ASQ Section 503 News

ASQ Harrisburg Section 503

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Section News and Events

REPORT FROM THE WORLD CONFERENCE MAY 22-26, 2010

BY: G. M. Gurican, Chair, Section 503

My Fellow Members,

This was my first ASQ World Conference in the nearly ten years that I have been a member of Section 503, or any ASQ conference for that matter, and I must say that I was extremely impressed. First, there were four (4) embedded conferences wrapped into one event, including: 1.) The World Conference on Quality & Improvement; 2.) The Institute for Continual Quality Improvement; 3.) The Institute for Software Excellence; and 4.) The Quality in Sustainability Conference – with topical tracks which could meet the needs of a wide variety of members both nationally and internationally. While the sessions which I attended personally were from Conferences 1 & 2 above and involved Healthcare topics and Quality tools, what was most impressive was the high caliber of Keynote Speakers. Let me relate to you two of four presentations, which if you were there would have blown you away!

First up, was Ford’s “Comeback Kid” Mr. Alan Mulally, President and CEO of Ford Motor Company, who spoke

openly and candidly about how his 37 years of quality experience at Boeing Aircraft company helped him at Ford. Mr. Mulally a disciple of Jurand, Drucker and Deming for many years and student of the Toyota Production System applied his “lessons learned” which enabled Ford to start making some of the highest quality passenger vehicles even produced in America affordably and profitably. He applied the “Stop-light” color coding charts long used in heavily regulated industries for reporting within the corporation, as well as Lean 6-Sigma principles. He was also very proud of the fact that Ford did not have to rely upon any Taxpayer dollars in the form of support or bailout, and the audience was very appreciative of that fact, as well. Now Ford’s past success in its truck line has resulted in similar success in passenger vehicles including hybrids which far exceed the mileage and capabilities of its competitor’s products. Alan’s key to success is that all stakeholders know the business plan, and that communications is such that everyone knows it by way of using every form of media available across the enterprise. Alan is convinced that while Toyota lost their way by growing too fast, that they will make a U-turn and become a better company for it, as well as strengthen the entire industry. For more insights into the “Mind of Mulally” read the FORTUNE article published May 25, 2009. The Ford Mission is: “One Team, One Plan, and One Goal” to attain the original Vision of Ford: “To Open the

Highways of America to ALL Americans,” making the automobile affordable to everyone.

Another Keynote Address was from Sister Mary Jean Ryan, FSM the Chair and CEO of SSM Health Care, which was the first H/C system recipient in the nation of the Malcolm Baldrige National Quality Award for performance excellence and quality achievement in healthcare. A Franciscan Sister of Mary for more than 40 years Sr. Mary Jean Ryan related the founding of her order of nuns and discussed SSMHC’s 23 year history in its commitment to Continuous Quality Improvement (CQI) leading up to the receipt of the award. The mission of SSHMC is to provide every patient with “Exceptional Care.” To achieve the award took the submittal of 5 applications, but Sr. Mary indicated that it was the first that was the most revealing and helpful to their journey as it uncovered many gaps in the kind of care delivery which would eventually become an outstanding exceptional care experience.

THE MEMBER LEADER SESSIONS (Sat. 5/22/2010):

Saturday started with the "Ideas to Action" gathering (ITAG). I estimated that about 500 member leaders gathered to address strategic issues in a structured, but informal way, with everyone in the group focusing its collective energy on two big topics: 1.) Collaboration; 2.) Global Presence, and, 3.) The ASQ Business Strategy as it relates to Innovation - each having a set of questions to spur on the group in thinking about solutions.

Collaboration: The questions –

What factors generate success in collaborative activities? And,
What barriers currently prevent ASQ member units (Divisions and Sections) from achieving collaborative success?

As you might imagine, several themes emerged. Success comes from:

Ø Solid and understood goals, teambuilding, mentorship, and active member and leadership participation.

Ø A sense of urgency that the goal is worth undertaking, with a focus on collaboration with cultural sensitivity and diversity of opinions; and,

Ø Good marketing for acceptance of the resulting ideas and plans.

It was clearly understood that our ASQ member leaders still have a long way in perfecting these principles. Barriers include lack of transparency and poor communications, both of which can create distrust; and additionally time constraints, understanding roles, and training issues. ASQ has had the tendency to use the top-down leadership models (often called command and control) to implement projects and resulting change. However, our member expectations have changed with technology advancements and a more

collaborative effort is needed that builds consensus with operational goals to achieve strategic results.

