The performance of a system is affected in no small way by the behaviour of the people in it. They are affected in turn by variousl factors, their health and well-being, their state of mind, their competence and, last but not least, their motivation. This somewhat inconvenient situation is nevertheless recognised in its own somewhat clumsy way within ISO 9000. Involvement of People is listed as one of the 8 underpinning principles of quality management. The only problem is the auditable standard does not devote much effort towards defining any required system attributes that are likely to promote the principle, save perhaps for a bit of training (clause 6.2.2). It stands as a principle more or less absent of requirements

The main reason for the omission, perhaps, is that the subject is DIFFICULT. It’s tough. The concept of motivation is supported only by a lot of theories. Not laws or rules, just theories. None are proven and not all are necessarily consistent with one another. So dare I suggest that ISO 9001 takes the convenient option of side-stepping the issue for the time being? Let’s face it, many of us do the same. How often do we see adverts for “self-motivated individuals”. What should that tell us about the job? Don’t expect excitement? Don’t expect any thanks, recognition or encouragement? Maybe it should set the alarm bells well and truly ringing as we could often read between the lines “Mug required for god-awful job”

Deming, however, believed people do actually carry an inherent motivation. So maybe this concept of a “self-motivated individual” is no fallacy, after all. He believed each of us holds a desire to do a good job and we take pride in doing so. If true, that’s has to be a good thing, hasn’t it? Because, as leaders and managers, it gets us off to a bit of a flying start

But hang on a moment, we need to be careful. “Inherent” does not mean “unconditional” or “indestructible”. Motivation can be destroyed. It is destroyed – all the time. How often have we seen first day enthusiasm systematically crushed and replaced by seasoned cynicism and apathy? And here’s the rub. Who always gets the blame for this loss of motivation? Yes, the poor old worker

Good old blame. The management tool of choice for the terminally inept, as easy as credit and as versatile as a Swiss Army Knife

Anyway, whatever theory of motivation we subscribe to, it is underpinned by a fundamental law
People get pissed off

This links nicely back to an earlier post relating to the role of leaders in amongst all this malarkey. A key role of a leader, according to Deming, is to continually seek ways to make it easier for people to do a good job – remove the barriers. This post on Curious Cat refers to Deming’s views on this matter and calls on managers not to motivate but to “Stop De-Motivating Employees”

In other words, people are already inherently motivated – all we as leaders can do is mess it up … but sadly mess it up we usually do

In a very early post I highlighted the practice in a US Army Garrison of rewarding staff for making improvement suggestions. Deming was not one for that sort of thing at all. He deemed that to be extrinsic motivation, and you only need extrinsic motivation if you have failed to build intrinsic motivation into the job. He saw extrinsic motivators like that as a work-around and an indicator of a deeper, more under-lying, system malaise

Anyway, to summarise, we can perhaps take a useful and practical lesson from this great imponderable. That is, if the subject of motivation is so big and complex so as to freak us out, could we come at it from another, perhaps easier, angle, and focus on the identification and removal of demotivators?

Post from: Capable People Blog

Deming on involvement of people

Many people use the word “efficiency” without really understanding what the term means. Even fewer understand how efficiency works – the dynamics of efficiency, if you will. So here’s a crash course. You can thank me later

In an earlier post I outlined the difference between efficiency and economy. An economy is spending less money (making a cut, in other words, which often results in doing less in order to make ends meet) whereas efficiency is the ratio of productive output in relation to the inputs to the system. An efficiency could therefore mean producing a similar quantity of productive output with a reduced input, or it could even mean doing more for less – which is more difficult. Anyhow, that’s what it is. Now to talk about how it works, because I worry that some people don’t understand some simple facts of efficiency life

Efficiency and the simple facts of life

There is one golden rule to appreciate if you are to fully understand the dynamics of efficiency

Efficiency never happens by accident or without a reason

What I mean by that is that systems are NEVER accidentally or naturally efficient. A system will ALWAYS gravitate (given the choice) to the easiest possible life. Efficiencies will never fall out of the sky and on to your lap. You have to go and find them and drag them kicking and screaming from their hiding places. Systems generally resist efficiency because it means a hard life. That means that you seldom find real efficiency in uncompetitive markets, and the most efficient systems you will find will always have competitors just half a step behind them snapping at their heals

