when the chocolates are coming too fast for Lucy & Ethel to handle, they had no way of letting the upstream or the manager know (but of course, the meanie supervisor lady didn't allow them to leave one chocolate behind).
  
• Performance management - the meanie supervisor lady did not have realistic expectations on Lucy & Ethel's performance, or maybe she simply didn't have any clue about the variability of the sometimes very high demand placed on Lucy & Ethel from the upstream.
  
• Reactionary management - When the supervisor lady came into the room and saw that Lucy & Ethel had no chocolates on the belt and therefore ordered the upstream to feed faster is very reactionary. She simply made the decision based on one observation / data point, and did not ask any questions about why it is that way.

Hope you find the video useful in your work as well. I'm sure you can draw parallels to other industries aside from health care. Please feel free to share it with me. Things are often best explained by humour.

"Doing good with good OR" - it's not just academic

ThinkOR reader, Tina asks:

I recently graduated from college and am considering going to graduate school to study Operations Research because it is a subject I really like. There's something strangely satisfying about improving the real world with mathematical models. However, I am conflicted about what kind of career path a masters in OR would put me on. In an admittedly naive way, I want to use my education to improve our society. I think that OR can be better applied to many social services to improve efficiency. However, are there currently opportunities like this available? It seems like most of the job market (at least in the US) is for market analysis...something I don't know I'd want to devote my life to, not that there's anything wrong with that.

There is an issue of Interfaces coming out about the sort of thing I'd be interested in doing--"Doing good with good OR", but the contributors so far are all academic. Is this the main option for this kind of research? I would hate to spend two more years getting a masters degree, only to find out that the kind of job I'm looking for doesn't really exist.

ThinkOR's reply to Tina's concerns on non-academic careers in Operations Research that would do good in our society (outside of finance):

True that OR can be applied to many social (or non-social) services to improve efficiency, because as long as there is a process in place, OR can be applied to it. The question is to what degree it would help - is the ROI worthwhile? You are right that some of the "Doing Good with Good OR" seems research oriented. However, I would disagree that market analysis is the only 'career' for OR graduates out there. In fact, health care is the biggest employer for my graduating class in Vancouver, Canada. It is my understanding that health care is employing OR folks more and more in North America, so there you go, a very valid social/public service that is using OR to improve our society.

Also, in this website, they have listed quite a few other real world examples of using OR to do good, some of them are certainly for the good of our society:

• evacuation planning
• cancer therapy
• acquisition prioritization
• dispatching service vehicles
• delay management in public transportation
• design of a house for disabled persons
• hub location in cargo applications
• production resetting optimization
• optimization of the collection and disposal of recyclable waste

See this website "24 Hours Operations Research - operations research clock" for more details on the above projects.