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Tag: quality tools

Management Books

• Fourth Generation Management: The New Business Consciousness by Brian Joiner
  An excellent book for those who wish to begin the transformation to "Fourth Generation Management" and for the experienced as well. We give this well written and easy to follow book this book our highest recommendation.

• Quality Improvement Through Planned Experimentation: 2nd Edition by Ronald D. Moen, Thomas Nolan, Lloyd P. Provost
  An excellent handbook on how to use experiments to learn about your organization and how to use that knowledge to improve your organization. The book integrates Dr. Deming's ideas and design of experiments thinking. Forward by W. Edwards Deming. 3rd edition is on the way.

• Evolutionary Operation: A Statistical Method for Process Improvement by George E. P. Box, Norman R. Draper
  Evolutionary Operation (EVOP), is a simple but powerful statistical tool with wide application in business. What originally motivated the introduction of EVOP, was the idea that the widespread and daily use of simple statistical design and analysis during routine production by process operatives themselves could reap enormous additional rewards.

• The Improvement Guide: A Practical Approach to Enhancing Organizational Performance by Gerald J. Langley, Thomas Nolan, Lloyd P. Provost, Cliff Norman
  Great handbook for process improvement. The best resource for applying the plan-do-study-act cycle to improvement.

• Poka-Yoke: Improving Product Quality by Preventing Defects by Nikkan Kogyo Shimbun
  

• Facilitation at a Glance: by Ingrid Bens
  170 page pocket size book published by GOAL/QPC (publishers of Memory Jogger...). Great reference to help facilitators.

• The New Economics: : For Industry, Government, Education by W. Edwards Deming
  Second Edition (reprint). The best of Deming's books for learning about his system for management. Packed with great thoughts but not as easy to read as the best books. This is a great book, but often it is best for managers already committed to finding new ideas.

• Lean Solutions: How Companies and Customers Can Create Value and Wealth Together by James P. Womack, Daniel T. Jones
  "few companies today see consumption as a process -- a series of linked goods and services, all of which must occur seamlessly for the consumer to be satisfied. Buying a home computer, for example, involves researching, purchasing, integrating..."

• Lean Hospitals: Improving Quality, Patient Safety, and Employee Satisfaction by Mark Graban
  

• Improving Almost Anything: by George E. P. Box
  

• The Checklist Manifesto: How to Get Things Right by Atul Gawande
  

• Just-In-Time for Today and Tomorrow: Japanese Management Series by Taiichi Ohno
  

• Agile Estimating and Planning: by Mike Cohn
  Highlights include: - Why conventional prescriptive planning fails and why agile planning works - How to estimate feature size using story points and ideal days—and when to use each - How and when to re-prioritize - How to split large features into smaller, more manageable ones

• Understanding A3 Thinking: A Critical Component of Toyota's PDCA Management System by Art Smalley, Durward K. Sobek
  Winner of a 2009 Shingo Research and Professional Publication Prize. The A3 report has proven to be a key tool In Toyota’s successful move toward organizational efficiency, effectiveness, and improvement, especially within its engineering and R&D organizations. The power of the A3 report, however, derives not from the report itself, but rather from the development of the culture and mindset required for the implementation of the A3 system. In other words, A3 reports are not just an end product but are evidence of a powerful set of dynamics that is referred to as A3 Thinking.

Management Articles

• Run Chart (TQL Handbook)
  38 pages. Part of Basic Tools for Process Improvement Handbook.

• A Handbook for Strategic Planning
  This handbook contains the Department of the Navy's Strategic Planning Model along with guidance on the strategic planning process. Written by Denise Wells and Linda Doherty.

• Small Business Guidebook to Quality Management
  The aim of this guidebook is to help small businesses make the transition to a quality culture. While the focus of the guidebook is small businesses the information is helpful to anyone transforming and continually improving their organization.

• Total Quality Leadership vs. Management by Results by Brian Joiner, Peter R. Scholtes
  Excellent article for those interested in improving management. It begins with a very short early 90's view on the increasing Asian economic clout. Those who are not interested in management improvement would likely be tempted to ignore the important...

• A Structured Approach to Rapid Process Development and Control by Raymond Augustin
  Illustrates the use various quality tools including a cause and effect diagram and QFD (house of quality). "By adhering to the road map described here, process development teams will be able to focus their energy and efforts on doing it right the first time, thereby delivering fully developed and optimized processes more quickly."

• QFD: Past, Present, and Future by Yoji Akao
  "This paper reflects on the early days of QFD, the current status, and future challenges."

