The information you collect and analyse may come from your own monitoring processes, as well as from management reports and other sources. In the previous section, Monitoring techniques, we looked at various methods of gathering information to monitor the activities being carried out on the ground.
One way of examining data graphically is to use a Pareto chart. This allows you to rank the causes of a problem according to their frequency of occurrence or some other unit of measure, such as costs, sales figures, performance levels, or downtime. The charts can be easily generated by entering the raw data into a spreadsheet or other specialised software application.
View an example of a Pareto chart
A rule of thumb sometimes used by quality managers is the Pareto principle, or 80-20 rule. This rule states that, for many problems or events, about 80% of the effects will come from 20% of the causes. Although it obviously won't hold true all the time, and is only a rough guide to start with, it can be a useful way to prioritise problems.
This lets you get the greatest gain from the limited resources you have at your disposal to attack the problems you're confronted with. In other words, according to the Pareto principle, if you can solve the top 20% of all reported problems, you would probably have dealt with 80% of all the problems.