- Cost of Quality
- Criteria for Performance Excellence
- Customer Satisfaction and Value
- Environmental Manag. and Sustainability
- Global Quality
- Human Resources
- Innovation
- ISO 14000
- ISO 9000
- Leadership
- Lean
- Metrics
- Metrology
- Problem Solving
- Process Management
- Project Management
- Quality Control
- Quality Management
- Quality Tools
- Six Sigma
- Small Business
- Social Responsibility
- Software Quality
- Standards
- Statistics
- Supplier Quality
- Teams
- Best Practices
- ISO 26000
- Risk Management
- Customer Requirements
- Economic Case for Quality
- Awards
- Certification (ASQ)
- Strategic Planning
- Change Management
Career Corner: Stake Your Ground
Stakeholder analysis has become standard practice among quality practitioners....
Innovation Imperative: Risk and Development
In my first Innovation Imperative column, I wrote that, in short, innovation is a risky business. In this month’s column, I am going to move beyond identifying the nature of the risks we must address and look at how we manage those risks....
Career Corner: Build Your Economic Case
Do you realize that one of the greatest means for professional development is attending a quality industry conference? But first, you need to get there....
Know the Why
One of the primary reasons improvement projects fail is a lack of alignment with an organization’s vision, mission, goals and objectives. In an attempt to avoid that issue, a government agency in Guyana deployed a multi-tool method for improvement....
Out in Front
“The job of management is not supervision, but leadership.” … “The aim of leadership should be to improve the performance of man and machine, to improve quality, to increase output, and to simultaneously bring pride of workmanship to people.”...
Innovation Imperative: Put It on Paper
Last year, the ASQ Quality Management Division’s Innovation and Value Creation Technical Committee conducted its first evaluation of ASQ readiness for innovation certification....
Career Corner: Trade Your Expertise
Most readers have an idea of what a mentor is. Perhaps you have received counsel or knowledge from an experienced mentor or mentored a person seeking your advice. But there is a lesser-known mentoring relationship—a peer-to-peer relationship....
Making Contact
For an organization to be able to truly understand how well it’s meeting customer expectations, more concrete, measureable metrics must be used....
Hearing Aids
Today, hundreds of organizations regularly conduct surveys and focus groups, solicit comments and complaints, scour social media and gather data from other sources....
Career Corner: Risky Reputation
Formerly the work of marketers, an organization's image and reputation are integral to quality and risk-based management systems. They are everyone's business in sustaining corporate integrity, and they deserve the attention of quality professionals....
Follow the Signs
Many change models have been proposed, but one stands out: the transtheoretical model, also known as the health behavior change model. The model originates from directly observing how people really did or didn’t change in response to urgent medical needs....
Career Corner: Waiting for the Phone to Ring?
Whether you're employed or unemployed, if you are waiting for the phone to ring or for an email to arrive inviting you to explore a new job opportunity, you are awaiting a miracle. And we all know how often a miracle occurs....
Standards Outlook: What's Old Is New Again
The time appears to have finally come to start another major revision of ISO 9001. But before moving forward, it’s a good idea to look back at where we’ve been....
One Size Fits All
There’s a reason why simple tools endure: They work, regardless of the situation. That’s a characteristic shared by the Baldrige Criteria for Performance Excellence....
Beyond the Basics
A movie sequel often can be as, if not more, captivating than the original. Essentially, a sequel builds on the original, continuing a journey with familiar characters and settings, developing ideas and unveiling more insight....
Career Corner: Should You Blow the Whistle?
Becoming a whistle-blower is no easy choice, even for quality professionals knowledgeable of organizational behavior and accustomed to audit processes with clear guidelines for nonconformance and corrective action....
Standards Outlook: Revised Thinking
COSO developed the internal control integrated framework in 1992 in response to the savings and loan scandals of the 1980s. COSO is now 20 years old and is due for an upgrade to incorporate changes in the financial environment....
Career Corner: Dust Yourself Off, Dive Back In
Don’t just sit there waiting for the phone to ring. You’re a professional. If you envision losing your job, or it’s already happened, refocus your approach. You are capable of reinventing yourself....
Standards Outlook: Know Your Role
When an organization has stale quality management system processes in the face of dynamic—at times chaotic— uncertainty, the entire system may become irrelevant....
