Quality and Innovation

(Image Credit: Doug Buckley of http://hyperactive.to)

Are you an entry-level Young Quality Professional (YQP) who has participated or led a project that resulted in tangible benefits for your organization or community? Are you a student in high school or college who has worked individually, or with a team, to apply quality tools to solve practical problems in your school, or community, or at home? If so, WE WANT YOU to tell us about it!

On Wednesday, May 23rd, we will be conducting a session at the ASQ World Conference on Quality and Improvement (WCQI) to demonstrate the impact that the newest members of our community – students and entry-level professionals – have had on their organizations, businesses, and communities. This session will consist of vignettes from up to 15 quality or process improvement projects performed by students or entry-level professionals. We’ll be inviting all WCQI attendees to come celebrate the accomplishments of the youngest members of our community, and support them as they progress in their education and in their careers!

HOW TO APPLY: Send an email to Jacob Mayiani Loorimirim (Graduate Assistant, JMU) at loorimjm@dukes.jmu.edu (and cc: simmo2ra@jmu.edu and radziwnm@jmu.edu) with short answers to each of the 6 questions below. Project review started on February 1 and will continue until all slots are filled, or February 29 at the latest.

If your project is selected to be part of the Showcase, we’ll work with you to put together a few slides, audio recordings, and/or video clips that describe the problem you solved, the quality tools and approaches you used, your results, and the impact of your solution on your stakeholders. We plan to spend between 3 and 5 minutes showcasing each project. If you are a student who will be attending the WCQI in person, we would love for you to submit a project that you completed individually or as a team – and talk about it yourself for 2 to 3 minutes during our session!

QUESTIONS:

1. Project completed by: (List your names and ages, and specify whether this was part of a school/university project, for a client, or was done in service to your community; if you had a teacher or faculty advisor, please list them too! Also, let us know if you plan to attend the WCQI in person in Anaheim, CA this May.)

2. Project title:

3. Project start and completion dates:

4. Provide a brief problem statement (1-3 sentences) that summarizes the problem, your stakeholders, and your goals:

5. Provide a brief description of your hands-on performance while completing the project, providing specific examples of the methodologies (e.g. PDSA, DMAIC) and/or tools (e.g. process maps, fishbone diagrams, Pareto charts, affinity diagrams, multivoting/nominal group technique) that you used to solve the problem.

6. In one sentence, describe your project’s RESULTS and the impacts on its stakeholders.

Thank you for your interest! Please forward this announcement by email, Facebook, Twitter, or any other mechanism if you know of a Young Quality Professional (YQP) whose work should be noticed and recognized – or where they might be hanging out.

Sincerely,

Nicole Radziwill, College of Integrated Science & Technology, James Madison University
Rebecca Simmons, College of Business, James Madison University

I was waiting for a session to begin at the Agile 2011 conference a couple weeks ago when the guy next to me struck up a conversation. What’s your name? What do you do? (You know, typical questions one conferencegoer will ask another to more comfortably pass the in-between time.) When he found out I was a college professor with a specialization in quality and quality management he said “Hey! I have a quality question that’s been on my mind for ages. Maybe you can answer it.”

Side Note: At first I thought he asked whether I liked kickball. I have some nerve damage in one of my ears, which means I have a hearing problem, especially in a large conference room where there’s a lot of crowd chatter. I told him I LOVED kickball. After he contorted his face and gave me the furrowed eye of confusion, I asked him to repeat the question, got a clarification of the question (OOPS), explained my auditory predicament, and we quickly got back on track.

“So here’s my question,” he said. “Some people use PDCA (Plan-Do-Check-Act) to structure continuous improvement, but then other people use PDSA (Plan-Do-Study-Act). Are they different? Should you use one instead of the other under different circumstances? Or are some people just getting it wrong?”

I was really intrigued by this question, because my assumption had always been that they were both valid methodologies – only that PDCA was to be used for more straightforward improvement scenarios, and PDSA was to be applied in more complex scenarios – when the metrics that you were CHECK-ing and the environmental conditions surrounding those metrics required more extensive REFLECTION. I hadn’t thought that the distinction would not be intuitively obvious.

CHECK implies that you’re asking the question “How does the state of the system compare to what you were expecting?” STUDY, in contrast, requires you to ask the question “What can we learn from how the state of the system compares to what we were expecting?” The STUDY aspect of PDSA also suggests, albeit a little subtly, that you take what you learned about the system and use that new information to better achieve the goals of the product or process in question. (Dan Strongin seems to agree, in “PDCA… PDSA, is it as simple as a C or an S?”)

But this question also made me realize that I had no idea which came first, PDCA or PDSA? Which was the chicken and which was the egg? I quickly found the answers I was looking for in Moen & Norman’s November 2010 Quality Progress article entitled “Circling Back.” PDCA emerged from a lecture given by Deming in Japan in 1950. In that presentation, he described his interpretation of the continuous improvement cycle proposed by Shewhart in the 1939 book, “Statistical Method from the Viewpoint of Quality Control,” which was based on the scientific method that had emerged much earlier in the 1600’s. As described by Moen & Norman, the characterization of this approach as PDCA was a further interpretation of the lecture by the Japanese attendees.

