- Cost of Quality
- Customer Satisfaction and Value
- Data Quality
- Design of Experiments
- Engineering
- Global Quality
- Human Resources
- Innovation
- ISO 14000
- ISO 9000
- Leadership
- Lean
- Metrics
- Problem Solving
- Process Capability
- Process Management
- Product Development and Recall
- Project Management
- Quality Assurance
- Quality Function Deployment
- Quality Management
- Quality Tools
- Six Sigma
- Small Business
- Statistical Process Control (SPC)
- Statistics
- Supplier Quality
- Teams
- Total Quality Management
- Career Development
- Information Management
- Customer Experience Management
- Customer Requirements
- Economic Case for Quality
In the Spotlight
Based on what we know about the skills needed for innovation management, what quality management functions, responsibilities and skills can be applied to manage innovation?...
Standards Outlook: How Will You Manage
While the required skill sets of quality and regulatory professionals constantly change, and capability upgrades must be ongoing to ensure success, it was hard to predict that branching out into project management would be the next hurdle....
Time for Action
Action learning is a simple yet intricate problem-solving strategy that engages participants in issue analysis, reflective questioning, listening and feedback. Its premise is that the answers to most problems lie within individuals....
Career Corner: Are You Recession Proofed?
An observation I have made over the years is that organizations seem to make cuts in two specific areas when economic times are tough. The first department cut is safety, and the second is quality....
Online Figure 1 Ramu
Outsourcing BoK Expected cognition Perceived weight CMQ/ OE CQE CQA CSQE ( New) CRE CSSBB CSSGB CCT CBA CHA CQT CQPA CQIA CQI Project management 10 Project charter Create Create Apply Project estimation and tracking Analyze Apply Apply Apply Understand C...
Eight Steps to Sustain Change
Improvement projects often focus on a problem, its measurement, analysis, and eventual solution, but fail to consider how improvements will be permanently integrated into the daily routine. Resistance is a natural response to change, but it can be...
One Good Idea: Under One Roof
Quality function deployment (QFD) is a great tool for designing a business based on the voice of the customer. Many quality tools are multifaceted....
Reaching Out to CEOs
Interested in promoting quality as an agent of profit and prosperity, ASQ asked the Pittsburgh section to participate in a pilot run of the Economic Case for Quality by surveying local business leaders to determine how they perceived the impact of...
Reach for the Stars
CelsiusTech Australia, a systems and software supplier, has long had a commitment to quality, but believes there is always room for improvement. The company decided to create an improved approach to the plan-do-check-act cycle to help new employees...
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...
Building Task Cohesion to Bring Teams Together
Traditional, homogeneous teams made up of members of the same gender, race, and age tend to be more cohesive and more successful and effective in problem solving, but such sameness can produce bland and predictable solutions. On the other hand, a team...
A Quest For Quality
Hamilton Health Services, a Canadian healthcare organization with a multi-site emergency room program, used quality facilitators in six continuous quality improvement projects over a period of one year. Quality facilitators provide resources needed to...
Does Six Sigma Work in Service Industries?
Service and manufacturing organizations have much to learn from one another when it comes to serving customers. While in manufacturing the focus on product quality distracts employees from customer service quality requirements, in the service sector the...
Training : It's Not Always the Answer
Employers need employees who perform well, and while training is one way to achieve this goal, it isn't the only way. A training needs analysis assesses current performance and defines desired performance, with the gap between the two states...
Quality Intervenes at a Hospital
The Nebraska Medical Center, the state's largest teaching hospital, began implementation of Six Sigma in 2002 in response to a decline in patient volume in its interventional radiology department. A Six Sigma team was assembled to address problems in...
Column: Emerging Sectors: All Aboard the ISO 9000 Express
The Chicago Transit System, serving approximately 1.5 million riders every day in Chicago and 38 neighboring suburbs, is a vital component of Northeastern Illinois' economy. Operated by the Chicago Transit Authority (CTA) and including buses, trains and...
Quality's Six Life Cycle Stages
A tool referred to as “quality life cycle” provides a strategic mechanism to chart and sustain quality while proactively countering shortcomings of its implementation, such as stagnation and limited application, which can ultimately result in failure....
College and University Programs in Quality
A list is provided of more than 100 colleges and universities offering courses, programs, and degrees in quality related fields. The list is both alphabetical and geographical and indicates the type of institution and certificates or degrees offered....