Global presence: Our Executive Director, Paul Borowski, reminded us of the top three areas of focus for our limited Society resources: Delivery of Education – everywhere and many ways, thus the creation of the ASQ Knowledge Center; Delivery and stewards of knowledge – to make theory and tools available to all, in part through the ASQ Learning Institute (browsable LMS catalog and website); and, expansion to meet the needs of a Global community – to better embrace the world.

ASQ Business Strategy: The questions –

If every ASQ stakeholder was living the Vision, what would ASQ look like?
What products and services could ASQ offer to support the Vision that would be: a.) user-friendly, b.) practical, c.) high quality, d.) customizable, and e.) innovative?

The answers, of course, were quite varied; however, there seemed to be a central theme – ASQ needs to be involved at the grass roots level in America educational processes to make quality more transparent, more easily accessible with respect to available tools, less expensive for members, and with an expansion of educational methodologies, e.g., consulting services for solutions assistance, an “Annie’s List” of professional available, more webinars and on-line tools. Some of the top “innovations” included: “Q-Tube” (an ASQ U-tube); Certified Speakers; a seat at the table in resolving global events/crises (Gulf Oil Spill), an improved Vision statement that is easily remembered and recognizable; and, improved training tools for everyone.

HEALTH/CARE DIVISION (HCD) MEETING (Sun. 5/23/2010)

While I am a member of both the Quality Management Division (with 28-29,000 members), it was a pleasure for me to spend 4-hours attending the HCD meeting (3800 members and growing) on Sunday afternoon. The meeting was lead by Dr. Joe Fortuna, retired, and the current Division Chair.

The goals the HCD are as follows:

Ø Focus on Patient-Customer systems to improve efficiency and efficacy of Global Healthcare systems;

Ø Dissemination of information related to applications, research, and innovations in quality theory and practice in healthcare;

Ø Formation of learning partnerships to advance knowledge of H/C quality and promotion of vigorous education and training programs for all providers; and,

Ø Support of all members and especially those in allied fields.

Meeting Highlights:

1. Overview of 2009-2010: The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly

a. The Good

i. Launched Process to Develop a HC Quality Manager Certification Exam (John Harrision, Laura Kinney, Rod Munro) with QMD and ASQ HQ support

ii. Division was part of ASQ’s health Reform Effort

1. Wrote HR White Paper And Comments on Stimulus Regulations

2. Organized the 21^st Century HC Caucus Mtg in DC

iii. Maintenance of membership numbers

iv. Nominated Don Berwick (IHI) for ASQ DSM award

v. Executed MOU with QMD for mutual support (Jim Levett)

vi. Filled Leadership positions for 2010-2011

vii. Kudos (Other than those above)

1. Carla Konzel and Rod Munro: HCD World Conference Booth setup and staffing & organization of multi-divisional reception

b. The Bad

i. Minimal growth in membership

ii. Timely communication with members

iii. VOC: low survey response rates

iv. HCD Conference attendance

v. HCD QMP – did not make goals last year

c. The Ugly: Overall Division Operations and Infrastructure – work is needed on improvement.

2. HCD Goals for 2010-2011

A. Develop and implement an implementable HCD business plan

B. Improve the infrastructure of the HCD to improve its value to all of its customers

Improve and coordinate member and partner communications

3. Planned HCD Activities for 2010-2011

a Certification (Kinney/Munro)

CMQ/OE to be modified for HC, new certification. Survey responses support certification. Will do focus groups using third party of job analysis. Then create BoK. Approved by ASQ certification board 5/22/10 to go forward. Target maybe available in 2010.

b QIHC (Leano)

2011 – back to QIHC with World Qual Conf. Develop conference committee.

Possible Theme – Do no waste

Separate (from WCQI) call for papers by mid-June

c HCD Officers’ Retreat (Fortuna)

Small, many by phone

d HCD Gap Analysis

Rod Munro to conduct gap analysis between the HCD and other sections. Will report to HCD retreat in June.

e HCD QMP:

Janice Tucker will assist HCD QMP Co-Chairs M. Carbonne and Y.Claudio as they develop this important document

f Regional Extension Center Liasion (Fortuna)

Regional extension centers (RECs) to help primary care practices with health IT implemetntation and achievement of meaningful use of information technology. May be a role for the HCD in working to prepare the RECs for their roles.

g Section/Division Synergies (Fortuna)

Fortuna and Konzel are working with Joni Judd to first survey section chairs in re: how they believe the HCD can assist them and then develop tools and methods to do that. One problem: the HCD does not know who their members are in sections, sections don’t know who HCD members are

h HCD Partnerships (Fortuna)

– fortuna is exploring relationships with other health organizations such as the American College of Health Executives (ACHE) and the American College of Physician Executives (ACPE).

