[Ever since my wife got me a lovely little iPod Nano for Valentine's Day, I've had long-lost songs in my head. Literally. This title, for those who may not have paid enough attention in the second quartile of the 90s, is a Spookey Ruben line from Volume I - Modes of Transportation. Seek out the album; it's great, and full of excellent earworms....]

As an exercise in Larry Seiford’s benchmarking class, I’ve just polled the volunteers over at Distributed Proofreaders about what kinds of projects they prefer to work on. Took the numbers and munged them into this “House of Quality” (Quality Function Deployment) diagram:

For those of you who may not have encountered these pseudo-quantitative extravaganzas before, here’s what’s going on: The left side lists a series of “Whats” culled from discussion from my “customers”—in this case, the people who will proofread and process the books we scan for Distributed Proofreaders. The top row of greenish columns is a series of “Hows”—in this case, what we as Content Providers think we can do to address those “whats”. Where a number appears in the intersection cell, it captures some of the positive association between them. The roof-like diagonal bit at the top is supposed to capture (though here only poorly hints at) correlations and conflicts between the “hows”. The right-most columns in funny colors summarize the intensity of reaction for and against the various “whats”, and collapses all the discussion down into a single number in the range 1–5 for each item. Finally, to fill the bottom rows floating down there, I multiply the weights on the right by the numbers in each column, and add them all up, and normalize them to the range 0–1000. The “hows” [columns] that produce the top quartile of these numbers are highlighted in green, the ones in the lowest quartile are highlighted in red.

Here’s what it’s nominally for: We, as Content Providers aiming to release projects at DP that most appeal to the volunteers (so they read them faster than they do now, so we can get our house-full old rotten volumes cleaned out faster than it fills up), want to focus on the “hows” that give the greatest benefit to our “customers”, and postpone thinking about the ones that they most dislike. It’s not like we’re competing with other large-scale Content Providers… but we are. For the time and attention of the volunteers. So: more interest, more books cleared out.

You may someday encounter, or even consider using, the House of Quality in your work. SixSigma people are all over it. Do not let the pseudo-quantitative aspects of the process fool you, and feel free to call bullshit on anybody—manager, dean, yourself, whoever—who jabs a finger at the bottom line and says, “Clearly we need to do this!” The point of the process is the conversation between consumer and supplier; forget the damned numbers. It’s a way of determining which subjects may warrant further discussion and attention, not a statistical method for driving without your hands on the wheel.

So the next step, as far as I’m concerned, is to talk more about why this weird prejudice against periodicals keeps cropping up. I have a teetering stack of maybe 200 volumes here; time to do some marketing.

Next book scanned I scanned last night? An 1899 novel. Woopsie.