Curriculum Assessment - A Systems Approach
Curriculum assessment (CA) is receiving a lot of attention as more educational institutions focus on the quality of their academic programs. Institutions that don't have formalized plans for integrating CA activities into their cultures, however, will...
The Essential Six Sigma
The disciplined quality improvement features of Six Sigma methodology offers companies nearly all of the elements of Total Quality Management (TQM), and it is much easier to incorporate into a business system. In addition, Six Sigma utilizes technical...
Quality in the Classroom
Institutions of higher learning have only recently begun to address the issue of how to offer quality products and services. The present turbulent economy coupled with the accreditation requirement for relatively low individual faculty course loads...
A Road Map to Six Sigma Quality
Many business executives interested in trying Six Sigma Breakthrough Strategies fail to realize that to be successful Six Sigma programs must become cultural revolutions that involve every member of the organization. What is needed is a road map that...
Lessons Learned
Despite the difficulty of transferring technology and methodology from one culture to another, a team from Raytheon has successfully conducted Six Sigma based tactical transformation workshops for Raytheon Business units, their customers, and suppliers...
Doing It Wrong: A Case Study
This case study looks at steps an insurance company took toward quality improvement, and how and why their efforts failed to achieve the desired results. Each step taken produced suspicion of upper management's motives, competition among middle...
Roll Quality Roll
The University of Alabama is using the Baldrige Award criteria to measure its continuous improvement. As part of its effort, the university is raising its expectations of strategic quality plans to provide guidelines for improvements within colleges,...
Integrating ISO 9001:2000 and the Baldrige Criteria
No single quality system, criterion, or philosophy will provide the solution to an organization's quality problems. A sound quality program can be implemented by an organization using ISO 9001:2000, the Baldrige Award and its criteria, and total...
Continuous Process Improvement When It Counts Most
Managers are challenged to address the radical changes that have occurred in the manufacturing industry in the past two decades. Managers often use continuous process improvement and computer simulations to help them reduce waste, improve quality,...
Making Teams Work
At the U.S. Department of Labor Bureau of Labor Statistics, a one-year pilot project for introducing a team environment generated seven major observations. The pilot project covered both leader-directed teams and self-directed work teams (SDWTs). The...
ISO 9000 Revisions Are Key to Knowledge Age Excellence
An analysis of the ISO 9000 process demonstrates its links with communication and information technology activities. These links are especially relevant for examining how the process oriented ISO 9000:2000 can help employees get ready for the knowledge...
Small Service Firms Face TQM Implementation Challenges
A survey questionnaire mailed to 1,000 small and medium-sized service firms in the United States plus 20 follow-up interviews examined the status, usefulness, and limitations of total quality management (TQM). Firms with 500 or fewer employees were...
Applying Quality Concepts to Community Issues
Communication and process are keys to overcoming political barriers in community improvement efforts. In Tacoma and Pierce County, WA, the ideas of W. Edwards Deming are coming to life in a partnership between Tacoma and the Deming Institute. The...
Team Technology
A study of 36 sessions of 12 industrial production teams performing the same process improvement task in six companies tested the hypothesis that teams having more structure perform better than those with less structure. Four methods of influencing...
Team Empowerment: A Simple and Easy Solution
QUEST (Quality Empowerment Survey for Teams) is a tool that helps teams make the most of their strengths while remediating their weaknesses. Team members use the QUEST survey to rate team factors such as respect, recognition, communications, problem...
Avoiding a Conference Train Wreck
Large-conference interventions for organizational change should be well planned. By paying attention to purpose, emotional expression, and conference energy, conference managers can avoid frustration and blowups over participants' unmet needs....
Is the World Ready for Knowledge Management?
By regaining information management skills, such as those fostered in the Associated Press (AP) model, organizations can prepare themselves for knowledge management. Although advanced technology often supports a knowledge management system, its success...
What Higher Education Should Be Teaching About Quality - But Is Not
A survey of colleges and universities revealed inadequate correlation between quality-related topics taught in schools and topics identified as important by winners of the Malcolm Baldrige National Quality Award. The teaching of quality is vital in...
The Quality Auditor: Helping Beans Take Root
Awareness of corporate culture enables the quality auditor to go beyond bean counting and become an agent of cultural change. This broader view of quality auditing fits well with the TQM (total quality management) view that behavioral factors are...