Two New Certifications Poised for Release

ASQ will be offering new lean and Master Black Belt certifications in the coming months. The lean certification has three levels: bronze certification emphasizes the tactical aspects of lean; silver is based on integration of lean; and the gold focuses on lean's strategic facets. The first administration of the lean certification will be May 23, prior to the ASQ World Conference on Quality and Improvement.

The Master Black Belt certification is currently being finalized by the ASQ Certification Board. ASQ’s Friday Fast Facts will provide for more information regarding these new certifications in the future. In the meantime, check out ASQ’s website for other certifications that are offered.

http://www.asq.org/certification/index.html

ASQ has joined the Lean Certification Alliance, enabling your society the opportunity to offer the certification exam. The Lean Certification program was launched in 2006 by the Society of Manufacturing Engineers, the Association for Manufacturing Excellence and The Shingo Prize for Operational Excellence in response to the market need brought forward by their members and constituents.

Members Reaching Out to Haitian Citizens

The recent earthquake in Haiti has many ASQ members asking for ways they can help. There are many worthwhile organizations helping the survivors with medical and food supplies. Many people have already elected to donate to the American Red Cross or the Yele Haiti Foundation by texting. ASQ member Fabrice Bouchereau is very involved with the organization Sow a Seed, which is also taking online donations (www.sowaseedonline.org). Another organization raising funds is Youthaiti (www.youthhaiti.org), dedicated to helping Haitian youth. For other organizations, visit the helpful MSNBC list (www.msnbc.msn.com).

Congratulations to the 0503 Harrisburg Section on achieving TQ and Silver Excellence!

As I'm sure you know...

Total Quality (TQ) reflects the section's ability to achieve its goals.

Gold / Silver / Bronze Excellence reflects the section's having achieved above average results regarding the key goals of:

a) Retention (as indicated by the period end Section Growth report)

b) Member Satisfaction, and

c) Member Loyalty -- both as indicated by results of the Customer Measurement Survey (CMS)

· Above average on all three = Gold

· Above average on any two = Silver

· Above average on any one = Bronze

For Information, results for all of Region 05 are:

v 0502 Baltimore TQ/Gold

v 0503 Harrisburg TQ/Silver

v 0508 S. Jersey TQ/Bronze

v 0510 Reading TQ/Gold

Again, congratulations.

Eric

J. Eric Whichard, Regional Director – Region 5

Our Section was one of 77 sections with this honor out of 250 sections in ASQ. Four Sections in Region 5 received this award.

Total Quality Award is achieved when a Member Unit reaches at least 75%

of the goals set forth in the Member Unit’s Annual Business Plan from the previous year. Required

documentation needs to be submitted to the Member Unit Leadership Committee, the Regional

Director for Sections, QMP Committee Representative for Divisions and QMP@asq.org by

September 1.

Section Officer Nominees for FY 2011

Chair: – Greg Gurican,

Manager – Nursing Quality Management & Innovation

WellSpan Health – York Hospital

Center for Nursing Excellence

Co-Chair/Chair-elect: - Scott Crandall,

Director of Quality and Advanced Technology

McClarin Plastics Inc.

Treasurer: - Eugene (Gene) M. Schwartz, CQA

Senior Field Specialist - New Jersey / Philadelphia Area
Underwriters Laboratories Inc.
Field Service Department

Secretary: - John Reibson,

Researcher

Penn State University

Milton S. Hershey Medical Center

COMMITTEE CHAIRS:

Bylaws: - David M. Little, ASQ Fellow, CQE, CQA
Deputy Regional Director, Region #5

Programs: - Co-Chairs: William (Bill) K. Gordon, and Fred Hammond

Arrangements: - OPEN

All remaining Committee Chair positions are filled

Sustaining a Business, Securing a Future

ASQ is the U.S. secretariat of the Technical Advisory Group (TAG) contributing to the development of an International Standard, ISO 26000: Guidance on Social Responsibility. The Draft International Standard (DIS) was issued September 14 under the governing body International Organization for Standardization (ISO) in Geneva, Switzerland, which expects to publish the final ISO 26000 in mid-to-late 2010. It is available on Standards Central.

