Practice 8: Deming Model of Quality

Management

Week 8.
Quality Management
IT Management
Jack Ma Life Story
Dr. Deming’s 14 Points
• Create constancy of purpose for improving products and services.
• Adopt the new philosophy.
• Cease dependence on inspection to achieve quality.
• End the practice of awarding business on price alone; instead, minimize total cost by working with a single
supplier.
• Improve continually and forever every process for planning, production, and service.
• Institute training on the job.
• Adopt and institute leadership.
• Drive out fear.
• Break down barriers between staff areas.
• Eliminate slogans, exhortations, and targets for the workforce.
• Eliminate numerical quotas for the workforce and numerical goals for management.
• Remove barriers that rob people of pride of workmanship, and eliminate the annual rating or merit system.
• Institute a vigorous program of education and self-improvement for everyone.
• Put everybody in the company to work to accomplish the transformation.
Adopt and institute leadership
The aim of supervision should be to help people and machines and gadgets to do a
better job. Supervision of management is in need of overhaul, as well as supervision of
production workers.
• Expect your supervisors and managers to understand their workers and the processes
they use.
• Don't simply supervise – provide support and resources so that each staff member
can do their best. Be a coach not a policeman.
• Figure out what each person actually needs to do their best. For example, hardware,
software, other tools, and training.
• Emphasize the importance of participative management and transformational
leadership .
• Find ways to reach full potential, and don't just focus on meeting targets and quotas.
Describe your own management practice
Adopt and institute leadership
• According to Deming, managers and supervisors should focus on leadership rather than the
traditional management style that calls for tight supervision and a very formal organizational
structure.
• Instead, Deming encourages understanding, collaboration, and a
coaching approach to management. You will always need a certain level of supervision in a
business, but working to help people deliver their best is more effective than taking punitive
action when you don’t see the results you wanted.
• A well-lead team will do more than just keep their heads down and work. They become part of
your quality management team. They ask for help, make suggestions, and point out stumbling-
blocks you may not have noticed.
• Setting and meeting targets and quotas is all very well, but is your team meeting its potential?
As a leader, you empower them to do so. You don’t just talk and expect others to “do,” you
listen, you understand, and you act. You create an environment in which people can realize
their potential. You motivate them to want to do their best, and they deliver their best.
Drive out Fear
Drive out fear, so that everyone may work effectively for the company.
• Allow people to perform at their best by ensuring that they're not afraid to
express ideas or concerns.
• Let everyone know that the goal is to achieve high quality by doing more
things right – and that you're not interested in blaming people when
mistakes happen.
• Make workers feel valued, and encourage them to look for better ways to do
things.
• Ensure that leaders are approachable and that they work with teams to act in
the company's best interests.
• Use open and honest communication to remove fear from the organization
Drive out Fear
• Were you ever a junior employee who was scared of the boss? Perhaps you had a teacher at
school who terrified you. Could you deliver your best under these conditions?
• There were probably times when you had questions you were too afraid to ask and opinions
you kept to yourself. And the more that boss or teacher reacted to your mistakes, the more
mistakes you made. Then you’d try to cover up those mistakes, hoping against hope that
they wouldn’t be picked up. That’s what fear does. Fear is not conducive to quality.
• You, your managers, and your supervisors need to share an understanding of the need to
drive out fear. Your employees should feel free to report problems, own up to their mistakes
without being asked about them first, and know that you’re there to make things better
without resorting to punitive measures.
• As a manager, always address the problem, not the person. Work with employees to find
solutions, and share your quality goals so that they know what you’re trying to achieve.
Remember, some of your best quality and process improvement suggestions come from the
coalface – but if you don’t have open lines of communication, you’re never going to hear
those suggestions.
Break Down the Barriers Between
Departments
People in research, design, sales, and production must work as a team, to
foresee problems of production and in use that may be encountered with
the product or service.
• Build the "internal customer" concept – recognize that each department
or function serves other departments that use their output.
• Build a shared vision.
• Use cross-functional teamwork to build understanding and reduce
adversarial relationships.
• Focus on collaboration and consensus instead of compromise.
