Performance by Kevin McManus
December 2025
The power and peril of outliers
Odds are, if you work in an operations management role,
you spend more time each day reacting to performance
outliers than you devote to the “in-control” work process.
I use the term outlier as a synonym for special cause
variation, as people seem to connect with it more. In
general, outlier events only occur one or so times out
of 100, around 1 percent of the time. However, it is not
uncommon for one outlier to require 20 to 40 hours or
more of personal time to investigate and resolve.
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