It happened without warning. I went to check the Pro QC Facebook page for comments about our August holiday schedule and recent 30th anniversary photo from our team in Vietnam, but I was denied. Sorry, something went wrong We’re working on getting this fixed as soon as we can. Jump over to Twitter and #facebookdown is already among the top trends. Around the world, work has stopped for those few minutes that it took for Facebook to come back up. Good job Facebook! When users are so surprised and shocked at a service outage such as this, it means you’ve been meeting or exceeding expectations. That’s Six Sigma perfection… Six Sigma at many organizations simply means a measure of quality that strives for near perfection. Six Sigma is a disciplined, data-driven approach and methodology for eliminating defects (driving toward six standard deviations between the mean and the nearest specification limit) in any process from manufacturing to transactional and from product to service. To achieve Six Sigma, a process must not produce more than 3.4 defects per million opportunities. A Six Sigma defect is defined as anything outside of customer specifications. Whether or not Facebook incorporates Six Sigma in their process design or operations, I can’t be sure. But, for those few moments where I was unable to connect with our followers, I did start thinking about the tools and how a situation such as this is a great opportunity to share them with others. ASQ provides a list of useful Six Sigma tools. And, there are several useful case studies via iSixSigma and others. Just ask us how to achieve Facebook quality, and we are happy to assist.
