Changing Leaders to Activate Change

Cultural change is one of the most difficult challenges an or­ganization will ever face. It is hard to achieve under even the best of circumstances. Leadership from the top is essential. Consequently, sometimes an organization’s culture simply cannot be changed without a change in leadership. This possibility arises when the staunchest defenders of the

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Laying the Foundation for a Quality Culture

Establishing a quality culture is a lot like constructing a building. The process begins with laying a solid foundation. Like a building, without a solid foundation an organization’s corporate culture will quickly crumble. What follows is a ten-step model that quality professionals can use to establish a solid foundation for a quality culture in

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Learning What a Quality Culture Looks Like

Part of laying the groundwork for a quality culture is under­standing what one looks like. This is a lot like a person who wants to lose weight where an effective strategy is to tape a picture of a slender person to the mirror. The picture serves not only as a constant reminder of the

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Countering Resistance to Cultural Change

Change is resisted in any organization. Resistance to change is normal organizational behavior. In this regard, an orga­nization is similar to a biological organism. From the per­spective of organizational culture, the alien is change, and the organism is the organization to be changed. Continual improvement means continual change. To ensure contin­ual improvement, one must

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Establishing a Quality Culture

Establishing a quality culture involves specific planning and activities for every business or department. This sec­tion identifies the steps involved, but first it outlines the emotional processes employees go through as the steps are being taken. Managers need to recognize and accommodate the emotional transition required not only of employees, but also of themselves

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Maintaining a Quality Culture

Establishing a quality culture is a challenging undertaking for any organization. It is even more challenging to maintain a quality culture over time. The easiest thing in the world is to become complacent and let the organization’s culture begin to slip back into its old mold. In order to maintain a quality culture, organizations

ISO 9000 and Total Quality

1. ISO 9000: the international standard for quality management systems ISO 9000 is a family of standards and guidelines related to the quality management system (QMS). It sets the require­ments for the assurance of quality and for management’s involvement. The thrust of ISO 9000 is for organizations to implement a QMS conforming to the

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Total Quality Tools Defined

Carpenters use a kit of tools designed for very specific func­tions. Their hammers, for example, are used for the driving of nails and their saws for the cutting of wood. These and others enable a carpenter to build houses. They are physi­cal tools. Total quality tools also enable today’s employees, whether engineers, technologists, production

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Pareto Charts as Total Quality Tool

The Pareto (pah-ray-toe) chart (see Figure 15.1) is a very useful tool wherever one needs to separate the important from the trivial. The chart, first promoted by Dr. Joseph Juran, is named after Italian economist and sociologist Vilfredo Pareto (1848-1923). He had the insight to recog­nize that in the real world a minority of

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Cause-and-Effect Diagrams as Total Quality Tool

A team typically uses a cause-and-effect diagram (see Figure 15.8) to identify and isolate causes of a problem. The technique was developed by the late Dr. Ishikawa, a noted Japanese quality expert, so sometimes the diagram is called an Ishikawa diagram. It is also often called a fishbone diagram because that is what it

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Check Sheets as Total Quality Tool

The check sheet (see Figure 15.12) is introduced here as the third of the seven tools. The fuel that powers the total quality tools is data. In many companies, elaborate systems of people, machines, and procedures exist for the sole purpose of col­lecting data. At times, this quest for data has become zealous to

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Histograms as Total Quality Tool

Histograms are used to chart frequency of occurrence. How often does something happen? Any discussion of histograms must begin with an understanding of the two kinds of data commonly associated with processes: attributes and variables data. Although they were not introduced as such, both kinds of data have been used in the illustrations of

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Scatter Diagrams as Total Quality Tool

The fifth of the seven tools is the scatter diagram. It is the simplest of the seven and one of the most useful. The scatter diagram is used to determine the correlation (relationship) between two characteristics (variables). Suppose you have an idea that there is a relationship between automobile fuel consumption and the rate

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Run Charts and Control Charts as Total Quality Tool

The run chart is straightforward, and the control chart is a much more sophisticated outgrowth of it. Therefore, the two are usually thought of together as a single tool. Both can be very powerful and effective for the tracking and control of processes, and they are fundamental to the improvement of processes. 1. Run

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Stratification as Total Quality Tool

Stratification is a simple tool in spite of its name. It involves investigating the cause of a problem by grouping data into categories. This grouping is called stratification. The groups might include data relative to the environment, the people involved, the machine(s) used in the process, materials, and so on. Grouping data by common

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Some Other Important Total Quality Tools Introduced

The preceding sections have discussed the statistical tools that have come to be known as “the seven tools.” One should not conclude, however, that these seven are the only tools needed for pursuing world-class performance. These seven are the ones that have been found most useful for the broad­est spectrum of users. Ishikawa referred

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Management’s Role in Quality Tool Deployment

Management’s role is changing from one of directing to one of facilitating. Since the Industrial Revolution, management has supplied the place of work, the machinery and tools, and the work instructions. The concept has been that management knows what the job is and needs only to hire the muscle power to get it accomplished.

Selecting the Right Quality Tool for the Job

In this chapter, we have discussed 13 quality tools, some in great detail and a few on an introductory basis. Your challenge will be selecting the appropriate tool (or tools) for the task at hand. This can be confusing, especially at first. For that reason, we have included Table 15.2, a functionality matrix for

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Problem Solving for Total Quality

If you ask the typical manager to describe his or her biggest problem in today’s workplace, the response will probably in­clude one or more of the following: We spend all our time in meetings trying to resolve problems. We are constantly fighting problems and that doesn’t leave us time to do our real jobs,

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Two Models for Solving and Preventing Quality Problems: the PDCA cycle and Practical Problem-Solving Process

Even the best-managed organizations have problems. A problem is any situation in which what exists does not match what is desired, or put another way, there is a discrepancy between the current state of affairs and the one desired. The greater the disparity between the two, the greater the problem. Problem solving in a

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