The Quality Professional as Organizational Gardener
Many quality professionals understand that the answers to these questions require the ability to envision their organizations as living entities, existing within their understanding of systems theory. We work with organizations and people, not on organiza...
Quality Goes to College
Higher education is seeing increased interest in quality management methods in response to the federal government's recommendation that they embrace the culture of continuous innovation and quality improvement. An overview is given of the types of...
TRIZ: A Creative Breeze for Quality Professionals
TRIZ, a systematic approach to creative thinking originating in Russia, can help quality professionals develop new approaches and solutions to quality problems. Its creator, Genrich Altshuller, wanted a systematic approach based on the rules of...
The Seven Deadly Sins of Quality Management
Root cause analysis is the structured investigation of basic causal factors leading to quality failure. When the root cause resides in the fundamental values of an organization, eradication can be extremely challenging. Problems ascribed to...
Safeguard Analysis
Improve process quality through environmental, health and safety performance excellence
Safeguard analysis offers a practical way to ensure that reliable safeguards are designed into activities to achieve product and process quality, avoid environmental insults, and protect the health and safety of employees. To conduct a safeguard analysis,...
Column: One Good Idea: Safeguard Analysis
[Abstract from article]
Safeguard analysis offers a practical way to ensure that reliable safeguards are designed into activities to achieve product and process quality, avoid environmental insults, and protect the health and safety of employees....
Roll Quality Roll
The University of Alabama is using the Baldrige Award criteria to measure its continuous improvement. As part of its effort, the university is raising its expectations of strategic quality plans to provide guidelines for improvements within colleges,...
Go with the Flow: Stress and the Quality Professional
He or she must train employees in quality skills, facilitate teams to improve processes, and convince line managers Go With the Flow: Stress and the Quality Professional Tips to decompress and improve your work life by John R. Dew D Figure 1. Mountain Cl...
What Game Is Your Team Playing?
Reflective practice is a tool for improving the effectiveness of work groups. Facilitators can use a sports metaphor to apply the tool in team-building sessions. The football metaphor is appropriate for production organizations where functions...
Are You a Right-Brain or Left-Brain Thinker?
Quality professionals should be open to various styles of thinking. Right-brain thinkers tend to be analytical, logical, rational, and sequential, while left-brain thinkers are more likely to use interrelationships, intuition, and synthesis....