• William G. Hunter: An Innovator and Catalyst for Quality Improvement by George E. P. Box
  This is the text of a talk given at the Speakers' Dinner at the Sixth Annual William G. Hunter Conference on Quality in Madison, Wisconsin, on June 2, 1993. In it, George Box recalls Bill Hunter's pivotal role in the birth of the quality movement in the c

• A Fresh Look at Flow Charting by Tony Burns
  "The computer enables each symbol to be neatly aligned and connecting lines drawn clearly and simply...However, in using computer based flow charts, there may often be more negatives than benefits, as will be seen."

• Eight Reasons Retrospectives Fail by Esther Derby
  "Choosing Actions the Team Doesn’t Have Energy For... They may have tried before and failed, the task may be too difficult or time-consuming given the other work they have to do, or the work may be plain unpleasant. In any case, when the team doesn’t have energy to work on an improvement, chances are pretty good it won’t get done. Go with the task the team has the energy to complete."

• Teaching Engineers Experimental Design With a Paper Helicopter by George E. P. Box
  How a helicopter (made in with a regular sheet of paper) can be used to teach principles of experimental design including - conditions for validity of experimentation, randomization, blocking, the use of factorial and fractional factorial designs...

• Managing Our Way to Economic Success: Two Untapped Resources by William G. Hunter
  "American organizations could compete much better at home and abroad if they would learn to tap the potential information inherent in all processes and the creativity inherent in all employees."

• Doing More With Less in the Public Sector: A Progress Report from Madison, Wisconsin by William G. Hunter, Jan O'Neill, Carol Wallen
  "The new quality improvement ideas can help public officials combat the effects of decreasing budgets just as they help private businesses increase productivity." Published in Quality Progress, July 1987.

• Teaching Quality Improvement by Quality Improvement in Teaching by Ian Hau
  This paper describes how students and the instructor worked as a team to improve the quality of teaching in a class. The defect rate dropped from 78% to 22% for computer instruction, 56% to 8% for blackboard presentation and 82% to 20% for overhead presentation.

• TPS vs. Lean and the Law of Unintended Consequences by Art Smalley
  "In every piece of TPS literature from Toyota, this stated aim is mixed in with the twin production principles of Just in Time (make and deliver the right part, in the right amount, at the right time), and Jidoka (build in quality at the process), as well as the notion of continuous improvement by standardization and elimination of waste in all operations to improve quality, cost, productivity, lead-time, safety, morale and other metrics as needed. This clear objective has not substantially changed since the first internal TPS training manual was drafted over thirty years ago."

• A3 Reports: Tool for Process Improvement by Durward K. Sobek, Cindy Jimmerson
  "Toyota uses it to systematically guide problem-solvers through a rigorous process, document the key outcomes of that process, and propose improvements. The tool is used so pervasively that it forms a keystone in Toyota's world-famous continuous improvement

• Using Design of Experiments as a Process Road Map by Davis Balestracci
  "The current design of experiments (DOE) renaissance seems to favor factorial designs and/or orthogonal arrays as a panacea. In my 25 years as a statistician, my clients have always found much more value in obtaining a process "road map" by generating the inherent response surface in a situation."

• Statistics as a Catalyst to Learning by Scientific Method by George E. P. Box
  Explores the implications raised when Response Surface Methodology (RSM) is considered, as was originally intended as a statistical technique for the catalysis of iterative learning.

• Kanban Family Job Chart by Peter Abilla
  "Our family needs something that is visible, without equivocation, and shows the Person, Jobs, Day, and Status. So, we created a Kanban Family Job Chart ... We want, instead, to teach self-reliance, demonstrate our trust in the kids, and help them grow

• Bring Lean to Your Sales Team by Jamie Flinchbaugh
  "Another example is experimentation and reflection. By teaching the fundamentals of Plan-Do-Check-Act, the sales team can test out new ideas, messages and techniques with rigor. They can establish a common means by which to experiment, and ultimately to share best practices. The third step is to work on processes that cross boundaries. Many processes that go into product development, manufacturing or finance begin in sales at some point. These process are often broken, or at least inefficient. Lean can connect them, but it will require collaboration."

• How to Apply Japanese Company-Wide Quality Control in Other Countries by Kaoru Ishikawa
  Kaoru Ishikawa highlights how to improve performance based on 20 years of experience visiting countries all over the world to give consult on quality control implementation.

• A Fun Presentation on a Powerful Software Test Design Approach by Justin Hunter
  "My own consistent experiences and formal studies indicate that pairwise, orthogonal array-based, and combinatorial test design approaches often lead to a doubling of tester productivity (as measured in defects found per tester hour) as compared to the far more prevalent practice in the software testing industry of selecting and documenting test cases by hand."

• How do you know when do to an A3, and when to just solve the problem by Tracey Richardson
  "If there was a defect that got past an area/department and to the customer, this is unacceptable and should be counter-measured temporary (stop the bleeding) to ensure nothing else 'flows out' as well as finding the permanent countermeasure (using PDCA) (again this is all initiated by the plant manager--they should be responsible at this level and gather the resources necessary, and involving their people to ensure this will not happen again and learn from it for the the next A3)."