40 New Voices of Quality
When QP set out to find the individuals who will give a voice to the new generation of quality professionals, one of the hopes was that the group’s makeup would lend insight into what the future holds....
Career Corner: Planning Ahead
When TQM became a strategic imperative for competitive advantage, celebrity CEOs became cheerleaders, quality maturity was measured by more vice presidents for quality, and academics traced quality’s history from inspection to customer-focused strategy....
The Right Stuff
The reality for many leaders is they are engaged in making decisions that affect everyone in the organization, but most of them have little evidence of whether decisions are being implemented as intended....
Get in Touch With Your Emotions
Emotional intelligence is one of the key traits shared by organizations that succeed in a dynamic world characterized by innovative technology, a diversified workforce, easy access to information and economic globalization....
Survey Says
To make software quality assurance less taxing, one organization used online survey tools as a creative means of addressing and resolving the difficulties inherent in performing process review data collection with limited resources....
Career Corner: Will You Be Ready?
In October 2002, I wrote a Career Corner column titled “Fired? Tired? Mired?” Even today, that’s the sense I get from the restlessness that I believe permeates today’s workforce. People are unemployed, and some have given up looking for jobs. People are...
Back to Basics: A Tool for Anyone
The balanced scorecard is used to align business activities to an organization’s strategy and monitor organizational performance versus strategic goals. The scorecard traditionally contains information related to four categories: learning and growth...
Climb to the Top
Who said it’s lonely at the top? For only the second time since the Baldrige program began in 1988, seven organizations were recognized last year with the nation’s highest presidential honor for performance excellence—the Baldrige Award....
Career Corner: The Missing Links
The Baldrige Criteria for Performance Excellence presents an ideal pattern of values to which quality professionals can aspire. Tracking its development throughout close to a quarter century reveals shifts in the quality community’s thinking...
Career Corner: Call a SPADE a SPADE
When you think about your career, what do you do? Do you just sort of mull it over and maybe write down a note or two? Or do you start by writing down what you want out of your professional life (your long-term objectives) and then consider what...
Trial and No Error
For years, the Veterans Affairs Cooperative Studies Program Clinical Research Pharmacy Coordinating Center has been working its way toward earning a Malcolm Baldrige National Quality Award. In 1996, the center first started looking at the Baldrige...
3.4 per Million: Integrating Inputs
Obtaining voice of the customer information is always important because a business’s survival depends on a person choosing its products over a competitor’s products....
Career Corner: Sell Yourself
Your personal body of knowledge (BoK) differs from your résumé. A résumé focuses more on your achievements: the situation you encountered, what you did about it and what results you obtained. Your personal BoK focuses on what you know, the skills...
Statistics Roundtable: Further Explanation
The purpose of a roundtable is to facilitate discussion. Here, we want to facilitate discussion on statistical engineering....
Online Figures Ellifson
Customer relationship management model / ONLINE FIgurE 1 Evaluation and improvement Strategic planning process ( SPP) step 1: Review customer inputs and analyze processes to refine feedback mechanisms, customer relationship strategies, and action plans (...
Tip of the Iceberg
HEALTHCARE PROVIDERS KNOW it’s not enough to treat a patients’ conditions and send them on their way. Often, the patient’s condition and symptoms are simply the tip of the iceberg. Many other factors—including human behaviors and societal conditions...
Career Corner: Curbing Career Fears
Books on careers usually contain some advice on strategic thinking. They counsel getting the big picture, sometimes by applying the tools and techniques of business planning. This can be done, for example, by conducting a strengths, weaknesses...
Jersey Score
For most, it takes years to reach a point at which an organization can expect to be seriously considered for the Baldrige award. But that didn’t deter New Jersey-based healthcare provider AtlantiCare, one of five award recipients for 2009....
Standards Outlook: The Bottom Line
Quality and environmental managers need to understand the language of finance and the effect of operations on the bottom line, while financial managers need to know how quality and environmental managers can help improve results....
Two in One
The terms risk analysis, risk assessment and risk management—often used interchangeably—can mean a variety of different concepts and metrics. There is no one single approach to risk management....
Time to Align
Culture drives leadership behavior and expectations. It can knock down barriers to prosperity or create obstacles that threaten future success. It defines whether an organization embraces or resists change....
