About Me

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I am the founder of University Training Partners, a company that designs and delivers online Lean Six Sigma and statistics training. In this blog, I hope to share my thoughts on statistics, quality assurance, and training, drawing from my 15 years of work experience in the field, eight years as a tenured professor teaching graduate statistics classes and ten years as a full-time training developer.

Wednesday, February 3, 2016

Writing & Publishing a Book with ASQ Quality Press - Part 2


Crafting the Book Proposal

The ASQ website gives potential authors specific guidelines on how to construct the book proposal. See http://asq.org/quality-press/become-an-author/index.html

The book proposal consists of seven sections:
  • 1. the title of the book
  • 2. an analysis of the market for the book and the current competition
  • 3. the author’s biographical sketch
  • 4. the book’s estimated length and completion date
  • 5. a detailed table of contents
  • 6. the book’s preface
  • 7. at least three sample chapters.
    This is not something that you can knock out in an afternoon, or even a month. But, researching and crafting a well-written proposal will ultimately prepare you for success when you do sign that book contract. For example, the market analysis will guide your choice of the book’s features, depth and tone. Writing the preface will help you clarify the reason for the book, and how it will be used by your readers. The estimated deadline section and the table of contents will provide the input for a detailed project plan. And, of course, the three chapters will give you a huge head start on your manuscript.

    Here are some tips for completing each section of the proposal.

    • The book title should be straightforward, and not overly “clever.” This is a technical book, not a fiction title.
    • There are many books on quality. Why will people buy yours? The market analysis section answers this question for the publisher. Know who your audience is, and what their job functions are. What other titles are in the same space as your proposed book? Look through the catalogs of not just ASQ Quality Press, but CRC Press, Wiley and Springer Verlag as well. Buy several of these titles and read them carefully. What strengths and weaknesses do you see? Are there important topics that seem to be missing, or are given a cursory treatment? How will your book address any deficiencies you see in the current titles?
    • The biographical sketch can be one page. Don’t be shy here; include the work experience and education that shows the publisher that you are uniquely qualified to write this book.
    • The book’s length is a rough estimate. Use the length of similar books as a guide, and remember that appendices and statistical tables can add many pages to the final count. Will your book be 150 pages, or 500? The publisher uses your estimate to arrive at its projected production costs and to set the price of the book.
    • Will you finish the manuscript 6 months after a contract is signed, or 12 months? Try to offer a realistic completion date! The publisher will place your manuscript in its production schedule based on your estimate. When in doubt, err on the high side.
    • I  had never really taken much notice of a book’s preface before writing a proposal. Take a few quality books down from your shelf and open up to the preface. You’ll find that the preface is generally written more informally than the text itself, and gives the reader the author’s rationale for writing the book, describes what is covered in each chapter, and offers tips to the reader on how to use the book.
    • The table of contents should be as detailed as possible. In my proposal, I used chapter headings, and two levels of subheadings.
    • The sample chapters you provide in the proposal do not need to be consecutive. The chapters should give the publisher and, importantly, the SME reviewer, a good feel for the overall tone, style, level and content of the book.

    Once the proposal has been submitted, you will receive an email confirmation from ASQ Quality Press. The editors will then read the proposal, and if they think it has merit, will send it out to a subject matter expert (SME) for review. This process may take 4 weeks or more. If all goes well, you will receive an email with a draft contract and a copy of the anonymous SME’s review. Now is the time to adjust due dates if needed. Signing the final contract starts the clock ticking in terms of your deadline. Now it gets real.

    In my next post, I will give some tips on writing the manuscript.

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    © 2016 Mary McShane-Vaughn

    Sunday, January 31, 2016

    Writing & Publishing a Book with ASQ Quality Press - Part 1

    If you are like most people, you probably have entertained the notion of writing a book. Maybe you imagine writing a memoir, a family history, or a crime novel. For those of you with a more technical, Quality bent, perhaps your aspirations lean more towards writing a book on Six Sigma leadership skills, Hoshin Kanri, or statistical sampling. If this is the case, how can you go about writing a book on Quality and getting it published? In this series of blog posts, I’ll share my recent experience writing a book for ASQ Press and give a few pointers on making the process run smoothly.

    Deciding on a Topic

    First things first: what do you want to write about? Ask yourself these questions to home in on a Quality topic:

    • What aspect of quality do you have a passion for?
    • What are your areas of expertise?
    • What is your main focus? For example,
      • Are you an expert in a niche field?
      • Or, are you a generalist with a broad range of experiences to share?

