Blame culture

Are we still blaming each other for the poor performance of the systems in which we work?

Recognizing and fulfilling the needs of customers. Doing this as efficiently as possible should be common sense.

Here are a few examples of how human nature gets in the way of common sense:

· We gather in tribes of the same function. Perhaps we do this to share stories or to keep the boss happy for promotion. Cross-functional process teams serve customers not departments.

· Employees learn that authority figures are not interested in problems. Employees keep quiet in fear of reporting potential (and actual) nonconformity.

· Authority figures focus on reducing short-term costs. They have little or no regard for something as nebulous or avoidable as quality.

· Authority figures measure production output. They may even count defective output for their bonus. They seem to place little or no value on planning and designing reliable processes.

· Authority figures rely on inspection. Paying the price of sorting bad product from good product. Instead of investing in helping teams to get their processes right.

· People with quality in their job titles gather in the “we know best” department. Many do not develop their organizational systems to help the workers to deliver quality.

· Collections of wordy quality procedures are called systems. Disengaged employees know compliance is the rule.

· Undocumented but crucial parts of management systems (such as care and respect) are ignored, neglected or deemed unimportant.

Alienation and frustration may be the consequence.

Or can we be courageous and take action to encourage our other behaviours?

We may end up with process-based management systems that enable self-directed work to help teams to determine and fulfill stakeholder requirements.

Quality professionals may need to start by learning human factors. Then we can remove the fear by change the blame culture.

We can show how managing quality reduces costs and how managing short-term costs reduces quality and increases long-term costs.

Let us turn the authority figures into leaders, managers and supervisors. Leaders helping their process teams to understand and fulfill requirements.

Let us collaborate to manage quality so we reduce costs.

This is how we improve the rewards from our work for customers, employees, shareholders and leaders.

2011 in review

The WordPress.com stats helper monkeys prepared a 2011 annual report for this blog.

Here’s an excerpt:

A San Francisco cable car holds 60 people. This blog was viewed about 1,500 times in 2011. If it were a cable car, it would take about 25 trips to carry that many people.

Click here to see the complete report.

Why always seek to reduce variation?

Thanks for asking why we should always seek to reduce variation (after taking the actions mentioned earlier).

Agreed, innovation in revealing and fulfilling yet more customer needs (including the psychological need for expectations to be satisfied) is indeed the key to success in a consumer-driven economy.

So is the design and operation of reliable production processes.

Unreliable processes may cause the people involved to increase the amount of work in progress “just in case” something goes wrong with an earlier process (or be idle).

Customers are expected to pay directly for this wasted inventory (and time) up and down the supply chains. The rest of us pay the avoidable environmental costs of waste.

Competitors with reliable processes waste less so they can afford to reduce their prices while making more profit to share with employees, shareholders and as taxpayers.

Competitors with reliable processes may yield more as taxpayers, attract more investment and attract more creative employees for innovation.

Our economy (some of the taxes could be invested in educating and training people for more creative and fulfilling lives) and our environment thereby benefit from reliable processes. .

Hence, we can see a virtuous cycle arising from the widespread design and operation of reliable production processes to result in products that fulfill the needs of paying customers.

Processes with more dependability should be a result of developing and running process-based management systems.

Within these systems people may cost effectively eliminate the “vital few” special and common causes of variation after designing to eliminate causes of nonconformity.

Such is the importance of organizations running reliable processes to result in needed goods and services.

Learning and earning our way out of borrowing too much

The slow economy is a crisis for individuals, families and communities in many western countries. For a decade or more, many western economies have borrowed more than they have earned. Politicians now have to reduce public spending to avoid borrowing even more money. Reduce spending to keep the interest repayments down on what our country has to repay every month.

Yes, our credit bubble was made much bigger by banks slackening their credit controls to sell more and more loans to us (and to buyers of the loans). Politicians are more likely to allow inflation to erode our debts (by printing unearned money and allowing the currency to devalue) while we wait for them to create jobs. Inflation would also erode the value of our work and any savings we have left.

Instead, we could demand our politicians globalize the tax on all financial transactions. We could also insist that the proceeds from this tax are invested so our children are educated and trained to earn an improved standard of living for themselves, their families and their communities.

Some politicians have had the honesty to admit that recovery will take ten years. We need at least as much time to repay as it took us to borrow the money we had not earned. Changing what we do to ensure our work adds value faster means we can also repay our debts faster.

Or are we waiting for politicians to create jobs?

Work, not jobs, is the key. Jobs are a departmental concept. Jobs occupy functions to further careers and claim bonuses. Jobs like this add no value for customers. Jobs like this put us deeper in debt. Better to determine how our work adds value. In both the private and public sectors, our work has to add value for customers (includes taxpayers) who are able and willing to pay. Our cross-functional work can add value faster to earn more for all of us.

