Past Book Review (May 26, 2007): "The Lean Six Sigma Pocket Toolbook"

Past book review (i.e. posted prior to starting this blog) for The Lean Six Sigma Pocket Toolbook: A Quick Reference Guide to 100 Tools for Improving Quality and Speed, by Michael L. George, John Maxey, David Rowlands, and Mark Price, McGraw-Hill Education, 2004, reposted here:

This text is simply the best of the various pocket Six Sigma tool guides currently available in the marketplace. Although this book is a quick reference guide as the subtitle suggests, there is enough substance here for it to walk on legs and provide learning material for those readers already familiar with basic quality concepts.

Quite honestly, I am not sure how the authors arrived at the "Nearly 100 Tools" portion of the subtitle, because the tools presented here can be numbered in various ways. However, this aspect really does not matter. What matters is that all of the major Six Sigma tools are presented with a lot of nice diagrams, graphs, and other figures to give the reader a good sense of the fundamentals of any given tool.

These well-encapsulated nuggets of information should serve as excellent memory joggers for some, and good starting points for those needing additional detail available in other texts or online resources. Especially helpful are the numerous brief "tips" sections throughout that point novices in the right direction.

Note that the organization of the book might not be well suited for some, because it is not ordered according to the customary steps of the DMAIC process. To some degree, the first chapter points to various sections of the book during its cursory walkthrough of the DMAIC process, although the street signs are not very well planned. Despite some minor flaws, this book serves its purpose well.