• Practical Combinatorial Testing by Raghu Kacker, Rick Kuhn, Yu Lei
  "Combinatorial methods can help reduce the cost and increase the effectiveness of software testing for many applications. ... With the NASA application, for example, 67% of the failures were triggered by only a single parameter value, 93% by 2-way combinations, and 98% by 3-way combinations. The detection rate curves for the other applications studied are similar, reaching 100% detection with 4 to 6 way interactions."

• The Principles of the Kanban Method by David Anderson
  Use the 5 Core Properties." 1. Visualize the workflow 2. Limit WIP 3. Manage Flow 4. Make Process Policies Explicit 5. Improve Collaboratively (using models & the scientific method)"

• Actionable Metrics by John Hunter
  "Metrics are valuable when they are actionable. Think about what will be done if certain results are shown by the data. If you can't think of actions you would take, it may be that metric is not worth tracking."

• Robust Experimental Strategies for Improving Upstream Productivity by Ronald D. Snee
  The solution to this problem is to use Lean principles to streamline the processes and procedures used to do the experimental work. Eliminating complexity and wasted time and effort results in experimentation being speeded up and scientists having more time to do creative work.

• Dr. Demingʼs Camping Expedition
  "Asking why all the time is the most effect route to overcoming problems. "The only drawback to it Iʼve found is when youʼve needed only three whys to get to the root cause, some determined people still go on to ask two more. Or else they stop at the fifth, even if they havenʼt gotten to the root cause... Blinded by the quality tools and techniques, you have missed the completely obvious"

• Are lean principles universal? by Michael Ballé
  "There is only one golden rule: we make people before we make parts. This requires a spirit of challenge, open mind and teamwork, as Pascal Dennis phrased it in his great lean novel Andy and Me. Every industry is different, but all human beings share the same capabilities and potentials – that is universal. As one Sensei once told me, the biggest room is the room for improvement."

• How to Get a New Management Strategy, Tool or Concept Adopted by John Hunter
  "Often when learning about Deming’s ideas on management, lean manufacturing, design of experiments, PDSA… people become excited. They discover new ideas that show great promise to alleviate the troubles they have in their workplace and lead them to better results. But how to actually get their organization to adopt the ideas often confounds them..."

• Genchi Genbutsu Case Study: how it helped Toyota winGenchi Genbutsu Case Study: how it helped Toyota win a multi-million dollar contract by Karn Bulsuk
  "He explained: 'Have you noticed that the Malaysia highways all use a much older, but cheaper version of noise absorbing wall?' Our team shook our heads. 'That’s the problem. They can't afford this yet. It’s true that our offering is superior to what the Malaysians are using, but economic reality is the reality that we live with.'"

• Lean Leadership Kaizen is Management by Mark Rosenthal
  "First they tried copying the benchmarked system on a small-scale test to deepen their understanding of what they had studied. Trying it on their parts surfaced differences that weren’t obvious at first, and they learned copying definitely wouldn’t work. Key: The reason they tried to copy was to learn more about it. This was a small-scale concept test, not an attempt at wholesale implementation... So, while an individual improvement task might take longer as people learn, in the end there is a multiplier effect as more and more people get better and better at making improvements. Sadly, it is really impossible to assign an ROI to that, so traditional management doesn’t allow for it..."

• Each necessary, but only jointly sufficient by John Allspaw
  "for complex systems: there is no root cause. ... Frankly, I think that this tendency to look for singular root causes also comes from how deeply entrenched modern science and engineering is with the tenets of reductionism. So I blame Newton and Descartes. ... In the same way that you shouldn’t ever have root cause 'human error', if you only have a single root cause, you haven’t dug deep enough."

Management Web Sites and Resources

• Curious Cat Management Improvement Articles by John Hunter
  Hundreds of useful management articles hand selected to help managers improve the performance of their organization. Sorted by topic including: Deming, lean manufacturing, six sigma, continual improvement, innovation, leadership, managing people, software development, psychology and systems thinking.

• Curious Cat Management Improvement Blog by John Hunter
  Blog by John Hunter on many topics to to improve the management of organizations, including: Deming, lean manufacturing, agile software development, evidence based decision making, customer focus, innovation, six sigma, systems thinking, leadership, psychology, ...

• John Grout's Mistake-Proofing Center
  Many examples of mistake-proofing.

• Smarter Solutions by Forrest W. Breyfogle III
  Consultant focused on six sigma improvement with articles available on various topics.

• iSixSigma
  Site with large amount of material on six sigma.

• Center for Quality and Productivity Improvement by George E. P. Box, William G. Hunter
  Founded in 1985 by George E.P. Box and the William Hunter at the University of Wisconsin - Madison. The technical report series is one of the best online management resources with reports authors including: George Box, W. Edwards Deming, Peter Scholtes, Kaoru Ishikawa, William Hunter, Gipsie Ranney and Brian Joiner.