My eureka moment

I was once at an event where a man called David was describing a recent and dramatic turnaround where his company managed to rescue itself from a seemingly terminal decline. In the Q&A that followed a member of the audience asked “How did you deal with resistance? How did you manage to get staff buy in? That is usually very difficult”. David paused for a moment and then responded “There was no resistance. We did not give them the option. Nothing polarises your strategy more than a lack of alternatives”. As I write this, I heard those words 7 years ago and it was a eureka moment. Maybe my biggest eureka moment. In that instant I understood how efficiency worked. I realised it was not about culture change models or quality management tools, it was more like an evolutionary event, obeying very simple evolutionary rules. A certain set of circumstances existed that allowed survival under certain conditions, and you either found a way of meeting those conditions, or you die. David’s company accurately assessed their options and found they only had one option remaining. So they followed it, and anyone who didn’t like it was told they could lump it.  They learned, and they lived to pass on their wisdom. Others are not so fortunate

Anyway, to cut a long story short, if you are a quality manager with a passion for your job, tearing your remaining hair out asking yourself how your system can be so inefficient, and why other people can be so ambivalent towards it, I give you this word of comfort. It isn’t your fault. There may not be that much you or anybody can do about it. The simple fact is that your system is most probably the way it is, and your people are the way they are, because they can be. The real fun will only start when that option ceases to be available – when things get tougher

So be careful what you wish for

Post from: Capable People Blog

A crash course in efficiency

A chance encounter

Let’s start the story at the beginning. Sometime in 2005 I was on my way back home on a Thai Air flight from Jakarta to Heathrow, via Bangkok. In Bangkok I was joined by a casually dressed, youngish Englishman. One look told me he had some money because his clothes and shoes looked expensive, as was his seat on the plane. After a while we got talking. I told him what I did, he told me what he did. Turned out he was a professional gambler living in Thailand. I was immediately captivated by the glamour of his chosen profession, he seemed keen to talk and while away the hours, I was keen to listen. So in the intervening 12 hours or so I got a pretty good insight into the life of a professional gambler

Well, surprise surprise, it’s not all glamour and it’s not all luck. That was lesson number one and two. The man was a statistician by education, a former mathematics teacher of all things, who had turned a knowledge of statistics to his advantage in the arena of sports betting. The trick to making a profit in the longer term was, apparently, to have an ability to identify when the bookies have got the odds wrong. That’s when you place your bets. They don’t all come off, but the odds start slanting your way as opposed to the way of the bookie. Being able to identify when the odds were wrong involved a working knowledge of statistics, and a better knowledge of the event than the bookie appeared to have, and that usually involved some very painstaking research. He was based in Thailand because the bookies in South East Asia get the odds wrong more often than they do elsewhere. Makes sense

So what were his strategies? Well, here are some that I can remember:

* Bet with a clear head. If you have a favourite team, leave it alone
* Avoid accumulator bets. With each accumulated event, the odds lurch further the way of the bookie
* Do your research. Pick, say, ten football teams a year and study them continually. Find out which games they tend to win, which they lose, which players appear to be key, injury situations etc. This will all give you a clear advantage over the lazier bookies
* Stick to sports you like and understand. You’ll have to study hard, but it will be easier for you if you happen to enjoy the game
* Steer clear of boxing

There were a few others, but that gives a feel for it

Get to the point, Sayers!

Very interesting, you may say, but what’s this all got to do with quality? Well there is a point to this tale, and here it is

Remember in the earlier post, Deming’s inconvenient truth, I suggested that Deming taught that management decisions should wherever possible be based on hard facts and evidence? But also that a lot of management information is both unknown and unknowable? Well that summarises in a nutshell that business is one big lottery. There are no certainties, and for every success there is a failure. If all management information was knowable there would be a scientific formula to remove all elements of risk from the decision making process. But it isn’t and there isn’t. That is a lot like the world of professional gambling. All bets carry an inherent risk, and professional gamblers accept risk and occasional failure as an unavoidable fact of life. HOWEVER the most successful gamblers use as much Management Information as they can get their hands on to slant the odds their way

That, I propose, is probably as close to an absolute definition of “Management Information”, its uses and limitations, that you’re ever likely to get

As definitions go, it is a bit on the long side. Sorry

Post from: Capable People Blog

Making sense of Quality

I’m going to try hard not to let this post turn into a rant, but it might, so apologies in advance.  The reason I have been moved to pose this question, and air my own views on it, is as a result of a few unusual comments I’ve seen posted on discussion forums under the “quality management” banner. As an example, recently I have seen people suggest that the following range of issues have resulted from a failure in quality management, specifically;

• The world banking crisis
• News International’s hacking scandal
• The perceived botch up by the USA special forces whilst attempting to apprehend Osama Bin Laden

Seriously. People have posted questions on quality management discussion boards suggesting that better “quality management” (whatever that is) could have prevented these undesirable events

What is “Quality Management”?

