One Good Idea
2003
Take Control of Your Activities
During our third certified software quality engineer (CSQE) study group at my organization, EDS, we came up with a planning and tracking tool (see Figure 1) to help people manage their study time outside the weekly, two-hour review sessions. The average p...
Column: One Good Idea: Keep Your QMS Implementation on Schedule
Consider this common scenario: An organization wants to implement a quality management system by a particular date. In this situation, the prerequisite is in place-management is committed to the company's goal and has provided the necessary resources....
Column: One Good Idea: Process Identification
If your organization has had a difficult time describing its quality management system (QMS) because it believes the system must be process mapped to satisfy the ISO 9001 requirements, then listen up....
Column: One Good Idea: Document Control
Focus on the information, not specific documents
The phrase "control of documents" is simple, but it's one tough element of ISO 9000 to design, document, implement and maintain. To simplify this element, you need to ask, "How do you define and control information?"...
Column: One Good Idea: The Traveling Card Box
You are probably accustomed to using some type of planning method, including the popular plan, do, check, act (PDCA) cycle, popularized by W. Edwards Deming. Unfortunately, most people plan only the major activities and their expected time of completion....
The Circular Radar Graph
This tool can help you enhance the results of your capability studies
If the ratio is less than 1.00, the characteristic's actual capability is less than its associated capability goal. The concentric circles denote ratio levels of 0.5 (only 50% goal attainment), 1.0 (100% goal attainment) and 1.5 (150% goal attainment). Th...
Column: One Good Idea: The Circular Radar Graph
There are times when the results of several capability studies must be reported to top management or a customer. The report can be a comparison of the capabilities for several machines producing the same characteristic, the outputs from multiple process...