• Peter Scholtes by Peter R. Scholtes
  Web site of Peter Scholtes, author of The Leader's Handbook (an excellent book) and The Team Handbook. The site offers several excellent management articles. He taught with Deming. Peter was a good friend and his management ideas are well worth studying.

• Hexawise - Combinatorial Software Testing by Justin Hunter
  This blog, by Justin Hunter, is about efficient and effective software test design strategies, including pairwise and combinatorial methods that are gaining traction in the testing community.

• Statistics for Experimenters by George E. P. Box, J. Stuart Hunter, John Hunter, William G. Hunter
  Web site for the classic book on design of experiments. Includes a search engine for statistics sites for managers.

• Shmula by Peter Abilla
  "This blog is my take on technology, business, operations, The Toyota Production System / Lean Manufacturing, Six Sigma, Queueing Theory, operations research, building software, the customer experience (especially ethnography and design thinking and word-of-mouth marketing)"

• Quality Digest
  Magazine covering quality management. Past articles, since 1995, are available online.

• ASQ
  Membership organization. They block far to much content behind pay walls for my taste (especially for an organization supposedly interested in promoting the principles covered in the content they make inaccessible).

• Lean Journey
  "My Lean Journey started about 10 years ago with a career change from R&D to manufacturing. I started this Blog to share lessons along the way and chronicle 'My Lean Journey in the Quest for True North'. With so much emphasis on continuous improvement we often miss the true teaching of TPS (Thinking People System). Lean is a 'Learning' process so sharing your lessons and opinions are welcome."

• John Shook's Column by John Shook
  Articles by John, senior advisor at the Lean Enterprise Institute.

• How to implement Lean Thinking in a Business by Tracey Richardson
  Blog by a trainer for Toyota and consultant.

• Training Within Industry
  Blog on standardization, process improvement, training and lean manufacturing topics.

• Got Boondoggle by Mike Wroblewski
  "My lean experiences include learning directly from the original lean leaders including Dr. Shigeo Shingo. As a certified Six Sigma Black Belt, I believe quality is a cornerstone of all improvement actions. By sharing these experiences and insights, my hope is that you may benefit on your lean journey."

• PQ Systems
  Software and services provider related to SPC tools. The site includes a blog.

• Langford for Learning by David P. Langford
  Quality learning achieved through continual improvement of systems which aim to produce the optimum state of personal, social, physical, and intellectual development within each individual. It is a commitment to excellence by each individual and is achieved through teamwork and a process of continual improvement and/or redesign. The site includes worthwhile articles.

• Life and Legacy of William G. Hunter by John Hunter, William G. Hunter
  George Box, Stuart Hunter and Bill wrote what has become a classic text for experimenters in scientific and business circles, Statistics for Experimenters. Bill also was a leader in the emergence of the management improvement movement. George Box and Bill co-founded the Center for Quality and Productivity Improvement at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Bill Hunter was also the founding chair of the ASQ statistics division.

• Curious Cat Management Improvement Connections by John Hunter
  The aim of Curious Cat Management Improvement Connections is to contribute to the successful adoption of management improvement to advance joy in work and joy in life. The site provides connections to resources on a wide variety of management topics to help managers improve the performance of their organization. The site was started in 1996 by John Hunter.

• Lean Edge by Michael Ballé, H. Thomas Johnson, Daniel T. Jones, Art Smalley, Steven Spear, Jeffrey Liker, Mike Rother
  "Lean management is a method to dramatically improve business performance by teaching people how to improve their own processes. The two main dimensions of lean management are continuous process improvement (going and seeing problems at the source, challenging operations and improving step by step) and respect for people (developing and engaging employees by developing teamwork, problem solving and respect for customers, employees and all other partners). ... The aim of the discussion [on the site] is to share different points of view and to collectively build a vision of lean management."

• Personal Kanban
  "Despite our best intentions, life has a way of becoming complicated. People, tasks, responsibilities, deadlines, and even recreation all compete for our attention. The human brain however, simply does not respond well to the stress of juggling multiple priorities... here are only two real rules with Personal Kanban: 1. Visualize your work 2. Limit your work-in-progress"

• Free Lean
  Making 'lean thinking' concepts of continuous improvement highly accessible for practitioners. The site provides Operational Excellence planning sheets, audit forms, and data collection sheets for you to download and modify.

• Effective Innovation by Bill Kappele
  Blog by Bill Kappele on design of experiments and statistics.

• Effective Innovation by Bill Kappele
  Blog by Bill Kappele on design of experiments and statistics.

• Stats Made Easy by Mark Anderson
  Blog on design of experiments and statistics by principal at Stat-Ease.