Quality management
Quality management
Pursuing just enough quality
Structured processes are a logical, evolutionary advancement that has emerged from the painful lessons of applying unstructured, ad-hoc methods to problem solving in product development. When products are produced by craftsman, there is a high reliance on their experience and its relevance to a particular circumstance. As the impacts of complexity in producing these products increased, the teams required to build those products became larger. This made it more difficult to control who could work on the teams, and the expertise and discipline that was expected of them. As a result, a cry arose for more systematic, repeatable methods that would produce more reliable outcomes regardless of who was on a team.
Yet an over-emphasis on process is frequently cited as a burden that constrains developers from pursuing their passion.
Today, countless development and manufacturing standards have been refurbished to attempt to address process yield that is less than 100%. Too often, organizations have adopted such standards as protectionist legislation to reduce competition, rather than because they guarantee higher quality outcomes. Read more »
Pursuing desired business results through improvements that stick
Change programs are notorious for coming up short in achieving the results that were expected from them. Research indicates that only 16% of such change efforts are successful. Yet despite this poor performance, we rarely confront the constraints that cause us these stumbles. As a result, we're stuck with technical debt that is a drag on subsequent performance. It is almost like we enjoy pouring money down the drain.
Change initiatives usually promise revolutionary outcomes rather than evolutionary refinement. When we consider these alternative paths in politics and hockey, a pattern emerges:
When a company starts losing money, or a whole industry starts losing ground because of a new technology, most of us follow leaders who call for revolutionary change—even if no one really knows what change is needed. Leaders who advocate the status quo look like dinosaurs. Read more »
Managing waste
Waste must be identified and eliminated to improve an organization's competitiveness. Waste management, whether in projects or households, involves capturing and removing waste as close as possible to where it is generated.
Waste is typically revealed through unnecessary variation. This variation can arise from observations of common-cause and special-cause patterns. Common-cause variation is the noise in a system, and while waste may result from such variation, it may require a redesign of processes, tools, or team competency to realize. Special-cause variation, in contrast, can provide signals from the system about opportunities to remove waste, when the root causes of waste can be efficiently isolated and reveal patterns that are worth attacking: Read more »
Confronting the constraints of synergy initiatives
General Motors was first founded in 1908, and grew through mergers and acquisitions of separate Oldsmobile, Pontiac, Cadillac, Buick, GMC, and Chevrolet businesses. On Jan. 21, 1988, a senior General Motors executive, Elmer Johnson, wrote a memo which accurately anticipated GM's key challenge in transforming the company: “We have vastly underestimated how deeply ingrained are the organizational and cultural rigidities that hamper our ability to execute.” After 80 years, those businesses still struggled to work together. Read more »
Processes, Mental Models, and Improvement Dynamics
The word process is an abstract concept. As a result, its meaning is often dependent upon the context in which it is used, and the mental models of those who are using the term. The dangerous part of this is that people can carry on conversations about them, and believe that they are talking about the same situations, even though they are actually discussing several, fundamentally different things. As a result, they each can think that they are communicating about the same 'process', and can go away from that conversation with the mistaken impression that they all agree on something meaningful, or all have a shared vision of what it will take to transform something. What is really going on is that consensus is typically achieved by adding ambiguity, rather than removing it.
As an example of these different 'mindsets', consider the following: Read more »