Quality and Innovation

Sunday afternoon, as I sat at my kitchen table drinking tea and flipping through the Sunday Washington Post, I came across an article about using process improvement principles in everyday life.  Aha!  My first thought was that I need to share this article with Nicole, followed immediately by another thought – I really need to share this with the students in our HON 300/ISAT 680 process improvement class!

I’m not sure of the exact date when Nicole and I hatched the idea of a process improvement course.  Since we both arrived at JMU in the fall of 2009, we have had numerous conversations about all the cool things we would love to share with students about quality and process improvement.  Those conversations inspire me, and honestly, sometimes they leave me feeling a little overwhelmed.

Whenever it was that we hatched the idea of this course, I definitely had some concerns about the reality of fitting a process improvement project into the time limitations of a single semester.  My concerns were heightened when we decided to structure the course using the DMAIC approach.  All the Six Sigma projects I led as a Black Belt certainly took longer than the approximately 15 weeks allowed for a semester, and I was a full-time Black Belt who (supposedly) knew what I was doing!

Wouldn’t the data collection and analysis overwhelm our students?  Shouldn’t we require some background in statistics as a prerequisite for enrollment in the course?  How would the relationships work with our clients?  Would the students really be able to deliver results in one semester?

Yet here we are, in early February with four outstanding project teams that are quickly moving into the Measure phase.  What’s all that got to do with the Post article?

Process improvement doesn’t have to require mountains of data and highly sophisticated statistical analysis.  The basic principles of process improvement can be used to effect change by anyone, and in almost any situation.  That is really what our course is all about, and the Post article just provided an example we can all relate to.  Who doesn’t wish for more time in their day?

I think we have an outstanding group of students enrolled in our course.  Nicole and I want them to learn, understand, and apply process improvement principles, but not just within the confines of this specific course.  The continuous pursuit of improvement is a lifestyle, and today I was reminded of just how true that can be

Yesterday, I posted about TRIZ, a 1940′s era device for stimulating innovation. I’ve always had this visceral feeling that we need a new, more modern, more right brained approach to innovation along the same lines as TRIZ, but with the art and panache of the 21st century – and with Eric S. Townsend’s new collection of business-stimulated haikus, I think we’re on to something.

Eric, a self-defined “supercreative” in business and search engine optimization, runs Eric S. Townsend Marketing, a firm dedicated to general marketing, internet marketing, corporate identity, branding, publicity, and totally-needed stuff like that. Only Eric is not from this planet. At times, I think he channels the Pleiadeans (which might not be a bad thing, considering what’s needed to be ultra-competitive in the era of the post-economy).

Eric’s new book features 206 pages of business-related haikus – riddles that might help stimulate you to new directions in business growth and accomplishment. I suggest that the Bizkus are used for brainstorming and in quality circles. Set a meeting time, get some stakeholders involved, identify a problem that you need to solve – and then randomly open up the Bizkus book and read – these things are meant for oral interpretation. Discuss, as a group, what you think the implications may be – or may be not.

Some of the bizkus are totally hard to figure out. But aren’t all problems in business? As a result, this approach has GOT to help you right-brain yourself out of current issues, and into emerging opportunities.

I give Eric’s Bizkus three thumbs up. Leave me comments if you decide to use it to stimulate innovation in your organization… I’d like to hear about your experiences. I’d also love to facilitate an article for Quality Progress on new approaches to stimulate innovation too, so let me know if this tool (or others like it!) serve such a purpose for your place of business. (Note: if you purchase the Kindle version, Eric will give you the PDF for an extra $1.29. I think you have to email him to make this happen.)

(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

According to dictionary.com, one of the definitions for rubric is “any established mode of conduct; protocol.” But the context you’ve probably heard this word in is education – where a grading rubric or a scoring rubric is used to evaluate a complex artifact like a student essay.

In my opinion, it’s time to move the concept of the rubric from the classroom into the mainstream, because it can be applied as a very practical general purpose quality tool! (Hear that, Nancy Tague? I think you should write about rubrics in your next edition of the very excellent book The Quality Toolbox. Let me know if you’d like me to help make this happen.)

A rubric is basically a grid with 1) levels of performance indicated along the top row, and 2) criteria or dimensions of performance listed down the leftmost column. Each cell of the grid contains a descriptive statement that explains how the level of performance in that column might be achieved for a specific dimension:

For example, here’s a rubric that one group constructed to evaluate the quality of the mind maps that they were producing. The performance levels are organized from high performance in the top left (smiley face giving a thumbs up) to low performance in the top right (smiley face that looks like he’s about to pass out):

The dimensions of performance are neatness and presentation, use of images/symbols, and use of color. The descriptive statements in each cell provide specific examples of how the performance level might be achieved, e.g. “has failed to include color in the mind map” is an indicator of a low performance level for the dimension of “use of color” – which is very understandable!