    As for me, I am an industrial engineer and statistician who has been working in the field for 30 years, so my daydreams of authorship naturally gravitated toward a text on statistical methods. In my doctoral program at Georgia Tech, I did write a dissertation, which I assume counts as a book. The dissertation compared the response model and dual response model analysis methods for experimental designs that combine both control and noise variables in a single array. It contained such gems as the derivation of the following equation for the relative efficiency of the dual analysis and response model variance estimators:


    You know, a real page-turner.

    In the end, the quality topic that ultimately spoke to me was probability. When I was a graduate student working in the statistics tutoring lab at Tech, students would come in for help on their probability homework, not for their statistics assignments. Once I became a professor, I noticed that students in my introductory statistics class had the most trouble with the probability topics. Once the class made it past the chapter covering mutual exclusivity, conditional probability and Bayes’ theorem, grades invariably improved. I suppose by comparison, performing a hypothesis test was a piece of cake compared to finding the probability of choosing two black socks from a drawer.

    This difficulty with probability concepts often followed students as they graduated and advanced in their careers. Many seasoned, certified quality professionals would voice their discomfort when solving probability problems in the ASQ exam reviews I participated in. It seemed to me that a book that used a clear, conversational approach to explain probability concepts and distributions would be welcome in the field ─ and read by more people than just my dissertation committee.

    Once you choose a topic, do some research on similar books in the marketplace. Study their tables of contents, and read through the major chapters to get a feel for their depth of coverage and writing style. Take note on what works well, and what is lacking. Now you will be better prepared to outline a proposal that explains why your book is needed, and how it will address the topic in a fresh way.

    In the next few days, I'll publish a post on crafting the book proposal.

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    © 2016 Mary McShane-Vaughn

    Friday, January 29, 2016

    An ASQ Exam Chair Reveals All

    What Did You Do Last Weekend?

    Last month, I was indoors on a beautiful Saturday afternoon, surrounded by five open statistics textbooks, gripping my calculator as I performed yet another calculation for the ASQ Six Sigma Black Belt exam. I wasn't missing out on my weekend with a group of like-minded quality professionals though. I wasn't even nervously watching the clock: I was sitting comfortably in my home office taking the Black Belt exam in preparation for an ASQ workshop.

    We could argue about the sanity of an already certified Black Belt who voluntarily takes the 150-question, grueling exam every six months, but that's fodder for another post. The fact is, twice a year, ASQ randomly chooses 12 certified Black Belts to read through an exam, record answers and, most importantly, provide comments (mostly criticisms) on the questions.  After sending their feedback into ASQ, the 12 are flown to ASQ headquarters in Milwaukee to attend a two-day workshop. There, the group reviews the exam questions and their collective responses and comments, all the while being expertly led through the process by an ASQ test developer. At the end of those two days, the 12 -- by now a cohesive group firmly in the performing stage of team development -- have produced a new version of the exam that is robust, reliable and accurate. The new, vetted exam is then administered to Black Belt candidates on the next test date, either in March or October. It is an extraordinary process performed by ASQ members for ASQ members.


    Comments Anyone?

    When I sat for my Black Belt exam back in 2006, I had no idea about the amount of work, expertise and caring attention to detail that went into the exam. I was just interested in getting through the test and passing. A couple of the questions had me scratching my head, and one or two seemed just plain wrong. I wrote a few comments on the sheet provided during the test session. Have you commented on exam questions as well? I will tell you that each and every candidate comment is collated into a report and reviewed by the ASQ test developer and the exam chair. (Remember, there are generally 1500 people taking the Black Belt exam throughout the country on test day!)  As you might expect, a lot of the comments are just complaints from cranky test takers. Four hours of filling out a bubble sheet will do that to people. However, it has happened that a test question gets thrown out because candidates have discovered a problem that was missed in the review workshop.


    A Way to Give Back

    ASQ administers 17 certification exams, from the old stalwarts like the CQE and CQA to the newly created, like the CPGP, or Certified Pharmaceutical GMP Professional. The exams each have at least one review workshop each year, and ASQ is always looking for volunteers. If you are interested in being involved in an exam review, don't wait for the luck of a random draw. Send your resume to Mary Martin at mmartin@asq.org stating which exam (or exams) you are interested in. Volunteers must hold a current certification and be an ASQ member. Participants get 2 REUs, a trip to Milwaukee and the chance to get nerdy with 11 other quality professionals!

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    © 2016 Mary McShane-Vaughn