Carnival of Quality Management Articles and Blogs – May, 2018

Welcome to May, 2018 edition of Carnival of Quality Management Articles and Blogs.

We have chosen – Process Cycle-time Improvement – as our base topic for discussion this month

The natural starting point is to get get a solid grasp of these three common time metrics.: Takt Time vs Cycle Time vs Lead Time  – Takt time equals the time between starting to work on one unit and starting the next. Cycle time equals the average time it takes to finish one unit. Lead time equals the total time it takes from receiving an order to delivering an item.

Overproduction vs. Fast Improvement Cycles –  Mark Rosenthal–  if you want fast changes to last, you have to work speeding up the organization’s cycle time for testing improvement ideas. Part of this is going to involve making that activity an inherent and deliberate part of the daily work, not a special exception to daily work.

Part of that is going to be paying attention to how people are working on testing their ideas. The Improvement Kata and Coaching Kata are one way to learn how to deliberately structure this work so that learning takes place. Like any exponential curve, progress seems painfully slow at first. Don’t let that fool you. Be patient, do this right, and the organization will slingshot itself past where you would be with a liner approach.

Small changes applied smoothly and continuously become big changes very quickly.

Quality Digest Live presents the issue in this video:

How to calculate Cycle Time provides the basic insight into different ways of calculating the cycle time.

Cycle time reduction is the strategy of lowering the time it takes to perform a process in order to improve productivity. In addition, cycle time reduction often improves quality.

Process Cycle Time Reduction  is about ‘Why measure and seek to reduce cycle time?’ and   ‘Methods to investigate and reduce cycle time.’ 

Process Cycle Time Reduction by Bjørn Andersen is a back-to-basics look at removing bottlenecks

Improve Process Cycle Time:

• What steps can we take out?
• What steps can we do in parallel?
• Can we improve hand-offs?
• Are there any air gaps?
• Is there information starvation?
• Are there any skill bottlenecks?
• Is there any duplication?

These questions might not reveal everything you need to do in order to improve process cycle time but these do provide a useful starting point. There are lots of ways to improve processes. You can find out more by watching other videos in this series.

90-Day Cycle Handbook – Sandra Park and Sola Takahashi – The 90-Day Cycle has emerged as an invaluable method for rapidly developing innovative approaches to support practice improvement. Generally, 90-Day Cycles are a disciplined and structured form of inquiry designed to produce and test knowledge syntheses or prototyped processes or products in support of improvement work.

The 90-Day Cycle Handbook serves as a comprehensive guide to the purpose and methods of this disciplined and structured form of inquiry. This handbook is an introductory document that delineates the purpose and process for this method. It is sprinkled with helpful tips and illustrative examples from previous successful cycles.

The Power of a 90-Day Cycle – “Success doesn’t happen right away, it happens in increments of 90-day cycles.” -Danny Morel

In the conclusion, I would only add that any method or improvement initiative is useful only if it is a well-aligned component of a broader long-term strategy. Also,  in order to succeed, these initiatives should not be implemented as stand-alone discrete additional activities, but must be integrated  into the normal routine.

We will now turn to our regular sections:

For the present episode we have picked up Aileron Blog’s white paper Create Your Future The Peter Drucker Way @ Strategic Leadership » Whitepapers column of Management Matters Network…. Drucker’s teachings center on how to manager others as well as how to manage onself…Part of the report explores Drucker’s time-tested principles, including how leaders can continue to improve themselves, and their organizations, with an eye for the future.

We now watch one of the latest ASQ TV  episodes:

• Last-Minute Advice for a Successful Transition – Consider a few practical tips for a smooth transition from the QP article Under the Wire.
• Big Data – Big data, data analytics, and predictive modeling, and how organizations and quality professionals can use all three. The Deal With Big Data

Jim L. Smith’s Jim’s Gems postings for April, 2018 are:

Strategy and Tactics– It’s worth it to understand the difference because strategy can save us when tactics fail to deliver. This is true in our personal as well as our professional world. If a tactic fails, we should consider abandoning it. However, that doesn’t mean that there’s something wrong with our strategy. The tactics are more short-term, therefore disposable, but strategy is for the long haul. Focus on what’s really important and supportive of the strategy.

Avoid the Blame Game: Root Cause Analysis(RCA) can solve problems effectively – RCA, when fully utilized, can eliminate defects occurring in operations as well as defects inherited from suppliers, ultimately helping to maintain satisfied customers,

I look forward to your inputs / criticisms/ observations to enhance the utility of our Quality Management Blog Carnival.

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