Top This
Besting your competitors means outdoing them when it comes to quality, safety, service, productivity and financials. The question is how to stay on top after you’ve planted your flag at the apex of your industry....
On the Mark
It’s really no wonder that an organization that subscribes to the vision “To be the best-run business in American for the benefit of its customers” received a 2009 Malcolm Baldrige National Quality Award. MidwayUSA, a 2008 Missouri Quality...
Career Corner: Ethical Excellence
As the first decade of the new millennium unfolds, opportunity abounds—and so does risk. We are confronted daily by a bombardment of news about undesirable human behavior. The ratio of bad news to good news weighs heavily on the average...
High Marks
The public is demanding more accountability of many private organizations, corporations and institutions of higher education. In response, the Department of Education instituted changes to the process of accreditation of higher education institutions....
Career Corner: Lesson Learned
In fall 2009, when I remarked to university educators that a particular decision-making tool was widely used at Toyota, their response was respectful interest. When I did the same this February, a similar group laughed derisively at the comment...
0410 One Good Idea Online Figure
Phase 1: Analysis Site visit/ gap analysis Project management and quality planning Provider recruiting Phase 2: Pre- start Process improvement ( close the gaps) Provider credentialing/ scheduling Communication plan ( internal and external) Phase 3: Imple...
Career Climb
You don’t need to be jobless in today’s economy to feel stressed and apprehensive about your current situation. You don’t need to be reminded there aren’t any guarantees in today’s world....
Test Run
In 2008, 14,906 people took ASQ certification exams, and 9,394 of these people—or 63%—passed. So how can you avoid being one of the certification exam takers who will not pass this year?...
Career Corner: Changing Times
In consulting and planning with not-for-profits—especially universities, unaccustomed to market turbulence—I often use the phrase “glacial change.” The phrase implies change that is large but so gradual that human beings don’t see...
Standards Outlook: Remaining Relevant
Without changes, ISO 9001 risks becoming irrelevant on the world stage. So, what new ideas should be included in the next edition?...
PDSA Leads to Top Accolades
Force field analysis. Two-way communication. SWOT analysis. These terms are likely familiar to quality professionals in the manufacturing, service and possibly even healthcare fields. But to those in education? It’s unlikely....
Danger Zones
I’ve often been asked to identify the toughest questions in the Baldrige criteria. Which questions make or break an assessment? What answers does an examiner seek that aren’t explicitly asked for in the criteria? What questions are the hidden jewels?...
Narrow Healthcare's Quality Chasm
Today's healthcare leaders face the need to effectively manage not only the clinical but also the business side of their operations. This includes demonstrating cost reductions, overall organizational improvement and long-term sustainability....
Career Corner: Survive and Thrive
No sector is immune. Manufacturing, IT, finance, healthcare, education, publishing and retail are being affected by conditions that range from slowdown to slow-motion collapse....
3.4 per Million: Control and Grow Your Enterprise
To achieve maximum efficiencies and financial results in turbulent business and financial markets, executives and senior managers must revisit their business models to make certain measurements lead to the right behaviors....
Driven to Succeed
Strategic planning is an important element in quality management, as evidenced by the Malcolm Baldrige National Quality Award criteria. A strategic plan is the aim of an organization that helps to reduce variation related to possible strategic outcomes....
Career Corner: Something Worth Catching
CAGS stands for capability + adaptability + growthability + sustainability. It’s a formula for success in any field....
Smooth Approach
Traditional internal audits fulfill a need for companies with fresh ISO 9001 implementations. But for organizations with mature systems, an innovative approach called an appreciative internal quality audit can take them beyond compliance to excellence....
Standards Outlook: Down With Silos
Businesses today have multiple management systems, including financial, quality and environmental. Unfortunately, these management systems usually do not talk to one another....
Back to Basics: A Newfound Affinity
While it might be more typical for companies to use affinity analysis for strategic planning, nonprofits and other organizations should not pass up the opportunity to use it in planning strategies for success....
In the Lead
To become successful innovators, you need leading indicators focused on the people and process aspects of your organization....
Career Corner: A Booming Voice
According to the Yankelovich marketing firm, this generation’s essence is defined by "individuality, youth, [and] self absorption. Yankelovich CEO J. Walker Smith and Ann Clurman answer, "Boomers will age, but they won’t get old—meaning they will remain e...