My first reaction was to dismiss these things simply as a few people getting carried away. It has been said many times by many people  that if the only tool you possess is a hammer, you’ll see every problem like a nail and, superficially, this may just be what is happening here. However, it did make me wonder whether there is a wider question that we need to answer, and that one being “what exactly is a quality professional?”  The thing is, when I look at other professions, I see the members of those professions being defined by possessing some relatively specific and sometimes unique skill and knowledge sets, and I think in the past this may have been more true of the quality profession. These days the term “quality management” seems to be being used in at least two different ways. On the one hand we have the traditional “Management of Quality” usage, which historically has tended very much to be output focussed and concerned first and foremost with the management of variation in the delivered product or service. On the other hand we have this less well defined “quality management” where, in its loosest sense, seems simply to mean “managing in a quality way”. This second use appears to be applicable to any function or process and, putting it bluntly, means little more than not screwing up at work

I’m caught a little bit in a cleft stick with the whole thing. I can see an argument that any person in any job can apply a few simple “quality management” techniques to reduce the risk of screwing up, but where does that leave those people that actually call themselves “quality professionals” and seek to be rewarded appropriately for adding a value that others can’t? It effectively destroys the identity of the profession by diluting it across the entire professional spectrum

One thing that I am certain about is that people outside the “quality” fraternity do not share the feelings of those inside the fraternity about “quality management” being the universal panacea that is being claimed in some quarters. I could suggest that they might consider the idea that a good quality manager could have averted the world banking crisis as just a bit daft. Others I am sure, will disagree

Football is a game of opinions, so they say* …..

Rupert Murdoch dismisses suggestions that he needs a quality manager - a decision he would later regret

*They are, of course wrong, as it is a game of two halves

Post from: Capable People Blog

Quality Management & The Management of Quality

There’s a good article on isixsigma about how a US Army Garrison, in an attempt to garner acceptance and enthusiasm for their Lean Six Sigma projects, has offered personnel an incentive for making suggestions on work related improvements. That is, if they make a suggestion that ultimately leads to an improvement to a demonstrable level of $2600 or greater, they get a day off work

That strikes a cord with us. As, many, many years ago, as a keen young management trainee, we were asked to perform a review of our organisation’s staff suggestion scheme. It was a pretty simple job, actually, as nobody we asked was aware of it, and there had not been a single suggestion for 14 years. Digging back through the archives we noted that the scheme dangled pretty small rewards, described in the vaguest and most non-committal terms, and the suggester was barred from making suggestions about anything to do with their own immediate job (the argument being that they were paid to do that in any case). It would seem that the suggestion scheme was disabled by design, and this was subsequently borne out by inactivity. Soon afterwards we began working for another organsation that did allow suggesters to make local improvement suggestions, it publicised the results and the scale of the rewards. Some of the rewards ran into the thousands. The scheme was quite well used, surprisingly, and it put us firmly in the “make it worth their while” corner. Agree with it or not, it appeared to be a practical necessity

There was, however, a perceived problem with the second scheme. There was a view held by some that it encouraged people to “hold back” on the day job, and try to exploit the scheme, gaining rewards for things that they should have been doing anyway as a salaried employee. It appeared that a happy middle ground was not so easy to identify. We were still firmly in the “make it worth their while” corner however as, when offered the choice between an over-exploited scheme or an obsolete one, the former certainly appeared to be the lesser of the two evils as it did move the organisation forward in degrees

There is another way to look at it. Check out this article that outlines W E Deming’s view on motivation. The argument here is that there is an intrinsic motivation within all of us (to take pride in a good job) and the provision of external motivation through reward schemes is only ever a work-around fix for a broader systemic failure. That is, somehow the organisation has successfully found a way to demotivate people, and the reward scheme is no more than a patch thrown over the more fundamental problem