In 1986, Deming amended his description of PDCA to emphasize the importance of reflecting on the meaning of whatever metrics you’re checking, and thus PDSA emerged. Deming was emphatic about the importance of not just checking, but using that knowledge to better understand the product or process being improved – hence his recommendation to use PDSA as a natural evolution of PDCA.

Also check out John Hunter’s comments on PDCA, PDSA, and friends.

If you have at least 5 years broad experience in quality, please help us validate the “Quality Systems Development Roadmap” originally published in Quality Progress in 2008 (http://asq.org/quality-progress/2008/09/basic-quality/starting-from-scratch.html). This is part of an expert systems project developed by Doug Jin, a student at James Madison University, under the guidance of Nicole Radziwill, JMU faculty member and ASQ member leader.

The 5-page, 13-question survey will be available until January 15, 2011 or 1500 responses are received, whatever comes first, so contribute now at http://www.surveymonkey.com/s/W2LYFYP!

If quality and continuous improvement are important to you, you should have a fundamental understanding of zombies and the role they play in quality management. Furthermore, understanding zombies might help you understand yourself better too. In fact, performing a zombie war analysis (on either yourself or your organization) could be the next great lean tool for identifying and eliminating waste from processes.

Huh??!?! Zombies… are you sure? Yeah, I’m sure. And no, I didn’t know much about zombies either until yesterday, when I read My Zombie, Myself: Why Modern Life Feels Rather Undead in the New York Times by Chuck Klosterman. (The savvy zombie thumbnail at the left by AMC is from his article.) In fact, I don’t think I’ve ever seen a zombie movie before. That might change, though, now that I see the zombie concept has a direct bearing on understanding modern work life.

Here’s why: battling the endless barrage of emails, texts, requests for your time, and sorting through the steady stream of social media chatter is like a zombie apocalypse. They just keep coming and coming, and you just keep fighting and trying to let it all not overtake you and drive you nuts. And the whole thing might never end:

Every zombie war is a war of attrition. It’s always a numbers game. And it’s more repetitive than complex. In other words, zombie killing is philosophically similar to reading and deleting 400 work e-mails on a Monday morning or filling out paperwork that only generates more paperwork, or following Twitter gossip out of obligation, or performing tedious tasks in which the only true risk is being consumed by the avalanche. The principle downside to any zombie attack is that the zombies will never stop coming; the principle downside to life is that you will be never be finished with whatever it is you do…

This is our collective fear projection: that we will be consumed. Zombies are like the Internet and the media and every conversation we don’t want to have. All of it comes at us endlessly (and thoughtlessly), and — if we surrender — we will be overtaken and absorbed. Yet this war is manageable, if not necessarily winnable. As long we keep deleting whatever’s directly in front of us, we survive. We live to eliminate the zombies of tomorrow. We are able to remain human, at least for the time being. Our enemy is relentless and colossal, but also uncreative and stupid.

Battling zombies is like battling anything … or everything.

The only way to WIN the war is to reduce the number of zombies that you have to deal with. So, my appeal to quality managers everywhere: Ask your people what processes feel like zombie wars, and brainstorm ways to reduce the number of zombies so you don’t have to shoot so much. By tapping into the highly sensitive emotional wisdom of everyone who has to work with or deal with a process, you can call out the zombies and start eliminating them.

My appeal to PEOPLE everywhere: ask yourself what aspects of your life feel like a zombie war, and brainstorm ways to reduce the number of zombies. You’ll eliminate waste from the processes that the zombies are appearing in, while saving on ammunition, reducing stress, and possibly even increasing the joy in your life.

The simple act of thinking about the “things you’ve got to deal with” in terms of which ones are zombies (and which ones are not) might be just the innovative boost you need to identify and eliminate critical packets of waste floating around your organization. Or your life.

Yesterday was really a fantastic day for me. In addition to starting it off right with a total solar eclipse at 2:11am ET, January 15th will go down in history as the first time I placed an order using OrderTopia. It will definitely not be the last time!

OrderTopia is a social, cloud-based ordering system that integrates directly into the point-of-sale (POS) systems at local merchants (such as restaurants). You place an order online, or with your mobile device, and the OrderTopia system automatically processes your payment and contacts the right people at the right places in the kitchen to construct your meal order.

The process improvement benefits are evident on both the customer and the merchant sides. As a customer, I don’t have to wait in line any more or keep giving out my credit card information – OrderTopia already has it as part of my account. I just walk into the restaurant at the time I said I’d pick up my order, and it’s there, ready for me to go. On the merchant side, all data quality issues between the time you place your order and the time it’s fulfilled (for example, the cashier misinterpreting what you say, or typing it wrong into the POS system) are erased. By eliminating those steps from the process of fulfilling your order, the path through the system is also shortened.

I can also sense that OrderTopia will improve my quality of life in the future. I won’t be spending valuable minutes waiting in line for lunch — nor will I spend a lot of time trying to figure out what I should order – I’ll just be clicking on a “favorite lunch” option on my Droid, specifying the time I want to pick it up, and then showing up to get my lunch. It will be like having a personal assistant, only it will be OrderTopia. I’ll be able to see what lunches my friends have ordered around town, find out who likes what, and track what I’ve eaten too. In the future, I’ll never worry about how long the line is at one of my favorite lunch places… or whether I’m going to miss out on Eppie’s Wednesday tamales because I showed up too late… OrderTopia will take care of it!