The concept of the rubric as a performance assessment tool is relatively new! Griffin (2009), in a brief history of the rubric, notes that since its introduction in 1981, “the scoring rubric has evolved into a more precise, technical, scientific-looking document. It carries a tone of certainty, authority, and exactitude.” However, she notes, the utility of a rubric will depend upon the thought and consideration that goes into its construction. “A rubric is a product of many minds working collaboratively to create new knowledge. It will, almost by definition, be more thoughtful, valid, unbiased and useful than any one of us could have conceived of being as we worked in isolation.”

Advantages of applying a well developed rubric include:

• Provides a common language for sharing expectations and feedback
• Helps to clarify and distinguish the differences between various performance levels
• Helps to focus an individual or group’s ATTENTION on relevant aspects of each desired quality characteristic or skill area
• Provides a mechanism to more easily identify strengths and opportunities for improvement
• Helps lend objectivity to an evaluation process that might otherwise be subjective

Disadvantages:

• Different rubrics may need to be devised for the different activities or artifacts that are to be evaluated using the rubric
• Not all evaluators will apply the rubric in exactly the same way – there is a subjective element at work here – so people may need to be trained in the use of a rubric, or perhaps it would be more effective in a group consensus context where inter-rater variability can be interactively discussed and resolved
• Creating a rubric can be time consuming
• The rubric may limit exploration of solutions or modes of presentation that do not conform to the rubric

Using Rubrics for Quality Improvement

Rubrics are already applied in the world of quality, although I’ve never heard them go by that name. The process scoring guidelines for the Baldrige Criteria are essentially rubrics (although the extra dimension of ADLI and LeTCI has to be considered in the mind of the examiner). The International Team Excellence Award (ITEA) criteria in the Team Excellence Framework (TEF) also forms a rubric in conjunction with the performance levels of missing, unclear, meets expectations or exceeds expectations.

I see a lot of ways in which rubrics can be developed and applied in the quality community to help us establish best practices for some of our most common project artifacts, such as Project Charters. Nancy Tague includes a Project Charter Checklist in The Quality Toolbox to help us create better and more complete charters… but what if we added a second dimension, which includes performance levels, and turned this checklist into a rubric? Any checklist could be transformed into a rubric. Furthermore, to develop a good rubric, we can brainstorm and rank all of the potential criteria in the left hand column, using a Pareto chart to separate the vital few criteria from the trivial many.

Are any of you already using rubrics for purposes outside training or education? I would love to start a list of resources to share with the quality community.

Reference: Griffin, M. (2009). What is a rubric? Assessment Update, 21(6), Nov/Dec 2009.

Note: There is a comprehensive site containing many examples of rubrics at http://www.web.virginia.edu/iaas/assess/tools/rubrics.shtm – however, they won’t open in Google Chrome.

A couple of weeks ago, I got this email:

Comment: I am basker from NJ, and I have a PMP certification, I want to get a six sigma black belt certification — are there other certifications out there other than one from ASQ ? that you would suggest and what is the cheapest and quickest way to pass the black belt certification ?

Kind Regards,

Basker.

Basker would like to know the quickest and cheapest way to get a Black Belt certification. Here are the routes I know about to obtain the certification: 1) you could go to http://sixsigmaonline.org, whose training and certification program costs about $1000, 2) you could attend the 4-week program offered by http://www.6sigma.us which runs about $8000, 3) you could go to Villanova and pay $7000 for their three-course package, or 4) you can study on your own, complete two projects and get a Project Champion to sign an affidavit, become an ASQ member and pay $299 to take the exam, or don’t become an ASQ member and pay $449 to take the exam.

The ASQ option is probably the quickest and cheapest if you’re good at self study, and dedicated to the task of Six Sigma problem solving. However, with the ASQ certification you also get a lot of clout. I don’t think any other organization has more than 10,000 Black Belts supporting the program, working on updates to the new exams, and keeping the curriculum current. I just personally think it’s a much more viable Black Belt designation than the other programs.

I also asked Jeanine Becker, who works at ASQ in Milwaukee and is responsible for the Six Sigma Forum, what she thought. Jeanine says:

ASQ certification is a formal recognition by ASQ that an individual has demonstrated a proficiency within, and comprehension of, a specific body of knowledge. Nearly 150,000 certifications have been issued to dedicated professionals worldwide.

Anyone can give you a “certificate” for simply attending a course, but an ASQ certification is the recognized gold standard for certification for quality professionals.  ASQ is the only third-party provider of certifications for the quality professional.   Those that are ASQ certified have the potential to earn a higher salary than their counterparts.    The majority of positions companies recruit for that require certifications specify an ASQ certification.