Wow. Where do we go with that one? Say, for example, you’re a new senior manager in a business, reviewing the performance of a reward scheme (such as the one at Fort Leavenworth) and you start debating the whys and wherefores of it all. If it subsequently becomes apparent that people will not engage without incentives, what do you do? Clearly the damage has been done over the years. What are the options? Let’s go through the main ones:

Option 1
Decide that Deming was right and that reward schemes are wrong. Elect to address the underlying systemic demotivators

Option 2
Decide Deming was right, but decide the damage has already been done and that an incentivised suggestion scheme is the only practical way to re-engage people in the short term

Option 3
Decide Deming was wrong and implement an incentivised scheme

Option 4
Do nothing

It does not take a genius to identify that there are pros and cons associated with each approach, and also no guarantee that any of them is actually “right”. There are dozens of respected motivational theories none of which have been sufficiently proven to become “laws” and not all of them even consistent with one another. Option 1 offers us only a possibility longer term gain, with few obvious quick wins. Option 2 offers us some potential short term gains, but leaves us with the problem of an “exit strategy” once we have started to address the systemic weakness. Option 3 offers us some short term gains but runs the risk of making things worse in the long run, while Option 4 offers us the cozy satisfaction of not having to do anything at all just now, but leaves us with an unsatisfactory status quo

Even after considering all of this, we are STILL in the “make it worth their while” camp. Not necessarily via incentivised suggestion schemes, mind you, just that we firmly believe in the “What’s in it for me?” influence on most life choices. People are, after all, just animals. Anyone who keeps a pet will have observed the basic simplicity of rules that they appear to abide by. Given a choice an animal will generally take the option that appears to give them the most favourable outcome, and we suggest people are no different. You give a person two choices and they will always take the route they judge will result in the most favourable outcome to themselves (they may not always get it right of course)

So ultimately if people are to be “conditioned” to take pride in their work and do a great job without the need for added incentives, this must be made an attractive long term proposition. And if people are our greatest asset, all this should be worth the effort

Post from: Capable People Blog

Incentive schemes, good or bad for quality?

Let’s start with a joke

There is a well-known joke in economics circles that goes something like this:

A student approaches his economics professor to challenge a low mark that he has been given on a recent assignment

“I can’t understand the low mark you’ve given me – I got the same question last year and you yourself gave me an A-grade” wails the student

“Yes I did” responds the professor “but this year the correct answer is different”

Of course somebody will get it right …

We are living in a continually changing world with few stable and absolute truths, consequently the future is at best difficult to predict. On any given day we can listen to countless economics experts debating the state of the global economy and what even the short-term future is likely to mean to nations, sectors and economies. There are dozens of different points of view and, no doubt, in two years time, somebody or other will be able to proclaim that they were right. Thing is, though, statistically, provided there are enough differing points of view, someone has to be right. But let’s not get too carried away with ourselves. No-one is always right because if such a person existed we would all know his name, because he would be king of the world. We actually live in a world of uncertainties. Deming knew this, and we’ve written on the subject a couple of times in the past. He knew that not all management information was known or even knowable, and that planning was merely an exercise in trying to shorten the odds on success – but it was no guarantee

Evolution, some rules

A while ago Channel 4 broadcast Richard Dawkins’ series “The Genius of Darwin”. During the course of the series a few striking and maybe unexpected parallels between the natural world and the business world have, well, evolved. They may be direct parallels, they may be metaphors, they may only be coincidental, but at worst they offer a new way of looking at things, which is usually a good thing in itself

Let’s start by taking a look at evolution (even if you don’t believe in it, try and stay with the argument, it’s imprtant). There are a few general truths about evolution that you need to understand before you can get your head around the way it works

1. Evolution has no goals. It just happens. Some species survive, others die out, but there is no end-game as such

2. The more successful species in the short term are those that can successfully exploit the status quo

3. The more specialised and “niche” a species is, the more vulnerable it is to environmental change

4. The more successful species in the longer term (especially in times of change) are those that can exploit a changing set of circumstances (i.e. they can learn and/or adapt)

Business is business

What does that have to do with goal-driven long-term business planning and how does that even suggest it may be a waste of time?