Create and describe own organisational structure
Break Down the Barriers Between
Departments
• When people work as a team, they can achieve more than they would on their own.
Although your company will have departments, they can’t work in isolation. If product
designers never work with production, and if production doesn’t work with sales, your
organization is never going to reach its potential.
• True, your designer isn’t about to become a salesperson, but without input from the
product’s designer, your salesperson won’t be able to sell effectively.
• What are the product’s special features? How do they meet customer needs? And since
your sales team is in direct contact with customers all day, every day, shouldn’t product
designers talk to the sales team before they even begin work on a new product design?
• Meanwhile, the production also needs to be part of the loop. Does the production team
foresee any problems in producing the new design? By working together, departments
can spot possible problems and eliminate them before they ever occur.
• Deming recommends that departments recognize, communicate with, and serve the
departments that are the “clients” of their work as well as keeping end-users of products
or services in mind.
Ditch Slogans and Communicate
With Individuals
Such exhortations only create adversarial relationships, as the bulk of the
causes of low quality and low productivity belong to the system and thus
lie beyond the power of the work force.
• Let people know exactly what you want – don't make them guess.
"Excellence in service" is short and memorable, but what does it mean?
How is it achieved? The message is clearer in a slogan like "Always be
striving to be better."
• However, don't let words and nice-sounding phrases replace effective
leadership. Outline your expectations, and then praise people face-to-
face for doing good work.
Create your own list of quality expectations
Ditch Slogans and Communicate
With Individuals
• Slogans sound so nifty, but do they have any real effect? “We put the customer first” is a typical
example. It sounds great, but what is its practical meaning? How does it apply to every worker in
your internal value chain?
• How about “Let’s try harder”? If you’re already doing your level best, you aren’t going to be happy
about being told to make some mysterious change to the way you work.
• Deming is alive to the resentments that generalized catch-phrases and exhortations to ever better
performance can cause. He points out that any productivity or quality problems you face won’t be
fixed with a slogan. Instead, you need to look into business process improvement. If your processes
work well, then your business is already delivering good quality and working productively.
• We also can’t expect generalized goals to become personal ones. Deming recommends setting
individualized goals for every person, and along with the new goals, there needs to be a roadmap
that shows them how to achieve them.
• Simply put, reducing defects means finding out where they occur and how the process allows them
to occur. Increasing productivity means identifying obstacles to productivity and removing them. Use
tools like Fishbone Diagrams to help you get down to root causes before you suggest solutions.
Eliminate numerical quotas for the
workforce
and numerical goals for management
Eliminate management by objective. Eliminate management by
numbers, numerical goals. Substitute leadership.
• Look at how processes are carried out, not just numerical targets.
Deming said that production targets can encourage high output but
result in low quality.
• Provide support and resources so that both production levels and
quality are high and achievable.
• Measure the process rather than the people behind the process.
How can you measure the success of your new organisational structure
and business processes in it? What’s the value of your processes?
Eliminate numerical quotas for the
workforce
and numerical goals for management
• It’s true that you need to have some numerical targets, but for too many companies, setting a quota
becomes a replacement for good leadership. In Deming’s opinion, high production targets make
quality suffer. For instance, if you are production line worker and you get paid per piece, you will
finish as many pieces as possible. You are working as fast as you can, but are you working as well as
you can?
• Again, Deming urges us to focus on processes. A well-designed process should deliver the results we
want. If it doesn’t, then the process needs attention. He reminds us that good leadership will
encourage people to feel proud of their work. They already want to perform well. It’s up to
management to create an environment in which they can do so.
• Do numbers go out the window? They do not. But instead of measuring the people who do the
work with quotas, the numbers should be used to evaluate the process.
• Some thinkers point out that numbers can serve as a motivating factor, particularly in sales
environments, but Management by Objectives should be approached with caution. When you set a
numerical target, are you encouraging people to take shortcuts that will affect quality? What
behaviour would you prefer to motivate? Remember, what you measure is what you get.
• Finally, if you want to set a numerical goal, be very sure you know how your business can reach it.
Without a plan and a method, numbers are meaningless.
Revolver - The Formula
End of Week 8 Practice