Our work becomes meaningful in process teams as together we create more successful customers.

First we have to understand our processes. Then we need to be competent, applying our skills and knowledge within these processes for the benefit of customers. But far too many skilled and knowledgeable people work in departmentalized organizations that waste 40% of their efforts to serve customers. Two days a week on rework, pointless work and repair. Too many organizations neglect their cross-departmental processes for adding and enabling value. In short they neglect their process-based management systems.

How can we improve the economy for ourselves, our children and our communities? Process-based management systems can make everyone’s work more effective and then more efficient. Management systems can help all of us to determine and fulfill the needs of our customers. Process-based management systems that are self-improving so they help us to prevent loss while speeding the rate at which our work adds value.

All of us can create sustainable and satisfying work lives so we earn our standards of living.

Users need manuals they understand

Generally, people do not read their quality manuals. This is not new. IT has realized this for years with their helpdesk’s less than helpful responses “have you read the manual” or “have you rebooted your computer yet”.

Some quality manuals are full of many turgid policies. So, does the failure to read and understand the quality manual reveal a lack of interest? More likely experts write their manuals without total regard for the readers.

Many experts rewrite the system standard. This fails to respect copyright even as we try to protect our own property. It is not a manual that meets the needs of its readers.

Instead, write your manual so it explains how your management system works to:

A. Convert the needs of customers into cash in the bank;
B. Manage opportunity and risk (add value while preventing loss); and
C. Continually improve performance.

Use the present tense to reflect reality and rewrite for Grade 8 readability. Just like the Wall Street Journal (and this post).

You may include the one policy statement as an exhibit. Write just one for quality, health and safety, security and sustainability.

Then train the leaders to explain to the employees the benefits of their management system. Help the leaders understand its obligations on the leaders and on the employees. Help them to explain the benefits of using the management system. Help them to develop their presentation, handouts and any other materials. Help them to plan and deliver the employee awareness campaign.

You want to make your manual friendly to auditors? Include a conformity matrix as an exhibit for each management system standard. Competent auditors do not need a rewrite of the system standard.

Write your system manuals to enthuse the leaders and employees. Encourage them to understand, use and improve their management system.

Benefits of big-Q thinking

Big Q thinking says everything the organization does is for quality. Organizational thinking in this way can result in highly successful holistic system development projects. Some organizations, though, are stuck in little-q thinking, perhaps kept in that state of mind by their dying QA department.

Since 1986 here are four reasons we have observed for organizations failing to obtain the full benefits of ISO 9001:

1. The leaders are not willing volunteers in developing their system.
2. The leaders ignore the system that actually is their organization.
3. The leaders delegate implementation of procedures written around ISO 9001 instead.
4. The quality professionals do not include the financial processes in the management system.

The key to developing a process-based management system is to go with the flow of work in the organization.

Embark on a voyage of discovery rather than implementing a standard:

A. Discover what the organization already does to determine customer requirements (and get paid for meeting them).
B. Discover what the organization already does to fulfill these and other requirements.
C. Discover the processes in the management system (and determine any new ones needed by the management system).
D. Discover what is done in each process to prevent nonconformity instead how nonconformity is detected.

Telling someone who is about to retire or any individual to implement ISO 9001 is not a good idea. The system development project needs a cross-functional team that is able to analyze its system, determine its key processes and analyze each of those key processes and their interactions.

Just a few of the management system’s processes need to be newly designed and implemented after training of the process team.

Respect the system that is the organization otherwise the system development project will fail. One way to do this is to use the “as-is rule”. Document the process lightly as it is not as you would like it to be. Then, by using and improving the management system it will cause any needed improvements and grow the detail where needed.

What if the process is so bad it does not conform to the standard? Well then, use the two-week rule: record the nonconformity and say “you have a fortnight to correct the process then we will re-document the improved process as it is”. If too difficult to correct in two weeks then feed the nonconformity into an early corrective action using the newly developed management system.

A summary of common mistakes:

i) Leaders not showing their commitment to requirements.
ii) Putting the documented procedure ahead of the process.
iii) Ignoring the system that is the organization.
iv) Implementing ISO 9001 instead of developing the organization’s existing management system.

The system should help people to determine and meet requirements including the requirement for continual improvement. The procedures should be owned by the people not the “we know best department”. That way QA is delivered as a result of everyone using their management system to fulfill requirements.

Learn how to do this for yourselves here.

$ per millisecond

How fast does your organization add value?

All work should help other people. In this context all work is service. We also know that all work is process. Work should add value or enable another process to add value. When our work depends on the successful interaction of several different functions we need a management system to help us so we are all doing the right things the right way at the right time.

Besides paying customers, our communities, our families, our colleagues, ourselves and our employers – the people receiving the results of our work are stakeholders.