Well, first we must make a distinction between making provision for the future (which is eminently sensible) and trying to predict what the future may look like and then identify what will be our specific niche in that unknown
future-world. It is the latter that we propose may largely be a waste of time – simply because there are far too many unknowable variables to make any sort of rational specific predictions worthwhile. We can aim to make the most of today, certainly, as there are fewer unknowns. We can make reasonably specific short-term plans as the volume of variables in the short-term will be lower. However the longer our time horizon, the less likely it is that we will be able to plan accurately, because we are likely to get more than a few things wrong

So why do people bother with long-term, goal driven planning (because they do)? Well, maybe because it is a comfort. Like the idea of an after-life, it’s nice to think that we can develop and execute long-term plans, because the alternative may be an uncomfortable thought. Maybe

Returning to the evolutionary metaphor, if we really want to survive (and even thrive) in the longer term, and we would prefer to have some influence over our chances, it may be more practical to concentrate on developing our inherent capabilities, rather than goal or outcome driven strategies. In planning terms we may find it difficult to identify what volume of widgets we will be selling in what market and at what margin in 5 years time – although we can easily wish for it. What we can do more easily, however, is to adopt a policy of re-investment with capability driven outcomes, and to place our faith in the general statistical rule that it is the more capable that survive, grow stronger etc.

Dragons schmagons

Now, some people may counter this view with an argument along the lines of

“Well I bought this book in an airport last week written by this millionaire tycoon fellow, and he quite graphically describes how he built his empire up based on a long-term strategic vision. He may not have predicted the future, but he certainly anticipated the future AND he was right – you can get his book yourself if you don’t believe me”

OK yes, we do have our tycoons and, yes, many of them do claim to have some sort of gift of foresight. Some may even claim you can learn it (usually after reading their $19.99 book). However for every startling success there are numerous abject failures about whom no books are written. It’s like if we put 100 would-be tycoons in a room and asked them to flip a coin over and over. If we wait long enough someone will flip 20 consecutive heads. We may actually find that when we speak to our expert coin-tosser that he attributes his success to technique rather than pure chance. Maybe he too would put all that it in a book. You see statistically there has to be some successes, but some factors will be completely incidental to that success, even though in hind-sight we may be able to weave an alternative and plausible yarn. Be entertained by it by all means, but don’t be fooled

Anyway, the gist of this article is to suggest that far too much time and effort is wasted on planning for a future that never arrives, at the expense of continual and relentless investment in capability. The future contains too many unknowns

Post from: Capable People Blog

Is long-term planning a waste of time?

Shaun and the EFQM Model

I first encountered the EFQM Model in 1994. The organisation I worked for had adopted it as its quality framework of choice (albeit after being more or less made to by the Cabinet Office). But we approached this new opportunity to learn with alacrity. We trained up a lot of people, mainly from 1st and 2nd tier management, and willingly set aside an inordinate amount of time and resource to the annual self assessment process (which we all agreed was quite a lot of fun). Evidence was prepared, assessed and scored. Finally the output was produced. A long list of over a hundred strengths and 200 areas for improvement. Then momentum, strangely, began to erode …

“Come on everyone! Let’s identify some key priorities  from the long list!”

“But we already know what our priorities are”

“Oh. Erm, in that case let’s look at this valuable output and see if we can identify some potential areas for process improvement”

“Do we have to?”

“Well it’d be a shame for all that time and effort to go to waste”

“OK …. well …  if you ask me it’s communications. There. Do something with communications”

“What sort of communications?”

“Just communications in general, really. It just seemed that when we did the self assessment that communications cropped up quite a lot – so let’s do something around that”

“We’re already doing lots around communications, though”

“There you are then. Now if it’s OK with you I’ve got more important things to do. I did enjoy the FEMQ wotsit though, and I’m more than happy to participate again next year”

A Familiar Story?

Is this typical?  In my experience I’d have to say that it is. The process is fraught with perils and these perils are not particularly well publicised, so new practitioners repeat the same mistakes over and over. The good news is that it can work well provided the pitfalls and limitations are anticipated. What are they? Well, here are the things that immediately come to  mind …

The process must satisfy a reasonable cost/benefit analysis

The more resources you pour into the front end of the process, the harder it is to cover that expense with an equal or greater amount of benefit. The process works on a “consensus” approach, which is good, but don’t overdo it. Self assessment generally won’t tell you a lot that you don’t already think you know. Don’t be surprised if the key AFIs turn out to be the things that bite you on the bum on a daily basis.