Keeping Current Online Table
Malcolm Baldrige National Quality Award: National Institute of Standards and Technology ( NIST) in partnership with ASQ Award criteria are built on seven core values: leadership, strategic planning, customer and market focus, information analysis, human ...
In the Know
More and more organizations are choosing outsourcing as a necessary means of remaining competitive in the global economy. Quality professionals must consider building a body of knowledge completely dedicated to the subject of quality in outsourcing....
3.4 per Million: After the Low-Hanging Fruit
There are four major approaches for organization-wide improvement efforts that fall under the label “lean Six Sigma,” as evidenced by current practices at many industrial organizations, service organizations and consulting firms....
Small Business, Big Feat
Efforts to continuously improve employee and customer satisfaction, and business practices led PRO-TEC to a Baldrige award. The company has incorporated many best management practices, including lean manufacturing and continuous improvement, and relied on...
Online Coral Springs
The City.s Performance Improvement System / ONLINE FIgurE 1 Strategic level Strategic planning process Environmental scan ( including customer requirements analysis and operational results) Business plan, key intended outcomes, business plan initiatives,...
Far-Sighted
In the first year nonprofit organizations could apply for the honor, Coral Springs became the first local government to take home a Baldrige award by proving it didn't emphasize the present at the expense of the future....
Map Quest
Raytheon Six Sigma is a proprietary six-step process that Raytheon Co., a defense and aerospace systems supplier, has embedded into its culture. It was developed by an internal team that was guided by the company’s top leadership....
Eyes on the Dashboard at Mercy Health System
Patient satisfaction has been a component of Mercy Health System’s dashboard system for about six years, so when emergency department satisfaction into the red zone in late 2005, it immediately set off an alarm....
Sharp HealthCare Gets to the Point in Managing Diabetes
With literature from the last five years demonstrating that poor control of blood sugar in acute healthcare settings equates to negative outcomes in diabetics, Sharp HealthCare in San Diego decided to control it everywhere....
Quality in the First Person: Value of Certification
In 1986, I began my career as an engineer in the research and development function of a large global chemical company. Eight years later, my family relocated, and I took a job with a plastic products company as a senior process development engineer....
Career Corner: Corporations Tout Social Responsibility
The Malcolm Baldrige National Quality Award has added “governance and social responsibilities” to its leadership criteria, codes of conduct are more prevalent, and ethics has taken on new importance in corporate training and business school curricula. In ...
Lean Six Sigma's Evolution
When Motorola rolled out its initial Six Sigma system in 1987, there were no Green Belts, Black Belts, Master Black Belts, Champions or any of the infrastructure or focused training we have come to associate with modern practices in Six Sigma....
Career Corner: Ready, Aim, Fire
Within an organization, the three elements and the outcome are typically something like policy + strategy + tactical plan = goal attainment. Specifically, “ready, aim, fire.” Think of this approach as you would an arrow hitting a target. You might say a w...
Ghysels Online Sidebar: School and Corporate Boards
Comparing School and Corporate Boards Just as a corporate board of directors owes its allegiance to its shareholders, a local school board must remain committed to its constituents while holding the superintendent (CEO) accountable. The MVWSD’s administr...
Ghysels Online Sidebar: What Students Think
Moreover, by teaching how to align teachers’ goals to students’ goals, the teachers were more apt to pay attention to organizational goals. Even though we were initially cautious about calling students or parents “external customers” or teachers “interna...
Navigate Your Career Path With QP’s Annual Salary Survey
45 Section 6 Salary by Number of Work Hours Online Section 7 Salary by Nonexempt vs. Exempt Status Online Section 8 Salary by Number of Years of Quality Experience and Highest Level of Education Online Section 9 Salary by Number of Years in Current Posit...
Salary Survey-Regular Employee and Self-Employed Consultants Results
45 Section 6 Salary by Number of Work Hours Online Section 7 Salary by Nonexempt vs. Exempt Status Online Section 8 Salary by Number of Years of Quality Experience and Highest Level of Education Online Section 9 Salary by Number of Years in Current Posit...
Six Sigma and Baldrige: A Quality Alliance
The Malcolm Baldrige National Quality Award has evolved from a way to recognize the best quality management practices to a comprehensive framework for world-class performance....
