All Features
Donald J. Wheeler
One thing burned into the brains of those who survive a statistics class is that you have to specify an alpha-level before you do anything statistical. And when it comes to statistical inference, they are correct. But just what does the alpha-level represent? What does it mean in practice? Read on…
Robert Fangmeyer
What does healthcare in the United States need? Well, according to a report released May 29, 2014, by the President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology (PCAST), U.S. healthcare organizations need “systems engineering.”
In their letter to President Obama, PCAST co-chairs John Holdren…
Jens R. Woinowski
I recently stumbled upon the book by S.J. Scott, Habit Stacking: 97 Small Life Changes That Take Five Minutes or Less (Archangel Ink, 2014). The concept is very simple, but powerful. Instead of a classical review, this is an “in a nutshell” version.
The idea of habit stacking is this: 1. You can…
Mike Richman
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…
MIT Management Executive Education
What stands between you and the more productive version of you—the person who meets personal and professional goals on a daily, monthly, and yearly basis?
Robert Pozen provides concrete answers to this question in his new course, Maximizing Your Personal Productivity, offered July 15–16, 2014, by…
Sonal Sinha
While public U.S. companies were preparing to meet their first conflict minerals reporting deadline, their European counterparts were taking their first steps toward implementing a conflict minerals law.
On March 5, 2014, the European Commission proposed a draft regulation to stop the sale and…
Carly Barry
It’s all too easy to make mistakes involving statistics. Powerful statistical software can remove a lot of the difficulty surrounding statistical calculation, reducing the risk of mathematical errors, but correctly interpreting the results of an analysis can be even more challenging.
No one knows…
Miriam Boudreaux
I frequently get asked questions from clients and readers about how to handle the everyday maintenance of a useful and compliant ISO 9001 quality management system (QMS). I thought I’d address a couple of those questions that I feel many people can relate to.
Numbering schemes: would a document…
David Fenn
For those who have already heard of Disney’s creative strategy, you may not be aware that the romantic notion of it coming directly from Walt Disney himself is actually untrue. The first mention of the dreamer, the realist, and the critic was taken from an interview with two of Disney’s original…
Bruce Hamilton
Aconversation with a lean friend reminded me of a story that I shared four years ago. It dealt with the consequences of crazy measures and how lack of management oversight will allow these measures to persist indefinitely. Absentee decision makers passing down absurd directives... sound familiar…
Lean Math With Mark Hamel
The plan vs. actual chart is one of the most powerful and simple visual process performance metrics. In fact, it’s a sort of Swiss Army knife of charts in that it not only provides insight into process performance but also, by the virtue of its comment field, begs and shares information as to when…
Jack Dunigan
I have always loved working with military people. Their training firmly builds within them a “can do” mentality and a fixation on mission objectives.
One of the best employee associates I ever had was a retired Air Force lieutenant colonel. He could always be depended on to get jobs out the door…
Patrick Runkel
These days, my memory isn’t what it used to be. Besides that, my memory isn’t what it used to be. But my incurable case of CRS (can’t remember stuff) is not nearly as bad as that of the exponential distribution.
When modeling failure data for reliability analysis, the exponential distribution is…
Not knowing the answer to the question posed in the title of this article has led many medical device manufacturers to undertake expensive and unnecessary retesting of their previously certified products.
In Annex 1 of the “Medical Device Directive 93/42/EEC—Essential Requirements—Section 2,” the…
University of Arizona
More than 25 years ago, an abandoned NASA spacecraft fulfilled its mission, fell silent, and has since been hurtling around the sun, somewhere between the orbits of Earth and Mars. Now, a University of Arizona engineering student is trying to wake it up.
Jacob Gold, an undergraduate student…
Michael A. Hughes
Your quality management system (QMS) documents for AS9100, ISO 9001 or any other standard for that matter, do not have to be complicated. Why create volumes of wordy procedures that employees will probably never read? And even if they do, they certainly won’t understand.
As auditors and quality…
Georgia Manufacturing Extension Program
In 1963, two paintbrush salesmen changed the process for coating artist canvases. They went from preparing the canvas by hand to a mass production process. By purchasing a textile machine, rolling the fabric, and applying gesso to the fabric continuously instead of sheet by sheet, Tara Materials…
Matthew E. May
It’s been well over a decade since Dan Pink predicted that the macro trend of automation would change the nature of just about everything in his bestselling book A Whole New Mind (Riverside Books, 2006 edition). The context of his message revolved around work, with the central idea being to take a…
Kevin Meyer
I’ve been following the panting exuberance of big data apostles for the past few years, rolling my eyes at most of it. Sure, it can be interesting, but maybe my age is showing when I say, “So what?” to most of it.
What finally pushed me over the edge enough to comment on it was a tweet I saw from…
Howard Sklamberg
To keep the food supply safe, have safe, effective, and high quality medical products, and decrease the harms of tobacco product use, we have to work with the rest of the world.
As the Food and Drug Administration’s Deputy Commissioner for Global Regulatory Operations and Policy (GO), I oversee…
Quality Transformation With David Schwinn
This month’s column is about a recent trip to New York and what I learned along the way. About a month ago, we attended the National Band and Orchestra festival at Carnegie Hall. The high school orchestra our granddaughter, Claire, plays in was invited to participate, and we were not about to miss…
Umberto Tunesi
Let’s consider for a moment the discipline we need to be quality professionals. It might take years to master our profession, but even when we have, we must not stop practicing and exercising it. Rather like being linguists or musicians, we must keep performing quality to keep ourselves fit for it…
Enterprise Innovation Institute at Georgia Tech
Two major noncommercial health information technology organizations are working together in a new vendor-neutral health IT innovation network designed to stimulate development of new ideas and shorten the time required to bring new solutions into practice.
The Department of Veterans Affairs (VA)…
Jim Clifton
Companies seem to try everything imaginable to fix their workplaces, except the only thing that matters: Naming the right person manager.
Leaders go to seminars, hire consultants, and employ a long list of interventions—competencies, 360s, and so forth. I don’t think any of them work. What’s…
Michelle LaBrosse, Kristen Medina
“We gain strength, and courage, and confidence by each experience in which we really stop to look fear in the face... we must do that which we think we cannot.” —Eleanor Roosevelt
When I think back to the moments that have shaped me to be who I am today, I don’t credit the times of relaxation and…