Today’s Op-Ed section in the Washington Post has a piece by Philip K. Howard called “Health Reform’s Taboo Topic”. The problem?

Health-care reform is bogged down because none of the bills before Congress deals with the staggering waste of the current system, estimated to be $700 billion to $1 trillion annually. The waste flows from a culture of health care in which every incentive is to do more — that’s how doctors make money and that’s how they protect themselves from lawsuits.

The article goes on to talk about “defensive medicine,” the practice of ordering tons of diagnostic tests to refine a diagnosis or a treatment plan for the purpose of avoiding malpractice suits. Howard suggests that physicians are cultured into this way of doing business as a defense against potential risks and potential malpractice cases – he even mentions one case where a doctor reacted to a lawsuit by changing his behavior in favor of defensive medicine. A solution, however, is possible:

Containing costs, as Rep. Jim Cooper (D-Tenn.) noted on “Face the Nation” recently, requires overhauling the culture of health-care delivery. Incentives need to be realigned. That requires a legal framework that, instead of encouraging waste, encourages doctors to focus on what’s really needed. One pillar in a new legal framework is a system of justice that is trusted to reliably distinguish between good care and bad care. Reliable justice would protect doctors against unreasonable claims and would expeditiously compensate injured patients. The key is reliability.

The culture of a system – in this case the U.S. health care system – influences the behavior of individuals within the system. This behavior can be waste-producing. When it is, we need to look towards the cultural influences or the structure of the incentives that drive that behavior, and examine ways to address the root cause(s).

It reminds me of the requirements gathering phase of a software development project. Stakeholders spend hours trying to hash out what functions and behavior they expect from their software, and how reliable they want it to be. It is always a challenge to avoid designing the system (that is, how it will look or act) when the essence of what you need to know is what the system needs to do.

I see evidence in the growing national healthcare debate that many people have opinions on the design of the system (e.g. who gets coverage, how pre-existing conditions are handled, how much it costs, who pays), whereas most citizens and Congressmen aren’t even touching the requirements for a successful system (e.g. what scenarios it should support, what behaviors it should provide incentives for, or its reliability/requirements for how much waste the system can and should generate).

In my opinion, one requirement for a successful health care system is that it provides incentives for you to remain healthy and stay out of doctors’ offices and hospitals. A tax credit for a health Body Mass Index (BMI), or maybe lower interest rates? I’d go for that… it would even stimulate me to boost the economy a little more by buying rollerblades or something.

This is the fourth and final installment of my collaboration with John Hunter and friends on the Year-End Management Improvement Carnival, where we review the best management improvement blogs and share which posts we found to be the most insightful or helpful. Today I have the privilege of bringing you a few gems from the iSixSigma blogosphere.

PART 4 of 4 – The iSixSigma blogs are written by a cast of columnists who share their experiences with the practice of quality improvement. The favorites I’ve picked out here are only the tip of the iceberg… there are many more on the site.

Innovation and Six Sigma (5/9/2008) – This article aims to answer the question “Does Six Sigma kill innovation?” In addition to being a thought-provoking article, the collection of comments is worth reading as well. I particularly liked this perspective: “I’m reminded of a story I was once told about an author who decided to write an entire novel without using the letter E. You’d think this would be incredibly limiting, but in fact the author ended up learning many, many new words and taking his writing in entirely new directions. The structure forced him to break old habits and think in new ways.”

The iPod Did Not Come From a Focus Group (3/3/2008) – Development of the iPod is an example of customer and market-driven innovation. The author of this article notes that “your company probably knows more about what is possible than most of your customers; but the lesson I take away from the Apple example is this: some of our customers know a lot more than we do, and we ignore them at our peril.” There’s also a pointer to an excellent 2002 article in the Harvard Business Review.

Six Sigma: The Laissez-Faire of Politics (1/28/2008) – In this article, the author explores how to solve a real public policy issue using Six Sigma: reducing the consumption of plastic bags (like the ones you get at the grocery store) on the national level. “If there is one area in society that definitely needs an injection of Six Sigma, it’s politics. Just like the working world of business, people want a silver bullet quick fix that sounds good and will make people feel good. Politicians often open their mouths without performing due diligence and as a result only partially address an issue.”

What You Measure is What You Get (12/22/2008) – This post reflected on the role and meaning of measurement (one of my favorite issues). “Perhaps what you measure is what you get. More likely, what you measure is all you’ll get. What you don’t (or can’t) measure is lost” – H. Thomas Johnson

Six Sigma Project Failure (7/28/2008) – What’s required for a Six Sigma project to fail? Conflicting definitions are explored in these survey results. (This is somewhat related to Eight Reasons Why Projects Fail (4/24/2008), another good post.)

Return to Part 1 of 4 –>

Return to John Hunter’s Management Improvement Carnival: 2008 Year in Review –>