Avoid Random Acts of Improvement With Baldrige
Organizations can use the best project execution methods, such as Six Sigma and lean, but be disappointed with the results if key strategic goals are not addressed. Improvement efforts should begin by first considering the characteristics of the...
Small Business Leadership: Creating and Preserving a Business Culture
Every business has its own culture that starts slowly and evolves over time as the business becomes more successful and grows. For a small business, it is initially the founder who determines the culture of the firm and the way employees work and...
Career Corner: Adapt to Today's Risk Based Environment
Not long ago, during a discussion about innovation, a nontraditional student of mine told me that if my ideas were more than 18 months old, they were probably out of date....
Back to Basics: Have You Adequately Defined Your Situation?
The is/is not matrix is a simple yet powerful tool that enables a planner or investigator to more clearly define the problem, decision or situation being addressed. The matrix can be extremely useful in problem definition and root cause analysis, but...
From One-Man Show to Baldrige Recipient
Mesa Products Inc., which manufactures and installs cathodic protection systems for underground piping and other metal structures, was the recipient of the Malcolm Baldrige National Quality award in the small business category in 2006. Mesa’s quality...
Six Sigma, Value and Competitive Strategy
Aligning Six Sigma deployment with an organization’s strategy is complicated by the fact that most organizations have three levels of strategy – corporate, strategic business unit (SBU), and competitive. The tools of Six Sigma are most effectively...
3.4 Per Million: How to Identify and Select Lean Six Sigma Projects
Lean Six Sigma is a powerful method for improving existing products, processes and services. Six Sigma was developed by Motorola in 1987. Motorola’s Six Sigma yielded significant financial results...
The Innovation Process and Quality Tools
Cost control and product quality are only capable of sustaining competitive advantage. It takes product or service innovation to create competitive advantage in a global marketplace. Innovation consists of a series of steps like any other business or...
Conformity or Sustainability? That Is the Question
Sustainability is an enterprise’s ability to survive and prosper in a rapidly evolving environment, and the essence of sustainability is performance results. Any expenditure of resources that does not generate value produces a net loss and impaired...
Quality Glossary
Five years after it published its first glossary of quality terms, ASQ has revised that glossary with updated definitions and new entries, many from the lean glossary published in 2005. This reference of terms, acronyms, and prominent figures in the...
10 Quality Basics
In an overview designed to give quality newcomers a glimpse of the knowledge they need to succeed, ten regular Quality Progress contributors write on 10 basic quality topics that are fundamentals essential to surviving in a quality role. Topics covered...
Quantifying Machinery Availability Loss
Possibly the most misunderstood and abused metric in performance based manufacturing is machine availability. When examining quality, performance, costs, and cycle time improvements, it is assumed that any performance metrics take into account a...
Six Sigma at Cigna
In 2002, Cigna Corp., a provider of employee healthcare and insurance benefits, launched a grass-root driven quality program based on Six Sigma. Leadership made it clear that the approach would be holistic and would require behavioral changes and a...
Standards Outlook: Why a New ISO 9004?
In the rush that is today's business environment, we often worry more about details than we do the big picture....
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...
ASQ Certification Board Puts Quality Tools to Work
Recognizing the importance of customer satisfaction in strategic planning, the ASQ certification board recently used quality tools to develop customer requirements. To begin the process, a SIPOC (suppliers, inputs, outputs, and customers) diagram was...
Career Corner: Get Rid of Clutter
Futurist John Naisbitt focused on 11 purposeful cognitive tools that contribute to successful anticipation of and adjustment to change. No. 10 is about leveraging quality: "Don't add unless you subtract," Naisbitt says....
Standards Outlook: Developing the Voluntary Healthcare Standard
The new Automotive Industry Action Group (AIAG) voluntary standard for healthcare delivery is in its second review, with an anticipated launch no later than early 2008. AIAG also is pursuing partners for the publication from the healthcare sector....
Building Quality at Veridian Homes
Veridian Homes in Madison, Wisconsin uses several quality methods to improve productivity while reducing impact on the environment. To achieve its goal of promoting and coordinating quality throughout the company, the company employed the National...
Shifting Quality Into High Gear
Park Place Lexus (PPL), located in the Dallas metropolitan area, is the first automobile dealership to win the Malcolm Baldrige National Quality Award. Determined not to be just another car dealership, PPL leaders looked outside the industry to...