Virtual Teams: Today's Reality, Today's Challenge
Virtual, dispersed, or networked teams have members who are geographically disperse and yet work together closely. It is expected that 13 million U.S. workers will be on such teams by 1998. Impetus for virtual teamwork includes trends in globalization...
What Game Is Your Team Playing?
Reflective practice is a tool for improving the effectiveness of work groups. Facilitators can use a sports metaphor to apply the tool in team-building sessions. The football metaphor is appropriate for production organizations where functions...
Ten Critical Traits of Group Dynamics
Teams are groups established within an organization to handle differentiated functions and specific tasks such that the whole team is greater than the sum of its parts. The following ten items are issues that, when addressed and resolved, allow teams...
Is This What's Really Going On?
Quality Progress readers respond to the Editorial Comment on "What's Going on at U.S. Universities" in the September 1996 issue. These 22 letters fall into three groups. Seven of the letters suggest that higher education responds to its markets by:...
What Should Higher Education Be Teaching About Quality?
Customer-supplier relationships, continuous process improvement, interpersonal skills, and teamwork are keys for those who plan to work in quality organizations. These are among the survey findings from seven 1988-1994 Malcolm Baldrige National Quality...
Are You a Right-Brain or Left-Brain Thinker?
Quality professionals should be open to various styles of thinking. Right-brain thinkers tend to be analytical, logical, rational, and sequential, while left-brain thinkers are more likely to use interrelationships, intuition, and synthesis....
Leave Your Soft Drinks (and Sanity) at the Door
Failure of total quality management (TQM) at a health care facility had five causes. First, the consultants were inexperienced and did not adapt their methods to the client's culture. Management must be ready for TQM, and consultants must use common...
Small Companies Learn How to Design in Quality
The Design of Experiments (DOX) program at the University of New Hampshire is a partnership between industry and academia. Since 1992 DOX has helped 29 teams from small companies use designed experiments to improve their processes and products. Every...
Five Ways to Improve the Contracting Process
Quality function deployment (QFD), teaming, integrated planning, change management, and customer-focused metrics can solve many contracting problems. QFD assures that requirements specifications are clear and have input from customer and contractor....
Love and Profit: Finding the Balance in Life and Work
Caring leadership enables managers and employees to be aware of their whole selves. A balance between life and work replaces the dualism of life versus work. Balanced leadership uses love, self-awareness, self-esteem, and attention as tools for...
The Zealots and the Old Guard
Fundamental changes to the content and process of undergraduate engineering education are occurring at Arizona State University and a consortium of six other institutions. The changes come about because traditional graduates enter the workplace with...
Teams in the Age of Systems
Customer focus and systems thinking affect the implementation of teamwork. Without attention to these factors, teams can proliferate and become disconnected. A customer-in mentality means that customers drive the formation, activity, and evaluation of...
What Do Managers Really Think of the ISO 9000 Registration Process?
Forty Colorado companies were surveyed about the ISO 9000 registration process. Each company was ISO-9000 registered, and the key ISO 9000 person at each firm answered the 22 open-ended survey questions. Results indicate that 85% of the firms sought...
Quality Quest: One Company's Successful Attempt at Implementing TQM
Introduction of total quality management (TQM) by a manufacturer of more than 2,000 products relied on training, involvement, and a pilot run of the problem solving process. Crosby's four absolutes of quality provided the foundation for this successful...
How to Develop a Meaningful Employee Recognition Program
Acknowledgment of employees reveals a company's principles and values. Employee recognition also is an incentive for quality and productivity improvements. However, a recognition program should not be a tool for behavior manipulation. A successful...
The Conference Method of Redesign
Restructuring of an organization can be accomplished efficiently by a sociotechnical analysis. The technique is based on Fred Emery's and Eric Trist's Future Search Conference. A case study of the conference method used groups and subgroups to...
Total Quality in K-12 Education
Transformational change in U.S. schools is necessary for continuous improvement. A TQM (total management quality) culture in K-12 education requires a new organizational structure in which everyone is responsible for quality. In such an environment,...
The Role of Statistical Thinking in Management
Managers, as well as statisticians, can employ process thinking, an understanding of variation, and data analysis. This mindset of statistical thinking has four requirements. First, managers must know why statistical knowledge is important. For...
