Quality Customer Focus

Delivering Two Kinds of Quality by Keith McFarland, Business Week:

What do the Japanese take for granted when it comes to quality? They take for granted that things should work as they are supposed to, and they even see an elegance to things working properly -- whether it's cars, subway schedules, traditional flower arranging, or the famous tea ceremony.

Japanese manufacturers were so obsessed with taken-for-granted quality that they created a constant stream of innovations that built on renowned quality-management consultant Ed Deming's original concepts: lean manufacturing, just-in-time industry, and design for quality. In today's competitive markets, manufacturers need to be very far along this quality innovation curve -- or moving along it very quickly.

Related ideas:
Kano model of Customer Satisfaction: Kano saw three types of customer satisfaction: required (basic quality also threshold requirements), more is better (performance quality) and delighter (excitement quality).

Customers expectations change over time. Often what was once enough to delight a customer (remote control for a TV) becomes expected. Once a feature is expected the organization gets no credit for providing it they only risk a negative reaction if they fail to provide it.

Voice of the Customer

John Simpson

Topic: Fun


This is the best I can do to create my Simpson self. Until I have a guest appearance on the show, I guess this will have to do. You can try for yourself using the Simpson Maker: post a comment with a link to your character.

Here is a photo of the real John Hunter (Glacier National Park, 2005):

The Deming Difference

The Deming Difference:

Everyone wants instant pudding. Then, Dr. Deming stands up and says there is no such thing as instant pudding. That we must learn how to integrate knowledge of people, statistics, and theory of knowledge into a working, breathing organizational system. That understanding these principles will lead to transformation. Instead of being competitive, individual components of the system will, for optimization, reinforce each other. This process is not spontaneous and is discontinuous. Some days little will seem to be accomplished. Other days great breakthroughs will occur. Progress will not be predictable.

• Deming on Management
  
• Curious Cat Management Improvement Library, articles related to the ideas of W. Edwards Deming
  
• Deming related blog posts
  

Visible Data

Effective visual signals are important for effective management improvement: lean thinking emphasizes such ideas. Top 5 Rules of Effective Measurement Boards is an excellent post on how to make measurement effective.

Take the time to find the important measures and then don't keep data hidden in some drawer or computer file out of people's view and therefore out of mind. Post the important data for everyone to see. Review the data as changes are made and see that the changes had the desired result. Update the measures when appropriate (for posting visibly - you will of course be measuring more than the few measures that belong on measurement boards).

If a the data posted is not being used as a resource something is wrong. The information on the board may not be the right information. If that is the case, different information needs to be posted. Alternatively the board could be a distraction ("we have changed, look at those charts we have posted on the wall") from the truth - that improvement is not happening, change has only been superficial. A measurement board is a tool, not an end.

Related Posts:

• Measuring and Managing Performance in Organizations
  
• Measurement and Data Collection
  
• Visual Work Instructions
  
• Operational Definitions and Data Collection
  
• Targets Distorting the System
  
• Great Chart
  

Curious Cat Management Improvement Glossary:

• Control Charts
  
• Outcome Measures
  
• Variation
  

Performance Appraisal Problems

The Struggle To Measure Performance, Business Week:

One company that recently decided to dump forced rankings altogether is Chemtura (CEM), a $3 billion specialty chemicals company formed by the July merger of Crompton in Middlebury, Conn., and Great Lakes Chemical in Indianapolis.

"The system forced me to turn people who were excellent performers into people who were getting mediocre ratings," says Eric Wisnefsky, Chemtura's vice-president for corporate finance. "That demotivates them, and they'd follow up with asking: 'What could I do differently next year?' That's a very difficult question to answer when you feel that people actually met all your expectations." Chemtura's new process still assigns grades. But to better motivate employees in the middle, labels such as "satisfactory" have been upgraded to phrases such as "successful performance."

As we mentioned in our previous thread on performance without appraisal more organizations are acting on what most people know - performance appraisal process is counter-productive. Deming on Performance Appraisal, Out of the Crisis, page 101:

Evaluation of performance, merit rating, or annual review... The idea of a merit rating is alluring. the sound of the words captivates the imagination: pay for what you get; get what you pay for; motivate people to do their best, for their own good. The effect is exactly the opposite of what the words promise.

From Business Week's article:

Whether a company calls it stack ranking, forced ranking, or differentiation, "there's no magic process," says Sartain. "We just want to make sure we're making our bets and that we're investing in the people we most want to keep. That's what this is all about."

