Quality Digest employees work for free. Our offices are donated. We don't pay for electricity. That’s fake news. Real news COSTS. Please turn off your ad blocker for our web site.
Our PROMISE: Our ads will never cover up content.
One of the major causes of TQM and Six Sigma failures is selecting the wrong project. This selection is probably one of the most important decisions that management can make to support the improvement process.
There are many approaches that can be used to select projects. They range from management intuition to complex analyses of how the processes affect business opportunities. I will show you a weighted selection approach that is effective, using a health care example.
In this approach each opportunity is evaluated in a number of parameters. For example:
A) Changeability = 2 points
B) Reduce cost = 2 points
C) Decrease mortality = 5 points
D) Improve patient care = 4 points
E) Improve staff morale = 3 points
F) Reduce wait time = 1 point
Each of these parameters is weighted by a point score from one to five. A rating of one indicates that it’s low priority, and a rating of five indicates that it’s very high priority.
Although I’ve spent my entire career working in the quality and process improvement fields, my undergraduate degree is in economics. I learned that economic cycles are normal. Economic downturns result when there is an imbalance in the economy. Past recessions have developed when businesses overestimated future demand and overproduced. When businesses realized their inventory was large relative to actual demand, they cut production and used various means to sell their excess inventory. Thanks in part to quality professionals implementing lean and other improvement processes, this source of imbalance is less common and less severe. However, as is now obvious, there are other ways to screw up an economy.
Over the years I’ve lost count of how many times I’ve heard the lament, “We don’t have management support!” I sympathize. Lack of management support is without a doubt one of the prime causes of failed process and quality improvement efforts. Without leadership backing, any organizationwide initiative is ultimately doomed. This column will explain why it’s not enough to ask for support in general. If you’re not very specific, you might find that the management support you asked for ends up killing you with kindness. Consider the following ineffective strategies:
Strategy No. 1: Command people to act as you wish. People in less senior levels of an organization often have an inflated view of the value of raw power. In truth, even senior leaders have limited power to rule by decree. Human beings by their nature tend to act according to their own best judgment. The result of invoking authority is that decision makers must constantly try to divine what the leader wants them to do in a particular situation. This leads to stagnation and confusion as everyone waits on the leader. Even under the best circumstances, people will often misinterpret the leadership’s commands.
Although other aspects of controls required by ISO 9001 may be critical, none receives as much attention as subclause 7.5.1--”Control of production and service provision.” Almost every organization must develop processes for delivering services or producing products. Subclause 7.5.1 focuses on the key concept that processes must be carried out under controlled conditions. Considerations for achieving controlled conditions are clearly stated, along with the requirements to determine the extent to which production and service operations are planned, established, documented, verified, and validated.
These considerations begin with understanding the specifications for the product that the processes will produce. The organization must determine the production and service processes that should be controlled and the outputs that must be achieved at each stage of processing.
Also, the organization must consider the equipment necessary to meet the product requirements, including their sequence and operating conditions. In some cases new equipment must be designed or procured.
As I’m writing this column, the U.S. government is debating the approval of a trillion-dollar-plus stimulation package, the Dow Jones average has dipped into the 7,000 range, hundreds of thousands of people were laid off work last week, and poor-performing companies throughout the United States are looking to the government to take money from the well-managed companies so they can continue to perform poorly.
Our new president hasn’t learned from the mistakes made in the last stimulation package as he pushes for approval to spend the trillion-plus dollars of our money without a well-defined plan on how the money will be spent (i.e., given away). The Bush stimulus package went to the banks, many of which didn’t need or even ask for the money.
ISO 9001’s subclause 8.3 is intended to prevent inadvertent use or installation of nonconforming product. A primary requirement of this subclause is to ensure effective implementation of processes that prevent unintended use or delivery of product that doesn’t conform to requirements. This simple requirement makes business sense because one of the worst things an organization can do is unwittingly provide its customers with product that doesn’t meet requirements. Organization must devise processes to accomplish this objective in a way that encourages personnel to address product nonconformity rather than find ways to avoid identifying and controlling such product.
Decision-making with respect to improving performance is a matter of prediction. So is leadership. For example, was the energy crisis a rational, predictive event 30 years ago? Or was it random, unpredictable, and unpreventable? If it’s the latter, then we must believe that we are morons with no theory, knowledge, or predictive capability, and are powerless to influence our environment or future. No reasonable person accepts that.
People in business, education, and government make decisions to create positive outcomes for themselves and their organizations. There are basically three categories of decisions:
1. Decide to take some form of action. (We can cause a positive result.)
2. Decide to take no action. (The status quo is just fine, thank you.)
3. Decide not to decide. (i.e., management by paralysis)
To make better decisions and improve future performance, we need to understand what drives performance. There can only be two major components that affect performance independently, or interactively, and those are the systems that are being used in the creation of the business outcomes and the performance of people working in and around these systems. The diagrams in figures 1 and 2 show the possible basis of performance.
There’s so much information in the world today that letting people recreate their own databases is a luxury we can’t afford. If we were all allowed to create our own basic concepts without any standardization, we couldn’t effectively interact with each other. Imagine trying to communicate if each person spoke a unique language, or how hard it would be to pay a bill if every individual used a different numbering system.
Often, our education keeps us from conceiving truly creative solutions. It’s important to realize that education doesn’t make an individual creative. In fact, it often has the opposite effect because there’s less need to use creativity on a continuous basis. Someone else is always supplying the answers. Of course, having an education doesn’t prohibit an individual from being creative, either. Highly creative, educated individuals don’t rely on their education to solve their problems. They use it to develop improved solutions.
We begin reducing a child’s natural creative urges early in life by saying, “Don’t try to be creative. We already have an answer that’s better than anything you can create.” Here is an example:
In the early 1980s, Matsushita’s Japanese management team bought the Quasar division from Motorola, and through the use of sound industrial-management techniques, significantly cut defect rates and cycle times.
At that time, Motorola was having major problems. Shortly thereafter, the company launched its Six Sigma program, which offered a huge opportunity for extremely high returns on investment. In addition to Six Sigma, Motorola also initiated active process redesigning activities focused primarily on cycle-time reduction. For the next five years, Motorola’s problem-solving approach was Walter A. Shewhart’s plan-do-check-act model. Motorola had no formal training to measure, analyze, improve, and control (MAIC); however, in 1991, Motorola developed the concepts of Black Belt and Master Black Belt training using the MAIC methodology, which was a slight modification of Shewhart’s model.
Motorola’s Six Sigma program consisted of the following:
Quality professionals obsess about processes. We are so focused on processes that we sometimes forget that people who aren’t directly involved in quality don’t understand the importance of them. When we see process failure or processes that don’t make sense, they stick out like sore thumbs. Everything that gets done is the result of some sort of a process. There are, however, poorly designed processes, poorly implemented processes, inefficient processes. . . you get the idea.
I’d like to share an example of a process problem that illustrates the importance of having, understanding, and implementing an effective and efficient process.
My wife and I have long wanted to remodel our kitchen. We decided we wanted to replace our 1980s-style tile countertops with granite.
I’m not handy and granite countertops aren’t something easily done by the do-it-yourselfer, anyway. It just so happens that a manufacturer of kitchen countertop surfaces is located right here in Chico. It advertises a one-stop solution for your new or remodeling needs. We also checked with the Big Box stores--Lowe’s and The Home Depot.
We decided to go with the local company, which offered a very good price and had a reputation for good quality products.
