Quality and Innovation

Image Credit: Lucy Glover Photography

This past month, ASQ asked the Influential Voices: “How do you incorporate quality tools into your daily life?” That’s a topic I’ve covered here often, and from many different perspectives:

• You can manage your personal budget with Pareto Charts, like my student Andy did
• You can use approaches from the Baldrige Framework to help you win bets in horse racing (and you can use your horse racing betting strategy to devise better organizational metrics)
• Or, you can even use Baldrige (without the award application) to serve as guidance for important strategic and operational planning documents.

Another simple way I apply principles from quality management to my day to day life is by structuring my problem-solving plans in terms of DMAIC, DMADV, or Root Cause Analysis. Sometimes, more than one methodology can be useful. How do you choose which methodology to use? Here’s how I do it:

• DMAIC is applied to process improvement. The process has to exist already… and it’s already performing to specifications. But you want to make it even better. Applying the measurements and analysis tools associated with DMAIC can help.
• DMADV is applied to new process design. The process doesn’t exist yet… and you need to create it so that it satisfies needs. This approach helps you articulate and implement innovative possibilities.
• Root Cause Analysis is also applied to process improvement. The process exists already… but something’s wrong! Quality standards or performance standards are not being met, and we need to figure out why, so we can fix it. Applying the basic quality tools that are associated with RCA can help.

Here’s an examples of how we’ve applied this approach.

One of the members of my household is frustrated by the way the dishwasher is loaded. He thinks the process can be substantially improved, so that we can fit more dishes in at any given time (thus conserving water and dish detergent) and relieving his frustration. We applied RCA tools (FMEA and Pareto charts) to determine that it was a training issue… one person in the house needed to be trained on the appropriate process for queueing up the dishes and loading them. DMAIC was applied to make sure that this training occurred, and that there was a control plan in place to ensure that the lessons learned were consistently retained. This resulted in an increase in cycle time (good!) from once a day to once every three days, and a decrease in almost all frustration. 🙂