There are no easy answers, but what it should be about is managing the system to produce the best results. My best advice is to read chapter 9 of The Leader's Handbook and read the rest of the Leader's Handbook and other great management improvement books. And manage using the ideas of Deming, Ackoff, Scholtes, McGregor, Ohno... Refer back to the great books as you gain experience and continue to learn and practice management improvement. It still won't be easy but the chance of you managing systems and people effectively will greatly increase.

Two great books on managing people: Abolishing Performance Appraisals: Why They Backfire and What to Do Instead by Tom Coens, Mary Jenkins and forward by Peter Block - Peopleware: Productive Projects and Teams by Tom DeMarco and Timothy Lister.

Related Links

• Performance Without Appraisal - Mini Microsoft
  
• Performance without Appraisal - Managing with Trust
  
• Performance of People and Appraisal
  
• Failed Practice: Forced Ranking
  
• Deming on Performance Appraisal
  

Toyota Special Report: Thinking Production System

Toyota Special Report: Thinking Production System. A very interesting article on Toyota's web site (www.toyota.co.jp).

At the 2003 Automotive Parts System Solution Fair, held in Tokyo, June 18, 2003, Teruyuki Minoura, then-managing director of global purchasing, Toyota Motor Corporation, talked about his experiences with TPS (the Toyota Production System), and what it means for suppliers and for the future of the auto industry.

This short article is pepered with many great quotes as section headers:

• In TPS, the T also stands for "Thinking"
• To cut lead-time, cut out all the bits that don't add value.
• The line must stop if there is a problem.
• Ask yourself "Why?" five times.
  
• Develop people who can come up with unique ideas.

Minoura warns "simply introducing kanban cards or andon boards doesn't mean you've implemented the Toyota Production System, for they remain nothing more than mere tools. The new information technologies are no exception, and they should also be applied and implemented as tools."

Early in his career, Minoura worked under Taiichi Ohno, recognized as the creator of the Toyota Production System. Ohno, through tireless trial and error, managed to put into practice a "pull" system that stopped the factory producing unnecessary items. But Minoura observes that it was only by developing this "loose collection of techniques" into a fully-fledged system, dubbed the Toyota Production System or TPS, that they were able to deploy this throughout the company

• How Toyota Turns Workers Into Problem Solvers
• New Toyota CEO's Views
• Toyota Production System in Indiana
• Toyota Engineers a New Plant: the Living Kind
• TPS - Take 2
• Toyota Manufacturing Powerhouse

Organization, Systems and Culture

Organization, Systems and Culture by S. M. Lane, G. J. Garrett, with contributions from R A. Long:

Traditional methods of how companies are organized, staffed and managed have become obsolete. The purpose of this paper revolves around those things most companies can do to remain successful, in spite of changing times, changing economies, global competition and customer needs. The information contained within is not new and is not radical, but it is a different way of handling things. Leaders of today cannot rely on successful past practices to guarantee future success. A new global economy requires a different philosophy that supports the new economic age and a different philosophy must take hold in order to survive and prosper in it.

This paper does a good job of pulling together ideas and present them is a simple manner. It is also refreshing to read an article where many sources are given credit and the author does not attempt to "sell" their unique ideas. Management improvement is mainly about using great ideas that have been around for years and decades.

Useful, innovative new management ideas are great. But far too much effort is placed in trying to package "systems" (or copyrighted terms) as some new breakthrough in management when most often they offer little of value. This article points to a number of very useful sources, in my opinion such as: The Leader's Handbook.

Learning, Systems and Improvement

A Major Mistake That Managers Make by Russell L. Ackoff

Once again Ackoff provides great ideas:

Errors of omission, lost opportunities, are generally more critical than errors of commission. Organizations fail or decline more frequently because of what they did not do than because of what they did.

Page 4 and 5 explore the method to effectively learn from decisions the organization makes. The idea seem simple but they are powerful.

Preparing a record of every decision of any significance, ones that involve doing something or (of particular importance) ones that involve not doing
something. This record should include the following information:


• The justification for the decision including its expected effects and the
time by which they are expected...
• The assumptions on which the expectations are based...
• The information, knowledge, and understanding that went into the
decision.
• Who made the decision, how it was made, and when...

The decision should be monitored to determine whether the expectations are
being met and the assumptions on which they are based remain valid.

When a deviation is found in either the assumptions or expectations, it should
be diagnosed, the cause determined and corrective action prescribed and
taken.

The corrective action is itself the result of a decision. A record of this decision
should be made and treated as the original decision. In this way the process
can not only yield learning but also learning how to learn.

A record of the entire process (all four steps) should be made and stored for
easy access by those who may later be confronted by the need to make a
similar type of decision.

More articles and books by Russell Ackoff

Theory of Knowledge