Carnival of Quality Management Articles and Blogs – June, 2017

Welcome to June, 2017 edition of Carnival of Quality Management Articles and Blogs.

We will commence our episode with a lighter perspective of Quality.

I have picked up a few recent articles from CQI|IRCA:

Fish Fraud: How the Marine Stewardship Council tackles unregulated fishing – In the early 1990s the impact of overfishing on the marine environment and on seafood supplies was reaching a critical point. This year the Marine Stewardship Council is celebrating its 20th anniversary and the picture is looking far healthier. In an extract from June’s Quality World magazine, Dina Patel speaks to supply chain standards director Michael Platt and manager Jaco Barendse to discover how they are leading the sustainable seafood movement.

The cost of rework: Finding the key to improving productivity in construction – Seán Connolly, the quality leader at Expanded, a Laing O’Rourke company, asks whether reducing rework is the key to improving productivity in construction.

Getting value from your supply chain – Bob Hughes, CQP FCQI, explains why an organisation’s products and services are only as good as its supply chain.

Brexit: Quality challenges facing new supply chains – Adeyemi Shodipo, director at training and consultancy company Charis Management Systems, explains why the quality profession will play a crucial role post-Brexit now that companies may have to engage more with three new trading blocs: ‘The First World’, the BRIC countries (Brazil, Russia, India and China) and the developing world.

When we talk of the challenges of productivity, innovation and competitiveness there is one profession that sits squarely at the centre of this – quality.

We will now turn to our regular sections:

For the present episode we have picked up the article The Lesson We Can All Learn From the Way Drucker Questioned Clients from William Cohen, Ph.D.’s column Lessons from Drucker @ Management Matters Network. Drucker asked not only his Famous Five Questions[i] and they may not be the most important questions he used as he analyzed an organization’s situation and needs. As a teaching technique he did not ask many questions to encourage intellectual interaction or get students to reason to a predetermined logical conclusion. These were the question meant to demonstrate just how elusive definitive answers were, even if the author of these principles was Drucker himself….When Drucker consulted for companies, he didn’t ask questions to demonstrate the problems with the solutions. Instead, he asked questions to enable the client, or group of clients, to reach an optimum answer for their business…..These questions came, as he himself stated, not out of his knowledge or experience, but out of his ignorance of the industry, the company, or other facts or factors that consultants sometimes collect…The lesson to be learnt is that you can find good answers, not only by listening to Drucker (or any expert for that matter), but by asking questions and listening to yourself.

From Ask The Experts, I have picked up a question from the archives – Audit by exception. The question seeks to know whether this technique, deployed mainly in financial audits, can be done in a manner compliant of management system standards. The response to the question states that “A robust internal audit report will identify non-conformances, but will equally focus on areas that can be improved or that have improved. …One of the ways to accomplish this, is to share audit results that report on findings, OFI and the status of objectives or targets that have been established. Auditing by exception, usually will not provide this level of reporting.”

In our ASQ CEO, Bill Troy column this time there appears to be now new post. So we pass on to our next regular column.

We now watch the latest ASQ TV  episodes:

• David Cote, Honeywell: The Importance of Continuous Improvement: how continuous improvement must be channeled into the business to make difference, not simply measuring for measurement’s sake.
• Kaizen, Buy-In and Efficiency : Using Kaizen methods and having a clear solution in mind, Vinay Goyal, Product Stewardship Project Lead, Johnson and Johnson Vision, says that quality projects become much easier to implement and offer bottom line value.
• DMAIC Leads to Cost Reduction, Increased Revenue : This Sime Darby team–2016 ITEA finalist–used DMAIC to reduce costs, waste, and meeting the company’s sustainability policy on the way to increasing the bottom line by $72M. More ITEA case studies.

Jim L. Smith’s Jim’s Gems for the month of May, 2017:

• Expanding the Quality Professional’s Role :  Quality professionals should be in the culture change business : One of the foundational truisms is that management must lead any culture change if it is to be successful. Quality professionals can expedite this by showing leadership the potential power of a statistically minded organization based on a few basic principles-
• Maintain a bottom-line focus. Quality professionals must move beyond “show me the data” to “show me the money.” The principle of all project management should be bottom-line impact.
• Focus on the vital few tools integrated with a problem solving framework that is sequenced and linked together. The key is to confine the set to the vital few (of the hundreds available) and make sure each tool generates outputs that become targets for the next tool in the sequence.
• Employ top talent to lead the effort. The organization will judge the effort as crucial if it has been staffed with top talent.
• Create a supporting infrastructure, which typically should consist of a project selection process, formal training program, project tracking and monitoring systems, an audit process for closed projects, a communications plan, and an employee reward and recognition plan.
• Provide focused training. Resistance can often be overcome by combining training with live projects as many companies do already.
• Focus early on “quick wins.” People like to succeed. When they see early tangible results, they are eager to repeat the process.
• Plan for longer term improvement. We should be reminded that maintaining momentum comes from the effect that achievement of significant, measureable benefits has on the outcome.
• Clarity is Key: A line in Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland popularly states that, “If you don’t know where you’re going, any road will get you there.” Hence, create your vision of what you truly want to accomplish. You must get completely clear about what you do want to have happen. Only then you’ll discover that you are indeed able to make it happen. Think about it, and you’ll realize that you are extremely well equipped and intended for achievement.

I look forward to your active participation in enriching the blog carnival as we pursue our journey in exploring the happenings across quality management blogs…………

Note: The images depicted here above are through courtesy of respective websites who have the copyrights for the respective images.

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Nothing Changes: Drucker’s questions are eternal | Jorge Sá | TEDxGrandRapids