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Create visible workflows to achieve well-architected software.
Understand and use meaningful data to measure success.
Integrate and automate quality, security, and compliance into daily work.
Understand the unique values and behaviors of a successful organization.
LLMs and Generative AI in the enterprise.
An on-demand learning experience from the people who brought you The Phoenix Project, Team Topologies, Accelerate, and more.
Learn how making work visible, value stream management, and flow metrics can affect change in your organization.
Clarify team interactions for fast flow using simple sense-making approaches and tools.
Multiple award-winning CTO, researcher, and bestselling author Gene Kim hosts enterprise technology and business leaders.
In the first part of this two-part episode of The Idealcast, Gene Kim speaks with Dr. Ron Westrum, Emeritus Professor of Sociology at Eastern Michigan University.
In the first episode of Season 2 of The Idealcast, Gene Kim speaks with Admiral John Richardson, who served as Chief of Naval Operations for four years.
New half-day virtual events with live watch parties worldwide!
DevOps best practices, case studies, organizational change, ways of working, and the latest thinking affecting business and technology leadership.
Is slowify a real word?
Could right fit help talent discover more meaning and satisfaction at work and help companies find lost productivity?
The values and philosophies that frame the processes, procedures, and practices of DevOps.
This post presents the four key metrics to measure software delivery performance.
August 5, 2015
Are you a one in a million? This is a tongue in cheek post that might shed a little bit of light on statistics.
The other day I was having an interesting conversation with a successful entrepreneur friend of mine and we were discussing how hard it is to get a startup exit let alone more than one. I have had three in 35 years. One within my first 10 years, and then another one not until 23 years later. This friend of mine has had a few exits as well and at one point he joked and said “I guess we are 6-Sigma’s”. We both laughed but that joke had me thinking all night. So when I couldn’t sleep I pulled my lovely R and Rstudio out and tried to figure out what Sigma am I.
First we should start with what a Sigma is. It’s the eighteenth letter in the Greek alphabet, but for the purposes of this discussion it is used in statistics as a representation of Standard Deviation (SD). A “1-Sigma” is one standard deviation from the norm (norm is also called mean or average). When plotted against a normal distribution, a “bell-shaped curve” (see Figure 2), or on a control chart (see Figure 1), it shows how much variance a particular data item is from the average.
Figure 1 – From Wikipedia on Walter Shewhart
The 68-95-99.7 rule is another way of looking at variation. In a normal distribution, it is postulated that things that are true 68% of the time are considered 1-Sigma events. Things that are true 95% of the time are considered 2-Sigma events and the three-Sigma rule implies that heuristically nearly all values lie within three standard deviations of the mean (3-Sigma).
Figure 2 – From Wikipedia on 68-95-99.7 Rule
You might have also heard the term Six Sigma. Six Sigma, by pure definition, is just 6 standard deviations from the norm. However, companies like Motorola (1986) and General Electric (1995) used the term as a quality initiative. The initiative is widely known through it’s banner slogan “Defects Per Million Opportunities (DPMO)”.
The Six Sigma quality initiative has a goal of not producing more than 3.4 defects per million opportunities. In common IT parlance, you could loosely consider this an service level of 99.9966. In reality this number is actually closer to a 4.5-Sigma, but Motorola determined that due to long term drift, they need to add something called the 1.5 Sigma Shift.
The bottom line is that Sigma is used often as a term to differentiate data points. Next time your friendly aunt tells you that you are a 1 in a million, you can thank her for putting you in an group with 6,999 other people (based on a world population of 7 billion). This group would collectedly be known as, at least from your aunt’s perspective, a group of 5-Sigma’s. So back to my original question, my aunt’s opinion aside, “What Sigma am I?”. In order to figure this out, I first needed to figure out what other people’s Sigma is (see Figure 3).
Figure 3 – My Table
I created my table chart below based on a chart I used from Wikipedia (see Figure 4) and a constant value of 7 billion of the world population. I cheated and took the frequency ratios and used them in the following R calculations to estimate total population and percentages.
x = 7000000000 # World Population y = c(3,7,22,81,370,2149,15787,1744278,26330254,506797346) format(x/y, scientific=FALSE) # Get the number per 7 billion print(100 * (x-(x/y)) / ((x-(x/y)) + (x/y)),digits=12)
Figure 4 – From Wikipedia on 68-95-97.5 Rule
Let’s look at some of my data points here…
So this leaves me with my original question. If my dearly departed Aunt Genie were still alive and if she had studied statistics, she would probably call me a 3-Sigma. On a good day my wife might consider me 6-Sigma and lower than a 2 on my bad days. My 16 year old son used to think I was a 6-Sigma, but now he is too cool so I’m probably just a solid 3 from him. And God bless all 12 year old kids because mine thinks (at least for a couple more years) that I’m a 10-Sigma. The reason I know this is because every night he says to me “Daddy I love you infinity”.
You can always find me at @botchagalupe on twitter….
John Willis has worked in the IT management industry for more than 35 years and is a prolific author, including "Deming's Journey to Profound Knowledge" and "The DevOps Handbook." He is researching DevOps, DevSecOps, IT risk, modern governance, and audit compliance. Previously he was an Evangelist at Docker Inc., VP of Solutions for Socketplane (sold to Docker) and Enstratius (sold to Dell), and VP of Training & Services at Opscode where he formalized the training, evangelism, and professional services functions at the firm. Willis also founded Gulf Breeze Software, an award winning IBM business partner, which specializes in deploying Tivoli technology for the enterprise. Willis has authored six IBM Redbooks for IBM on enterprise systems management and was the founder and chief architect at Chain Bridge Systems.
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