Carnival of Quality Management Articles and Blogs, December 2018

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

This is the last issue of 6^th annual period of our blog carnival of quality management articles and blogs. We have taken up Sustained Success of an Organization as our key topic for discussion.

ISO 9004: 2018 goes on to state that “Factors affecting an organization’s success continually emerge, evolve, increase or diminish over the years, and adapting to these changes is important for sustained success. Examples include social responsibility, environmental and cultural factors, in addition to those that might have been previously considered, such as efficiency, quality and agility; taken together, these factors are part of the organization’s context.”

We will pick three different articles that individually links up efficiency, quality and agility respectively with the sustained success.

Efficiency and Sustained Success:

Building Efficient Organizations – An efficiency mindset is the key to long-term gains. – Ryan Morrissey, Peter Guarraia, Véronique Pauwels and Sudarshan Sampathkumar – There is no fixed blueprint for embedding efficiency in an organization’s DNA. In our experience, however, successful companies share a common overarching approach: They make sure their efficiency effort spans five critical areas: strategy, metrics, commitment, behaviors and culture. Tenacity and a sustained investment in these areas create the best chance of success.

There is an interesting white paper – Capturing Operational Efficiency and Sustainable Value through Claims – by Capegemini and Guidewire,which studies the business case for claims transformation and paying specific attention to the critical factors that generate benefits, insurers can capture substantial operational efficiency and sustainable value for the insurance companies..

Quality and Sustained Success

ISO 9004 goes beyond product quality concept of consistently meeting the requirements of customer and stresses on two key concepts for of an Organization:

• focus on the concept of “quality of an organization”;
• focus of the concept of “identity of an organization”

The relationship between efficiency, effectiveness, sustained success and the quality of management in terms of immediate and final results.

The Figure here above shows a diagram describing the company’s hierarchy. It includes the company’s embedded resources, processes, immediate results (produced goods and services), as well as final results and impact (strategic effect). Immediate results should be presented in vector form

Agility and Sustained Success:

The leaders of organization design at McKinsey, principals Wouter Aghina and Aaron De Smet, explain what agility means and how organizations can evolve to thrive in an environment that demands constant change in the article, The keys to organization agility. Agility is when you thrive on change and get stronger and it becomes a source of real competitive advantage. (For more on the importance of being both agile and stable, see “Agility: It rhymes with stability.”)

There are a few more, general, articles which helps in understanding how to build sustained success:

• Dorie Clark, in her article, The Secret to Sustained Success draws on Chris Zook, co-head of Bain & Company’s Global Strategy Practice to state that the best companies focus on identifying and leveraging their core strengths, rather than chasing random new acquisitions and opportunities. (See her previous article on “Why You Should Kill Your Ideas.”)
• A winning culture …can be the catalyst that ignites an organization into truly becoming a “best place to work!”. The article offers 5 keys:
  • Establish a corporate set of core values that highlights being a champion for doing the right thing and taking care of people.
  • Communicate the values through the behavior and actions of the management.
  • Hire people who fit your values – Invest the resources – time, money, energy – to determine if a candidate fits with your values.
  • Enhance employee sense of ownership– This ownership is derived from opportunities that enable employees to know their leaders, to being informed on the success of the company, to know who their customers are, and future plans for the company.
  • Assess employee passion and satisfaction – and act on results.
• How to Create Sustained Success is a rapid-fire summary of Jim Collins’ famous first book, ‘Built to Last‘.

Recognizing the limitation of what can be covered in an article like ours, one can find good deal of highly useful literature on the subject.

We will now turn to our regular sections:

For the present episode we have picked up William Cohen, Ph.D.’s article The Focus on the Customer and What the Customer Values @ Effective Management topic of Management Matters Network….At the strategic level this could mean an important differential advantage in positioning against competitors to win customers.

We now watch two videos of the ASQ TV, one of which is related to quality improvement and other one containing the year-end message:

• Enhancing Quality through Improved Quality Reports : Gregory (Grisha) Gorodetsky, Safety, Environmental & Quality Manager, Wipro Givon, discusses the importance for organizations to format all documents, such as quality reports, in an identical way.
• 2018 Year-End Message: Elmer Corbin, ASQ Chair : In his year-end video message, ASQ Board of Directors Chair Elmer Corbin highlights significant accomplishments in 2018 and acknowledges contributions of the Board, GCC, TCC, member leaders, members, and staff.

Jim L. Smith’s Jim’s Gems posting for November, 2018 is:

• Success makes us feel good, but failures teach us valuable lessons – Certainly, negative results are never fun, but they shouldn’t become demoralizing. What innovative people realize is that negative results are signaling that something different and new needs to be done…It is easier to understand the concept of productive mistakes when the situation is reversed…When the project is successful. In this situation, your assumptions were correct, you most likely took the standard approach to getting the tasks done and did a good job managing the project…While completing a successful project is something to feel good about, there may have been a missed opportunity to get breakthrough improvements from the project. Was it your objective to simply get the job done, or was it your goal to take some risks that could take the business to a new level of performance?.. Think about this for a moment to consider how you can adjust your mindset. Most likely you won’t become another Thomas Edison, but there’s no doubt you can find ways to make your life more productive.
• Personal GPS – May be you’ve never thought of your roadmap for success being like a personal Goal Projection System (GPS) but it is much the same. Let’s see if we can connect the dots…Ask yourself, what would you like the outcomes to be for yourself at the end of one, five, ten and twenty years? Once you have that outcome, what will you see? What will you hear? What will you feel? Be as specific as possible, as you write the answers down…After this is done which as much honesty as possible, examine current reality…This process isn’t easy and will take some time but stay with it. You also should revisit this on occasion to ensure you’re staying on tract. Once you have everything recorded, you’ll have a roadmap you can use to guide you to a very personal kind of success.

On that note I take your leave for the year.

Trust you had had a great year and wish that your 2019 also is more productive, more successful, and above a thoroughly enjoyable year of your personal and career life journeys.

 

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

 

P.S. All episodes for the year 2018 of this quality blog carnival can be accessed at  / downloaded from Carnival of Quality Management Articles and Blogs, 2018.