Blog posts on quality management

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• Resources for Using the PDSA Cycle to Improve Results

  "Using the PDSA cycle (plan-do-study-act) well is critical to building a effective management system..."   

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• Root Cause, Interactions, Robustness and Design of Experiments

  A single root cause is rare. Normally you can look at the question a bit differently see the scope a bit differently and get a different “root cause.” In my opinion “root cause” is more a decision about what is an effective way to improve the system right now rather than finding a scientifically valid “root cause.”

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• Is Quality Ambitious Enough?

  While grand aims don’t amount to much without systems that direct the effort to turn those ideas into practical action such aims are extremely valuable when they are part of a system that acts to consistently strive in that direction.

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• Influential Women in the Field of Quality Management

  Joyce Orsini and Gipsie Ranney have done lots of good stuff. So has Clare Crawford Mason.
  
  Gertrude Mary Cox isn't known so much for "quality" as statistics but she was an impressive person and a generation or two ahead of others (and it really is related to quality).
  
  Mary Poppendieck has really good stuff at the intersection of quality and software development.
  
  Meg Wheatley...

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• Root Cause - Addressing Systemic Causes Not Symptoms

  It isn't that there is this "true root cause" that created the current problem. There is a way to look at the issue and find a deeper cause that will allow you to address it and improve the future performance of the system.
  
  Depending on how you look at the problem there can be many different "root causes" that are sensible from their different perspectives. The important thing is by aiming to fix root/systemic problems you will not just treat the current symptom you are dealing with today but eliminate future problems from occurring.

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• Quality Comes to City Hall

  Changing to a culture that has a Deming perspective on customer focus is not easy. When you succeed though the way people think is profoundly changed. The City of Madison police department even did customer surveys for those they arrested and used the results to improve the process in ways that make sense. Obviously there are restrictions on what you can do to please those being arrested but this is really always the case – you can’t give all your products and services away for free even if that would make customers happy.

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• “Our Problems Are Different” – Not Really

  It is very common for people to see their situation as special and so different that they can only learn about management from some situation identical to the one they face. But this is a misunderstanding of what learning about better management practices is about. It isn’t an effort to find practices to copy. It is an effort to learn about managing organizations made up of people so that you can apply those ideas to your specific situation.

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• Better Meetings for Your Organization

  This is similar to Deming’s ideas on management, I don’t believe their is a recipe to follow. There are principles that are universal. But what specific form they take depends greatly on the specific circumstances and systems in place.

  Here are principles I believe will help:

  • Have a written objective
  • Document decisions and actions to be taken
  • Prepare people in advance (and don’t expect people to come if there isn’t a good reason for them to be there)
  • Talk to those involved in the meetings to learn what is working well, what needs to be improved and if the meetings are worth the effort (should there be fewer meetings or should less time be taken with them)

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• Management Tools for Quality Improvement Succeed When Practicing Respect for People

  An article, by my father, also addresses this area very well, while explaining how to capture and improve using two resources, largely untapped in American organizations, are potential information and employee creativity. It is only by engaging the minds of everyone that the tools of “technical” quality will result in even a decent fraction of the benefit they potentially can provide if used well.

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• Examine the Results of Your Testing Practices and Continually Improve Your Methods

  The idea of delibrately examining your software development and testing practices will be familar to those using agile retrospectives. The power of continually improving the development practices used withing the organization is hard to appreciate but it is immense. The gains compound over time so the initial benefits are only a glimpse of what can be achieve by continuing to iterate and improve.

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• Transforming the Management System of an Organization

  I don’t think there are simple answers to the questions that take the form of “do this simple thing and you will have the results you wish to see.”

  ...

  There are principles that can be fairly easily captured (respect people, improve using iterative experiments, use data to learn and test your understanding when possible but also realize that using data is not always possible…), but doing that does not offer a simple recipe laying out what steps to take.  What should be implemented in your organization and what specific steps to take are not obvious, it requires applying the principles to your organization. And doing that also requires building the capability of your organization (including your people) to operate using those principles.

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• Improving Management with Tools and Knowledge

  Both the tools and the underlying principles are catalysts to better management. Alone each can result in a bit of improvement. But when they are used together is when you see remarkable improvement. The effective integration of the principles and the tools is what separates the remarkable companies we respect (and maybe envy) from all the others that are having some success but that are also struggling in many ways.

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• Lean Thinking and Management

  I agree that we should acknowledge the paucity of success stories for improving the practice of management. The failures of management are not minor. The problems are large and the successes seem limited. The biggest thing I think we need to learn from this is that improving management is not easy. The concepts may seem simple but most of us can look around and see much more Dilbert Boss behavior than lean thinking behavior. And the gap between those two types of behavior seems to rise as you go “up” the organization chart.

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• Box on Quality

  Dr. George Box is not as well known in the general management community as his ideas merit (in my biased opinion – photo of Bill Hunter and George Box). He is well know in the statistics field as one of the leading statistical minds. Box on Quality is an excellent book that gathers his essays from his 65th to 80th year.

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• Seven Leadership Leverage Points

  IHI has the courage to say one of the 3 sources for there hypothesis as “Hunches, Intuition, and Collective Experience.” While attempting to base plans on data and not hunches is good. Often you must make decisions without data. It is why Dr. Deming was so concerned with mobility of top management: that mobility means many managers don’t really understand what they are managing. Lean thinkers understand the value of having managers with deep knowledge of the areas they manage.

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