Some resources for Analysis of Means (created 2006-06-30, updated 2007-02-01)

One of the techniques recommended by Davis Balestracci when he visited CMH in June 2006 was Analysis of Means, which often is abbreviated ANOM. You can use ANOM much like a control chart, but it is applied when you have a collection of averages representing the performance of specific subgroups. The classic application is examining the performance of several different workers who are all performing a similar task. I tend to dislike examples like that because it implies that the root cause of most problems lies in the workers themselves. That's not really true, though, but even if it were, such a focus early on in a quality program would lead to a lot of resistance, defensiveness, and possibly even fudging the numbers.

This webpage was originally published at the StATS website, which is currently unavailable. There is a dispute about the ownership of these pages, so I am only able to include a brief excerpt from this page.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 United States License. This page was written by Steve Simon and was last modified on 2008-11-15. Need more information? I have a page with general help resources. You can also browse for pages similar to this one at Category: Analysis of means.