Management Books

• Statistics for Experimenters: Design, Innovation, and Discovery by George E. P. Box, William G. Hunter, J. Stuart Hunter
  Second Edition of this classic.

• Statistics for Experimenters: An Introduction to Design, Data Analysis, and Model Building by George E. P. Box, William G. Hunter, J. Stuart Hunter
  See new Statistics for Experimenters - Second Edition
  Or view this classic text used widely in universities and corporations for over 20 years.

• Quality Improvement Through Planned Experimentation: 2nd Edition by Thomas Nolan, Lloyd P. Provost, Ron Moen
  An excellent handbook on how to use experiments to learn about your organization and how to use that knowledge to improve your organization. The book integrates Dr. Deming's ideas and design of experiments thinking. Forward by W. Edwards Deming. 3rd edition is on the way.

• Design and Analysis of Experiments: 5th edition by Douglas C. Montgomery
  Covering factorial and fractional factorial design, experiments with random factors, response surface methods, experiments with mixtures, and methods for process robustness studies.

• Evolutionary Operation: A Statistical Method for Process Improvement by George E. P. Box, Norman R. Draper
  Evolutionary Operation (EVOP), is a simple but powerful statistical tool with wide application in business. What originally motivated the introduction of EVOP, was the idea that the widespread and daily use of simple statistical design and analysis during routine production by process operatives themselves could reap enormous additional rewards.

• An Accidental Statistician: The Life and Memories of George E. P. Box by George E. P. Box
  From early childhood to a celebrated career in academia and industry, acclaimed statistician George E.P. Box offers personal insights and a first-hand account of his professional accomplishments in this insightful memoir. It features thoughts from more than a dozen researchers and practitioners on how Box shaped their careers; previously unpublished photos from Box’s personal collection; and Forewords written by two of Box’s closest colleagues and confidants. An Accidental Statistician is a charming, intimate account of a great intellect’s life that will appeal to math and engineering professionals.

Management Articles

• Integrating Experimental Design and Statistical Control for Quality Improvement by Harriet Black Nembhard, Rene Alverde Ventura
  "As a result of a successful case study, we advance a methodology for combining design of experiments (DOE) and cumulative score (Cuscore) charts to control and monitor an industrial process subject to a feedback control scheme. We use DOE to screen out the most important variable from a larger set of variables."

• What Can You Find Out From 8 and 16 Experimental Runs? by George E. P. Box
  Includes two articles on options for designed experiments. Design of Experiments is a tools used heavily in Six Sigma programs.

• Teaching Engineers Experimental Design With a Paper Helicopter by George E. P. Box
  How a helicopter (made in with a regular sheet of paper) can be used to teach principles of experimental design including - conditions for validity of experimentation, randomization, blocking, the use of factorial and fractional factorial designs...

• A Fun Presentation on a Powerful Software Test Design Approach by Justin Hunter
  "My own consistent experiences and formal studies indicate that pairwise, orthogonal array-based, and combinatorial test design approaches often lead to a doubling of tester productivity (as measured in defects found per tester hour) as compared to the far more prevalent practice in the software testing industry of selecting and documenting test cases by hand."

• Using DoE to Develop Better Inks by Bill Kappele
  

• A Useful Method For Model-Building by George E. P. Box, William G. Hunter
  "The object of much experimentation is to build or discover a suitable model. This is done by an iterative procedure in which a particular model is tentatively entertained, strained in various ways over the region of applicat.ion, and its defects found. The nature of the defects interacting with the experimenter’s technical knowledge can suggest changes and remedies leading to a new model which, in turn, is tentatively entertained, and submitted to a similar straining process."

• Design of Experiments: An Overview and Application Example by John S. Kim, James W. Kalb
  "DOE techniques are not new to the health-care industry. Medical researchers have long understood the importance of carefully designed experiments. These techniques, however, have not been applied as rigorously in the product and design phases as in the clinical evaluation phase of product development. The recent focus by FDA on process validation underscores the need for well-planned experimentation."