I totally agree. And as a result, Basker, I’d say go with the ASQ cert.

Nicole

Jim Collins, author of Built to Last (2004) and Good to Great (2001), released a new compendium of his research this fall entitled Great by Choice: Uncertainty, Chaos, and Luck – Why Some Thrive Despite Them All. I was pleasantly surprised to discover that these authors have also stumbled upon the importance of quality consciousness – awareness, alignment, and selectively focused attention! These are the keys to developing a highly successful “ten-X” (10X) organization (one that outperforms its industry index by at least ten times, especially during times of great volatility in the business environment).

Collins and his co-author, Morten Hansen, don’t call it quality consciousness, though – they call it “Level 5 Ambition.” And Level 5 Ambition consists of three traits: fanatic discipline, empirical creativity, and productive paranoia. Each of these traits demonstrates one or more aspects of quality consciousness. Here’s how (using excerpts from p. 35 and 36 of the book):

Fanatic discipline: 10Xers display extreme consistency of action – consistency with values, goals, performance standards, and methods. They are utterly relentless, monomaniacal, unbending in their focus on their quests [emphasis added].

Consistency of action is enabled by awareness of quality standards, and unrelenting attention towards achieving them.

Empirical creativity: When faced with uncertainty, 10Xers do not look primarily to other people, conventional wisdom, authority figures, or peers for direction; they look primarily to empirical evidence. They rely upon direct observation, practical experimentation, and direct engagement with tangible evidence. They make their bold, creative moves from a sound empirical base.

By aligning the actions of an organization and its players with what the evidence shows will work, everyone is more confident and able to engage fully in the pursuit of shared goals. A data-driven approach, familiar to anyone who understands quality improvement practice, allows an organization to test its ideas on a smaller scale before committing to major changes.

Productive paranoia: 10Xers maintain hypervigilance, staying highly attuned to threats and changes in their environment, even when – especially when – all’s going well. They assume conditions will turn against them, at perhaps the worst possible moment. They channel their fear and worry into action, preparing, developing contingency plans, building buffers, and maintaining large margins of safety.

Hypervigilance is heightened awareness of the external environment, even during times of peace and productivity. The aspect of productive paranoia that I think is most instructive, however, is that it involves a choice of where to focus your attention: instead of harboring worry and panic about what might happen, the productively paranoid manager will focus on understanding failure modes, developing contingency plans, identifying backup strategies, and planning to branch off on alternative paths, if necessary. The attention is purposefully and positively diverted from unproductive emotions (worry and panic) to productive emotions (the positive feelings associated with being prepared).

Even though nearly 40% of the end of the book is an “Epilogue” containing more detail about Collins and Hansen’s research methodology and results, this is still a very substantial read, and one with very practical advice for businesses aiming to succeed through a challenging economy. My graduate students in technology management enjoyed it too.

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

In a previous article, I described the notion of quality consciousness that I’m currently preparing an article about.

To achieve quality consciousness, we ask the very important question (cf. ISO 8402) “What are the totality of characteristics of YOU that bear upon YOUR ABILITY to satisfy the stated and implied needs of your stakeholders?”

The reason we WANT quality consciousness is because we know that the more in tune with the essence of quality that we are, within ourselves, the better we will attune to the needs of our customers and clients – to be able to help them achieve their goals for making things better, more streamlined, and more cost effective.

I summarized quality consciousness as the “3 A’s” – Awareness, Alignment, and Attention:

Quality consciousness implies awareness of yourself and the environment around you (including what constitutes quality and high performance for people, processes and products – most importantly, YOU). It also suggests that you must achieve alignment of your consciousness with the consciousness of the organization, which will aid in full activity and engagement of the senses. Your attention must be selectively focused onto what you can accomplish in the present moment according to that alignment (which implies that you are able to effectively filter the rapid and voluminous streams of information coming at you).

It struck me today how similar this whole notion is to Timothy Leary’s appeal to the counterculture of the late 1960’s, to achieve breakthrough innovation in individual and collective perception of the world to “Turn On, Tune In, and Drop Out”! The message, according to the summary on Wikipedia, was intended to “urge people to embrace cultural changes… detaching themselves from the existing conventions and hierarchies in society.”

So if you want to improve a product, a process, or yourself, embrace the breakthrough innovation that is promised by quality consciousness!

• TURN ON = Become aware of quality standards and the true meaning of excellence, for you and for the domain you work in.
• TUNE IN = Align yourself personally and professionally with your goals, and those of your organization!
• DROP OUT! Focus your attention on the essentials… don’t be distracted by the down economy, by social upheaval, or the perils of ever-increasing competition.

Deliver value… to yourself and those around you! Make it a personal imperative and watch the avalanche of breakthrough innovations begin to cascade around you and your inspirational attitude.