Blog posts on quality tools

Posts selected fromManagement Blog - Engineering Blog - Investing Blog and other blogs

• Messiness is Good?

  Basically it seems the interviewee has a book with the gimmick that being a mess is good – creativity and all that. Yes, I am sure sometimes messiness helps (and I am sure having a easy, catchy, gimmick is a good marketing idea). But as a management strategy it seems lousy to me. 5s is the correct strategy(even if I fail to do so – my desk tends to get messy as I get busy and... which is often. See: Planning 5s? First Know Why!

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• Transforming Management: Risks and Importance of Data and Quality Tools

  ...Often measures become the focus and the reason for improvement is obscured. Improvement should eliminate waste and improve value to the customer. Measures should help determine the success along that path but improving the numbers is not the aim, the numbers are merely proxies for that aim.

   

   

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• Business 901 Podcast with Me: Deming’s Management Ideas Today

  Here are some links related to items I mention in the podcast:

  • The W. Edwards Deming Institute Blog
  • William Hunter, my father. Link to paper with Easaw Chacko on Building a Quality Movement within a developing nation, 1972. Developing Children’s Numeracy Using Dice
  • Shoichiro Toyoda, Honorary Chairman and director of Toyota: “There is not a day I don’t think about what Dr. Deming meant to us. Deming is the core of our management.”
  • Statistics for Experimenters by George Box, Bill Hunter and Stu Hunter.
  • City of Madison applying Deming’s management ideas...

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• Change is not Improvement

  The Improvement Guide: the Practical Approach to Enhancing Organizational Performance, is an excellent handbook on making changes that are improvements rather than just a way to create the illusion of progress. The book uses three simple questions to frame the improvement strategy.

  • What are we trying accomplish?
  • How will we know that a change is an improvement?
  • What changes can we make that will result in improvement?

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• Quality Customer Focus

  Kano model of Customer Satisfaction: Kano saw three types of customer satisfaction: required (basic quality also threshold requirements), more is better (performance quality) and delighter (excitement quality).

  Customers expectations change over time. Often what was once enough to delight a customer (remote control for a TV) becomes expected...

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• A Powerful Tool: The Capacity Matrix

  The basic idea of the capacity matrix is to track your capability for each concept:

  1. awareness (information) – I am aware of this idea and can recall pertinent details as needed.
  2. knowledge (understanding and comprehension) – I can explain this idea or theory. I can translate the idea into my own words. I can make an example to explain the idea and demonstrate learning.
  3. know-how (analysis and application)...
  4. mastery (judgement and evaluation)...

  ...

  It seems to me that obviously such a manner of matching potential employees to the needs of the organization is a huge improvement upon current methods...

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• George Box Webcast on Statistical Design in Quality Improvement

  There is great value in creating iterative processes with fast feedback to those attempting to design and improve. Box and Deming (with rapid turns of the PDSA cycle) and others promoted this 20, 30 and 40 years ago and now we get the same ideas tweaked for startups. The lean startup stuff is as closely related to Box’s ideas of experimentation as an iterative process as it is to anything else.   

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