• 101 Ways to Design an Experiment, or Some Ideas About Teaching Design of Experiments by William G. Hunter
  A great article sharing ideas on teaching and learning about Design of Experiments (DoE), a powerful and greatly underutilized tool. 6 simga efforts have greatly increased the use of DoE.

• Teaching Engineers Experimental Design with a Paper Helicopter by George E. P. Box
  "How a paper 'helicopter' made in a minute or so from 8 1/2' x 11' sheet of paper can be used to teach principles of experimental design including - conditions for validity of experimentation, randomization, blocking, the use of factorial and fractional factorial designs, and the management of experimentation."

• What Can You Find Out From 12 Experimental Runs? by George E. P. Box, Soren Bisgaard
  Examines the possibilities of factorially designed experiments using many variables at once.

• Split-Plot Designs: What, Why, and How by Bradley Jones
  "The past decade has seen rapid advances in the development of new methods for the design and analysis of split-plot experiments. Unfortunately, the value of these designs for industrial experimentation has not been fully appreciated. In this paper, we review recent developments and provide guidelines for the use of split-plot designs in industrial applications."

• Development of the Theory of Experimental Design by R.A. Fisher
  Proceedings of the International Statistical Conferences, 1947.

• A Personal Story of DOE by Bill Kappele
  "Back in the lab, I tackled ink with DOE. I was able to perform a small number of experiments and learn about interactions among the ingredients. I could see which ingredients appeared to be the most important, which ingredients interacted, and which inte

• The Scientific Context of Quality Improvement by George E. P. Box, Soren Bisgaard
  Scientific method is a key ingredient in the new philosophy of quality and productivity improvement. This paper provides an overview. A discussion of new ideas of how to design quality into products and processes is provided and Taguchi's work is evaluated.

• Using Design of Experiments as a Process Road Map by Davis Balestracci
  "The current design of experiments (DOE) renaissance seems to favor factorial designs and/or orthogonal arrays as a panacea. In my 25 years as a statistician, my clients have always found much more value in obtaining a process "road map" by generating the inherent response surface in a situation."

• Design of Experiments in Healthcare Delivery
  "Typically, this involves iterative testing of different factors, settings and configurations, and using the results of successive tests to further refine the product or process. When properly done, a DOE approach produces more precise results while using many fewer experimental runs than other methods (e.g., one factor at a time, or trial and error)"

• Combinatorial Software Testing by Rick Kuhn, Raghu Kacker, Yu Lei, Justin Hunter
  While the most basic form of combinatorial testing, pairwise, is well established, and adoption by software testing practitioners continues to increase, industry usage of these methods remains patchy at best. However, the additional training required is

• The Art of Discovery by George E. P. Box, John Hunter
  Quotes by George Box in the video: “The scientific method is how we increase the rate at which we find things out.” “I think the quality revolution is nothing more, or less, than the dramatic expansion of the of scientific problem solving using informed observation and directed experimentation to find out more about the process, the product and the customer.” “Tapping into resources: Every operating system generates information that can be used to improve it. Everyone has creativity. Designed experiments can greatly increase the efficiency of experimentation."

• Maximize Test Coverage Efficiency And Minimize the Number of Tests Needed by John Hunter
  "The steeper the slope the more efficient your test plan is. If you repeat the same tests of pairs and triples and… while not taking advantage of the chance to test, untested pairs and triples you will have to create and run far more test than if you intelligently create a test plan. With many interactions to test it is far too complex to manually derive an intelligent test plan. A

• Response surface methods and sequential exploration by Ron Kenett, David M. Steinberg
  "A typical response surface study begins with a screening experiment to identify the most important factors. Small, orthogonal experimental plans and simple regression models are usually used for screening (see our second and third blog posts in this series). Subsequent experiments will depend on the results of the screening experiment. For example, factors that had small effects might be dropped from further consideration. Other factors might be added. The team might decide to shift the levels of some of the factors to get better results for the critical quality attributes (CQA’s). If the results suggest that a first-order model is no longer a good fit to the data, the team expands the design to permit fitting a second-degree regression model."