Skillful management of the self assessment process

Speaking of bums, “leadership” is a pain in the bum to assess. Loads of people get defensive and there’s a huge temptation to bottle out of an argument on the key points. You can spend a lot of your assessment time on this topic and get absolutely nowhere. Take my advice and assess it last when people are more focussed on wanting to get home.

Start with leadership first thing in the morning when everyone is pumped up on coffee and muffins is just asking for trouble.

It’s the economy, stupid

The model does not force you to assess the economic viability of the organisation very well. Not near as well as it asks you to look at process control. This has led to a number of high scoring award winning companies folding. Understandably this has impacted the credibility of the model.

Process control has to be assessed against a backdrop of economic sustainability, otherwise you may be assessing the paradox of “non-viable excellence” *The principle of cause and effect is critical, so processes and process results should be assessed simultaneously, otherwise links can be lost, forgotten or disguised There are a few more, too, but the message is that it takes a bit of work. The Model has been around now for about 15 years. It’s still here so there must be something in it, but it hasn’t conquered the world, so it obviously isn’t the “silver bullet” that we all thought it was going to be

Unfortunately for a lot of companies it gets played with once then gets put back in the toy box. Maybe it’s time the EFQM started to ask why?

Post from: Capable People Blog

The EFQM Enigma

ISO 9001 Clause 5.4.1

Clause 5.4.1 of ISO 9001 requires that organisations “establish” quality objectives, and that these objectives “shall be measurable and consistent with the Quality Policy”. Fair enough, you could say, but saying it simply doesn’t make it happen. That’s why there is an additional requirement within clause 5.4.2 (QMS Planning) that states that planning “shall be carried out” in order to meet the requirements of the quality objectives. In other words, we set a target to achieve something, then we put a plan in place for managing the job. What could be simpler? Well, lots apparently. I have lost count of the number of times I’ve been presented with the vaguest of QMS objectives to “strive“ for this and “endeavor to achieve“ that. Virtually meaningless objectives that would make a politician blush, generally unsupported by any kind of rational plan or monitoring. It’s a common problem, and more often than not,  it is ignored or tolerated during a third party audit

OHSAS 18001 Clause 4.3.3

The strange thing is, there is a similar coupling of requirements in OHSAS 18001 with regard to OHS objectives and planning (clause 4.3.3), but the failure to identify meaningful objectives and to support the objectives with a plan is much less of a weakness in that discipline. It is actually relatively uncommon to encounter vague and meaningless OHS objectives, or to find there is no method for working towards them. Why is that? Is it that the penny has dropped better and farther with OHS people? Are they cleverer than “Quality” people? Does the training that OHS people tend to go through (IOSH, NEBOSH or whatever) emphasise this planning discipline more effectively? Or is it down to the fact that the requirement is consolidated within a single cohesive clause, so it is harder to overlook or wriggle out of?

Sharing best practice

From time to time I do get involved in various consultative processes relating to the review of standards, particularly ISO 9001, and I must say I would be lying if I said I enjoyed it. That’s probably more to do with the type of person I am, and the requirement to get a large number of people agreed around (first) general principles, and then around actual words, frankly takes ages. It wears me down quicker than it seems to wear down others. But that is my problem. I also get frustrated by what I would call a general “not invented here” syndrome. In my view, anyone with the slightest degree of objectivity would have to admit that ISO 14001:2004 and OHSAS 18001:2007 do at least a couple of things better than ISO 9001. It has long been my opinion that ISO 9001 could achieve a couple of “quick wins” simply by acknowledging the fact and replicating the structural and content issues that quite obviously work much better. The main things, in my view, are the following;

PDCA Structure

ISO 14001/OHSAS 18001 clauses are structured around a PDCA model. ISO 9001 clauses are not. They could be, but they aren’t. ISO 9001 supports a PDCA approach, so why does it not adopt the obvious sensible approach of structuring its higgledy piggledy clauses more rationally? You tell me. Our environmental and health & safety cousins have shown that it can easily be done

System Planning

For reasons I have stated above, the system planning requirements are included in a more integrated way

Management Processes

These are described in a more grown up, detailed and practical way. They are also NOT grouped together as they are in section 5 of ISO 9001. In my view this is a good thing. Again it represents a more integrated approach where “management processes” are not disaggregated from the system and applied as “bolt ons”

There are other issues that those standards just do better, but in my view these are the ones that jump out at you when you work across all three standards. The irony is indeed thick. A quality management approach supports the idea that continual improvement is supported by processes of organisational learning and the sharing of best practice. The huge caveat appears( to me at leas)t to preclude a requirement to learn from them over there ….