Management systems should inform us of the requirements critical to success. Management systems should deliver to us, on-time and defect-free, the inputs to which our work must add the value. Management systems should deliver the necessary resources and controls so we understand and can agree customer requirements. As part of the management system leaders coordinate our work and cause all of us to care passionately for each other’s requirements.

In short, the management system enables us to earn a living and our organizations to exist.

Sometimes our system slows us or stops us from adding value because its core or support processes, the inputs, resource or controls are late, ineffective or defective in some other way.

Two questions remain: “how fast does your management system enable your core processes to add value and what are doing with your management to hasten the rate it adds value?”

Creating more successful customers

Many people say business is all about making money. Just the other day in London while working on the global standard for management system requirements someone from local government said this. Fortunately he was quickly corrected by his colleagues who know better:

“Business is all about creating more successful customers”.

Indeed a quality organization determines the products, processes and management system they need to create even more successful customers. They then design and invest so the products and processes are improved by their management system to create more successful customers.

Their management systems include product design processes to translate the customer’s needs and objectives into specifications. Design and planning processes specify the delivery processes. Their customers review and approve their specifications and place a value on having them fulfilled.

Determine what your customers need to be successful and when they need it. Determine what value your customers place on being successful. Ask them to pay a little less than that value. Agree upon the promise using the approved specification so it is measurable and keep the promise.

By understanding customer needs we can see if we are the best organization to fulfill those needs. If not we may be able to recommend another organization to fulfill those needs so we can focus on fulfilling the needs of customers that match our strengths.

More successful customers are the most important products!

More Prevention = Less Cure

Crosby succeeded in helping organizations to realize that defects need not be inevitable.

For many organizations this was the beginning of their serious investment in their system of prevention.

Such investments in the removal of common cause variation from the system reduced the money wasted on detection and failure (the price managers once were happy to pay for not preventing nonconformity).

ISO 9001 specifies what must be done for the management system to prevent nonconformity (covering two of Crosby’s four absolutes).

All this prevention should enable organizations to remove common cause variation from the system instead of dealing with an abundance of misbehaving processes. Drive out special causes of nonconformity with PONC information (see C below).

Ongoing cycles of repeated preventive action (and corrective action) further improve the management system and its processes.

As your management system matures invest in three more processes:

A. Analyzing failure modes (and success modes) and their effects (preventive if FMEA/SMEA is used during design)
B. Mistake proofing processes and products (preventive)
C. Reporting the price of nonconformity (reactive)

Crosby’s “zero defects” said it is better to prevent defects than to rely on statistical process control and we agree.

Prevention of Nonconformity by Design

Even competent people make mistakes. Consumers misuse poorly designed products perhaps injuring themselves or others. Competent employees may not operate confusing, boring or complex processes as intended. Human factors should be considered when planning and designing systems, processes, goods and services.

The development, use and improvement of the management system should prevent problems instead of relying on their detection. Relying on warning labels to warn customers is less effective than planning and designing products so they cannot be used or operated wrongly. Verifying services and goods is less effective than designing delivery or manufacture to avoid nonconformity.

Unsustainable wastes arise from poor design failing to protect stakeholders from incurring more and more of these losses. Additional resources used to make good the poor quality further damage the environment and adversely impact sustainability.

The prevention of nonconformity in goods, services and processes is a paradigm change from the control of nonconformity. Sorting bad product from good product is less efficient than prevention to stop the design of nonconformity or situations that cause nonconformity.

Prevention focuses first on reducing complexity in design. The most expensive mistakes can then economically be prevented in delivery or manufacture by mistake-proofing. Remaining causes of variation that result in any defective products may then be eliminated. This progression applies to the design of all products and the processes and tooling necessary to deliver conforming products.

Prevention offers a more robust approach to quality assurance than appraisal. It may require major changes in management philosophy, such as shifting the responsibilities for quality assurance into the operating organizations to remove complexity from designs, mistake-proofing service delivery, mistake-proofing manufacturing, statistical process control and verification. Conventional quality assurance organizations may change or decrease in size and importance in organizations applying the prevention principle.

Hence, design is the only way to prevent nonconformity when creating and delivering goods and services.

An organization preventing nonconformity by design will:

1. Establish the metrics for prevention of nonconformity by design (starting with design simplification criteria);

2. Identify the stakeholders affected by the system, product, its processes and the related outcomes;

3. Determine the needs of the customers and the concerns of other stakeholders;

4. Specify measureable and achievable characteristics of the product;

5. Specify the critical methods, resources and controls (including mistake-proofing as required) for correctly making, delivering and safely using conforming products;

6. Fulfill the system, product and process designs with capable processes.

7. Monitor and measure the design process per the established metrics; and

8. Review the design process against stakeholder satisfaction information.