• William G. Hunter: An Innovator and Catalyst for Quality Improvement by George E. P. Box
  This is the text of a talk given at the Speakers' Dinner at the Sixth Annual William G. Hunter Conference on Quality in Madison, Wisconsin, on June 2, 1993. In it, George Box recalls Bill Hunter's pivotal role in the birth of the quality movement in the c

• Introduction to Statistical Experimental Design by Johan Trygg, Svante Wold
  "Statistical experimental design, a.k.a. design of experiments (DoE) is the methodology of how to conduct and plan experiments in order to extract the maximum amount of information in the fewest number of runs"

• Do Interactions Matter? by George E. P. Box
  "It has recently been argued that in an industrial setting the detection and elucidation of interactions between variables is unimportant. In this report the contrary view is advanced and is illustrated with examples."

• Statistics for Discovery by George E. P. Box
  This report explores why investigators in engineering and the physical sciences rarely use statistics. It is argued that statistics has been overly influenced by mathematical methods rather than the scientific method and consequently the subject has been greatly skewed towards testing rather than discovery.

Management Web Sites and Resources

• Curious Cat Management Improvement Articles by John Hunter
  Hundreds of useful management articles hand selected to help managers improve the performance of their organization. Sorted by topic including: Deming, lean manufacturing, six sigma, continual improvement, innovation, leadership, managing people, software development, psychology and systems thinking.

• Life and Legacy of William G. Hunter by John Hunter, William G. Hunter
  George Box, Stuart Hunter and Bill wrote what has become a classic text for experimenters in scientific and business circles, Statistics for Experimenters. Bill also was a leader in the emergence of the management improvement movement. George Box and Bill co-founded the Center for Quality and Productivity Improvement at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Bill Hunter was also the founding chair of the ASQ statistics division.

• Stats Made Easy by Mark Anderson
  Blog on design of experiments and statistics by principal at Stat-Ease.

• Curious Cat Management Improvement Blog by John Hunter
  Blog by John Hunter on many topics to to improve the management of organizations, including: Deming, lean manufacturing, agile software development, evidence based decision making, customer focus, innovation, six sigma, systems thinking, leadership, psychology, ...

• Center for Quality and Productivity Improvement by George E. P. Box, William G. Hunter
  Founded in 1985 by George E.P. Box and the William Hunter at the University of Wisconsin - Madison. The technical report series is one of the best online management resources with reports authors including: George Box, W. Edwards Deming, Peter Scholtes, Kaoru Ishikawa, William Hunter, Gipsie Ranney and Brian Joiner. Sadly the center has abandoned the ideas of George Box and Bill Hunter. It once was a very important center for thought about management improvement. The legacy left by Box and Hunter has been lost. I find this very sad and a huge insult to the memories of those great men. Bill Hunter was my father and built the Center after he was diagnosed with fatal cancer because it was a useful way to provide benefit to the world. Seeing that cause abandoned I find insulting and extremely unfortunate for all those that no longer have the possibility of benefiting from the vision of Box and Hunter through the center. Thankfully many people that learned from them have continued to build upon their work. And their books, writing and other material continue to inspire those interested in management improvement.

• Statistics for Experimenters by George E. P. Box, J. Stuart Hunter, John Hunter, William G. Hunter
  Web site for the classic book on design of experiments. Includes a search engine for statistics sites for managers.

• Curious Cat Management Improvement Connections by John Hunter
  The aim of Curious Cat Management Improvement Connections is to contribute to the successful adoption of management improvement to advance joy in work and joy in life. The site provides connections to resources on a wide variety of management topics to help managers improve the performance of their organization. The site was started in 1996 by John Hunter.

• Hexawise - Combinatorial Software Testing by Justin Hunter, John Hunter
  This blog, by Justin Hunter, is about efficient and effective software test design strategies, including pairwise and combinatorial methods that are gaining traction in the testing community.