Post from: Capable People Blog

Quality Management System Planning

The new PDCA?

It’s the 21st century, people. We need to get with the program as there are some new rules to learn

I heard an interesting debate on the radio the other day. Two academics were arguing about the impact that the information age has had on us and the way we do business. One academic said it has been bad for us and (you guessed it) the other argued the opposite

The information age is bad for us – the case for the prosecution

The academic who argued that the information age had been, on the whole, bad for us, had a good reason for saying it. He stated that in the past, when we had to spend a week painstakingly researching something, we valued what that research eventually yielded. It would have constituted a significant investment for us and, because of that, we’d want to extract as much value from the result as we could. He argued that the fact that we can find out in 5 minutes what it used to take us a week to uncover, causes us to undervalue the outcome and we often don’t bother to learn from it, or even process it properly. This is certainly something I can identify with and, to a degree, recognize in myself. But, as always, there’s a flip side, and here it is ….

The information age is bad for us – the case for the defense

Old business rules no longer apply. Things move more quickly, things are more transient, life-cycles of products and of trends are shorter. “Right first time” is dead. We haven’t got time to get it right first time. By the time we’ve got it right, the opportunity has passed

This change in dynamics brings two implications;

1. We need to be quick, agile to seize small windows of opportunity and, (as a result of moving fast);
2. The risk of defects and failures will increase

Now, as quality professionals, that gives us a problem. Failures, we are taught, are bad and should be avoided at all cost

But hang on, that’s not quite true is it? Expensive failures are bad. Damaging failures are bad … but if we can find a way to fail fast  …. and fail CHEAP … then …

So “Fail Fast Fail Cheap” is the new PDCA. Right?

Well, not quite. In some industries cheap failures are difficult to manage. Food, drugs, medical devices, aerospace? The idea that these industries could evolve into a fast moving trial and error model is inconceivable. Their failures are potentially dangerous and very damaging. The chances of a quick and graceful exit after a failure in those industries are small. So PDCA certainly is not dead. But fast moving consumer markets with low public safety risks … that’s different, and we need to accept that different, and perhaps mildly sacrilegious, rules may now apply

Anyway, for those of you looking for some new rules, I hope this is a new one worth thinking about. Here’s an article on the subject I found in Business Week on the same subject

Shaun

Post from: Capable People Blog

Fail Fast Fail Cheap

Anyway, this year I have chosen to review the blog of practising Quality Manager, Improvement enthusiast and friend Rob Thompson – Learn Sigma. Rob has been posting his thoughts on quality and improvement on Learn Sigma for a few years now, and the blog is worth a browse for its extensive and growing back catalogue of well written and thought provoking posts. I checked out the “Popular Posts” section of Learn Sigma to see what appeared to have been sparking people’s interest, with these highlights (in no particular order)

PDCA is dead?
I penned an article with a similar title a while back, so this one caught my eye. Rob’s argument was a different one to my own (I’m deliberately not linking to it, as this ain’t about me). Rob’s argument, with nods to Jamie Flinchbaugh and Mark Graban, was that SDCA has now taken the place of PDCA via a natural process of learning and evolution. Life moves on. Of course things must change

Can Lean and ISO 9001 be integrated?
Another question. The post asks  ”is it possible?” and concludes that it is. The post however explores how this might be done in an efficient and practical way as, we all know, initiatives do have a habit of developing lives and reasons to exist all of their own, with efficiency sometimes being little more than an after-thought. Particularly with ISO 9001 in my experience

How beer really, really helps with Lean
Not just a great title, but the post also opens with a great quote

“When you invite the whole world to your party, inevitably someone pees in the beer” (attributed to Xeni Jardin)

The post itself does go on to explore harder concepts of managing quality in the supply chain, using the brewing industry as its vehicle. Some great links in this post too. Read it

Anyway, I hope you enjoy reading these posts that I have selected from Rob’s back catalogue, and I hope that if you do bother to click through, you spend a little time browsing the back catalogue for a load of other great stuff that I couldn’t be bothered to list

Finally, from Shaun, thanks for reading, please call again. Have a Happy and Successful New Year

Post from: Capable People Blog

2010 Management Improvement Carnival