A method for detecting a hazard rate increase in time-managed lifetime data includes specifying acceptable and unacceptable levels of a shape parameter, summarizing rows of a data table by pre-specified criterion and consolidating the data table into a less refined block representation, computing bias-adjusted estimators of the shape parameter for every block in the data table, computing weights wi, i=1, 2, . . . , N corresponding to the estimators ĉi, the weights wi decreasing as the variance of ĉi increases, computing a threshold h to be applied to a set s1, s2, . . . , sN defined by s0=0, si=max[0, si-1+wi (ĉi−k)], I=1,2, . . . ,N, and applying the threshold to the set s1, s2, . . . , sN that was observed and establishing whether smax>h, where smax=max [s1, s2, . . . , sN].