Descriptive Statistics

Abstract

It is vital that you measure the current state before you begin your project. This is the only way you will be able to document the impact of your project, and it will tell you a lot about what is wrong and how to move forward. Be forewarned that there will always be some debate over the impact of your project because it is likely that other activities are also taking place that might have improved things. Still, if you do not have data, it will not be possible to make your case. The way you make sense of the data is by using statistics. Statistics are data summaries. That is, they are a small set of numbers used to represent a larger set of numbers. Descriptive statistics are data summaries that describe the process distribution in numbers.