Do We Still Have the Patience for Quality Improvement?

Four experts weigh in

The foundations of the quality industry go back decades, centuries, even millennia. In that course of time, men and women of various backgrounds and nationalities contributed wisdom distilled from their hard-earned experiences to help develop the tools and techniques that help good organizations become great.

This consensus of opinion insists that quality improvement only takes root when top management is actively engaged and the culture of the organization can be modified—two things that usually go hand-in-hand. If you think that this requires patience, you are correct. True culture change that lasts and reinvents an organization rarely happens quickly. But in today’s “give-it-to-me-now” business world, do we still have the patience for the delayed gratification of a properly implemented quality improvement journey as it was laid down by our performance excellence forebears?

The question

That is the question at the heart of a comment we recently received from a loyal reader, Prashant Swaroop, who works for a leading information technology company headquartered in India. Swaroop is a quality assurance engineer at his firm, a role which he has occupied for the last 12 years.

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Comments

We Can't Afford to be Patient Anymore

Ask anyone in healthcare, patients are impatient and with good reason. Healthcare is still sluggish and error-prone. If we don't accelerate the rate of improvement in healthcare, the costs will cripple us.

As Pyzdek said: We need to modernize our approach. As Wheeler said: It's actually quite simple. As Micklewright said: We need to take a hard look at ourselves.

Instead of the one-size-fits-all Green Belt and Black Belt trainings currently deployed, maybe we need to tailor training to the company and it's problems. Teaching people things they don't need is a form of overproduction and waste.

As I discussed in the Four Hour Black Belt, we can change the approach to deliver results, not training, and achieve deep, lasting understanding of improvement methods as a byproduct of solving real problems.

Customers expect suppliers to be better, faster and cheaper than they were before.

Can Lean Six Sigma expect to be excluded from this requirement?

Your piece June 6th

Hi Mr. Richman. I'd suggest you read my piece on CERM Magazine titled "The Risks of Excessive Quality". Thank you.

(Sigh...) There's nothing new here

Here's an article I wrote almost five years ago for QD:

http://www.qualitydigest.com/inside/twitter-ed/pareto-principle-coming-…

Anything sound familiar?

I'm hardly blowing my own horn, but, rather, making people aware of the outstanding work of Ron Snee -- a statistician who has been thinking about such things for years (as in, early '80s). Regarding "big data," he and Roger Hoerl wrote a wonderful article for a recent Quality Progress that anyone should read before diving into the depths of:

Continuous - Recording of - Administrative - Procedures. (Work out the acronym for yourselves).

As a matter of fact, anything written by those two is worth reading.

Davis Balestracci