Alan Nicol

Business improvement and cultural change leader

Alan Nicol, the executive member of AlanNicolSolutions LLC, is an experienced business improvement and cultural change leader with a background in engineering and product development. His skills and experience include cultural change leadership, continuous improvement, business performance improvement, lean, Six Sigma, design for Six Sigma, product development, innovation methods, engineering design, systems engineering, engineering management, reliability engineering, value engineering, project and program management, system integration, total quality, and ISO 9001. He writes a blog, Business Wisdom Within.

Tue, 09/15/2015 - 13:18
Same Skills, Different Problems For problem solving, begin with what you already know
Thu, 10/18/2012 - 15:21
Within the last week I have had two conversations representing two sides of the same challenge. I first conversed with an engineer who recently became a member of his company’s process improvement team. He lamented that he sometimes missed the…
Icebergs Lead to Titanics A successful improvement movement can sometimes trigger its own failure
Wed, 10/03/2012 - 09:56
So, we have a process improvement program installed. Our people are trained or are getting trained. We have a list of prioritized improvement efforts, and we are attacking that list concertedly. We are tracking our improvement benefits, and the…
Some Tribulations of Testing and Truthfulness Estimating risk is relatively simple; facing answers and making decisions… not so much
Mon, 09/17/2012 - 10:57
Most of us do some form of testing or other validation of our designs and production systems before we initiate production of our products. For some of us, especially those who produce products related to safety, we must prove to a regulatory agency…
Important! Requirements Records An untitled requirements note lurking in a lost folder just won’t cut it
Tue, 08/21/2012 - 11:52
The most important pieces of information we must manage are product requirements, yet it seems to be something that lacks a standard practice or much discussion of best practice. Improve how your organization maintains requirements records. In my…
The Power of Dumb Questions Tools and techniques don’t necessarily teach us to be better problem solvers
Wed, 07/25/2012 - 11:11
Often it is the simple and basic question that unlocks the mystery of our business or process problems. What’s more, we don’t have to be trained experts in process improvement techniques to ask the all-important, all-powerful dumb questions. I was…