Who's Keeping Score?

Description: There’s one tool you won’t find for sale at Sears. One of the retail giant’s divisions has started using a quality management tool extensively to maintain and improve its own quality management system.…

Keywords: Organizational improvement initiatives,Process improvement,Quality management system (QMS),Continuous improvement (CI),Scorecards,Case study

Social Bookmarking

Digg, delicious, NewsVine, Furl, Google, Spurl, BlinkList, Simpy, StumbleUpon, BlogMarks, Facebook

You must log in to comment. Please log in or register. Comments FAQ

I like the simplicity of the evaluation that is being done at Sears. It makes it easy and facilitates "keeping score", which is what most management teams want to do.

I also read Randall Robinson's comment, and while he is technically correct about the measurement of results, I think it's wrong to have too much focus on the results. This leads to "management by results" which has been said to be a poor way of managing a quality system. It actually leads to data manipulation (gaming) causing a "tail wagging dog" situation in which the metrics get better, but no real process improvement takes place. The good thing about the QMS is that it can measure the process Xs, instead of the results. Those Xs are the correct way to drive the results and if they don't or can't, then a process improvement effort is needed to get the results we want.

Thanks, Rebecca, for a thought-provoking article.
--Mike Harkins, 07-03-2008

Prime example of why so many QMS' get a bad wrap. You treat the QMS as it is a separate entity to be managed. Implemented correctly, a solid and effective QMS is a business enabler that focuses from the customer perspective inward. You appear to be evaluating symptoms rather than results (e.g., customer satisfaction, supplier performance, operations effectiveness, etc.).
--Randall Robinson, 06-18-2008