Tag: Dr. Edward Deming

Carnival of Quality Management Articles and Blogs – April, 2017

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

We will commence our episode with three articles on Quality, in general.

The Quest for Quality in the Modern Enterprise – Michael Heaps and Kathie Poindexter – The holy grail of quality is 360-degree visibility, measurable, real-time performance and the ability to go far beyond compliance into the realm of true, value adding and sustained improvement initiatives.

The other article – 4 Quality Management System Trends to Watch Out For In 2016  –  in fact, relates to QMS trends in 2016. However following takeaways seem relevant even for 2017:

  • Long and complex supply chains, along with an ever-changing regulatory landscape, present big compliance challenges.
  • The cloud has moved into mainstream business adoption as the value of subscription-based models and minimal on-premises infrastructure become clearly understood.
  • Business leaders are finally getting to grips with data analytics, and quality managers should be prepared to respond to this with meaningful uses of big data in their field.
  • The Internet of Things can play a transformational role in eliminating the human errors that can creep in with suboptimal systems and processes.

Jenny Brown in Top 7 Organizational Trends in Quality Management takes a quick look at the key trends that are offering the much needed competitive edge to organizations and impacting all quality initiatives to make them gain further momentum in future:

  1. Supplier-Specific Quality Standards of the Highest Levels
  2. Change Management for Higher Consistency in Work Processes
  3. Consistent and Continuous Evolutions in Quality Management
  4. ‘Six Sigma’ for Continuous Business Growth
  5. Quality Departments are Opting for Strategic Quality Planning by integrating many quality-related initiatives such as Lean, Kaizen, ISO registration, Six Sigma, and others in their strategy planning processes.
  6. Value to Supply—Quality Management is everywhere
  7. Social Equity and Environmental Sustainability

Quality management is being positively impacted by many latest organizational trends and is well set to dominate the future economy too. It’s expected that all industry sectors will be governed by this combination of project management and quality principles in the years to come.

We add one more column to our regular columns on our Blog Carnival for the current month. This is from Drucker Perspective column @ Management Matters Network. For the present we have –

Are You Asking the Right Questions? – The most serious mistakes are not the result of wrong answers. The truly dangerous thing is asking the wrong questions….A wrong answer to the right question can, as a rule, be repaired and salvaged….But if you ask the wrong question and get the right answer, chances are it will take a lot longer to discover and it inevitably leads to even more costly errors.

We will now turn to our regular sections:

I have picked up the question with regard to clauses 8.4.1 and particularly 8.4.2 of ISO 9001:2015, should the other internal entities of the company (.i.e HR, IT, Sales …) absolutely necessary but outside of the perimeter be considered exactly like external providers. The answer being in affirmative, adds three comments: One, being captive, not all controls that would be applied to an outside body would be applicable. Two, use process approach (clause 4.4) to determine how these departments interact and interface with core QMS processes. And, three, exploit the concept of context of the organization (clause 4.1) to further explore these relationships.

ASQ CEO, Bill Troy has presented the Guest Post: How to Choose Continuous Improvement Software by Chris Moustakas, President & CEO of DevonWay. The best-performing organizations choose Continuous Improvement (CI) as the framework for achieving that agility of dealing with a barrage of regulatory hurdles, performance gaps, and inefficiencies, and have to move quickly to stay competitive. Most of the software models available in the market have their own challenges. ERP and QMS and BPM system software models do have elements what good CI software ought to incorporate, but it needs to be remembered that Continuous Improvement happens when you apply Quality principles to Operational needs.

We now watch two of the latest ASQ TV  episode:

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

Defining Variability – Special cause variation generally comes as a surprise to the system– In the early 1920s, Dr. Walter A. Shewhart of Western Electric Company developed a theory that there are two components to variation: an inherent component from random variation he called chance-cause variation and an intermittent variation due to special cause which he referred to as assignable cause variation…..Dr. Shewhart’s improvement approach was that assignable causes could be removed with an effective diagnostic program. At the same time, he became convinced that random (chance-cause) variation could not be removed without making basic process or product changes….It is important, therefore, to understand the implications of the two alternatives before making a decision as to actions, or inactions, to be taken….‘Special cause variation generally comes as a surprise because it acts as a signal to the system that something’s gone astray.’

Whilst on the subject, it would be interesting to learn what Dr. Edward Deming has to say on the subject of variability –

Lynda M. Finn in the third of a 4-part series on Deming’s system of management, SoPK has listed 6 common mistakes that businesses make – and why they make them

Mistake #1: Failure to plot data over time

Mistake #2: Neglecting to normalize

Mistake #3: Neglecting to stratify

Mistake #4: Treating a continuous metric as discrete

Mistake #5: Not identifying key metrics

Mistake #6: Acting inappropriately in the face of common cause variation

For other three parts of the series, read:

Part I: Systems Thinking and the Three Musketeers

Part II: The Trouble with Motivation

Part IV: How Do We Know What We Know?

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.