As activities are realigned to better deal with the economic pressures of the day, organizations are looking for best practices that will help secure their future. Of course many of the activities and programs they are researching relate to cost reduction. Those activities can lead to short term gain, it is not a long-term solution—for instance, instituting short cuts and supplier changes lead to rejected product, re-work, and customer loss—it is not systemic and it doesn’t lead to innovative problem solving. You can read more in the ASQ News Media Room.

ASQ, Thought Leaders Offer Perspective on Future of Quality

Business, industry, and non-governmental organization leaders addressed quality opportunities and crises in the 21st century in a dialogue, hosted by ASQ and the Baldrige National Quality Program at the National Institute of Standards and Technology in Gaithersburg, Md. A full report of the June 2009 event is now available at www.asq.org/knowledge-center/future-of-quality-dialogue.html

Jim Pasquali appointed ASQ Deputy Director

Keystone Alliance for Performance Excellence

Visit the website at www.keystonealliance.com for current information.

Quality Tips & Tools:	Gantt Chart	FMEA Tips	Organizational Success	Scatter Diagram	Spaghetti Map
Quality Tips & Tools:	QFD

Gantt Chart

Also Called: milestones chart, project bar chart, activity chart.

Description

A Gantt chart is a bar chart that shows the tasks of a project, when each must take place and how long each will take. As the project progresses, bars are shaded to show which tasks have been completed. People assigned to each task also can be represented.

When to Use Gantt Charts

When scheduling and monitoring tasks within a project.
When communicating plans or status of a project.
When the steps of the project or process, their sequence and their duration are known.

When it’s not necessary to show which tasks depend on completion of previous tasks.

Gantt Chart Basic Procedure

Construction

Identify tasks:

Identify the tasks needed to complete the project.
Identify key milestones in the project by brainstorming a list, or by drawing a flowchart, storyboard or arrow diagram for the project.
Identify the time required for each task.
Identify the sequence: Which tasks must be finished before a following task can begin, and which can happen simultaneously? Which tasks must be completed before each milestone?

Draw a horizontal time axis along the top or bottom of a page. Mark it off in an appropriate scale for the length of the tasks (days or weeks).
Down the left side of the page, write each task and milestone of the project in order. For events that happen at a point in time (such as a presentation), draw a diamond under the time the event must happen. For activities that occur over a period of time (such as developing a plan or holding a series of interviews), draw a bar that spans the appropriate times on the timeline: Align the left end of the bar with the time the activity begins, and align the right end with the time the activity concludes. Draw just the outlines of the bars and diamonds; don’t fill them in.
Check that every task of the project is on the chart.

Using the Chart

As events and activities take place, fill in the diamonds and bars to show completion. For tasks in progress, estimate how far along you are and fill in that much of the bar.
Place a vertical marker to show where you are on the timeline. If the chart is posted on the wall, for example, an easy way to show the current time is with a heavy dark string hung vertically across the chart with two thumbtacks.

Gantt Chart Example

The figure below shows a Gantt chart used to plan a benchmarking study. Twelve weeks are indicated on the timeline. There are two milestone events, presentations of plans for the project and for the new process developed in the study. The rest of the tasks are activities that stretch over periods of time.

Gantt Chart Example

The chart shows the status at Thursday of the sixth week. The team has finished seven tasks through identifying key practices, measures and documentation.

This is a hectic time on the project, with three time-consuming activities that must happen simultaneously:

The team estimates it is one-fourth finished with identifying benchmark partners and scheduling visits; one-fourth of that bar is filled.
Team members have not yet begun to identify the current state.
They are halfway through collecting public data, which puts them slightly ahead of schedule for that task.

They are behind schedule for the first two of these tasks and ahead of schedule for the third. Perhaps they need to reallocate their workforce to be able to cover the three activities simultaneously.

There is a fourth activity that could be happening now (develop benchmark questions), but it is not urgent yet. Eventually the team will have to allocate resources to cover it too, before visits can begin.

Gantt Chart Considerations

Sometimes Gantt charts are drawn with additional columns showing details such as the amount of time the task is expected to take, resources or skill level needed or person responsible.
Beware of identifying reviews or approvals as events unless they really will take place at a specific time, such as a meeting. Reviews and approvals often can take days or weeks.
The process of constructing the Gantt chart forces group members to think clearly about what must be done to accomplish their goal. Keeping the chart updated as the project proceeds helps manage the project and head off schedule problems.
It can be useful to indicate the critical points on the chart with bold or colored outlines of the bars.
Computer software can simplify constructing and updating a Gantt chart.

Excerpted from Nancy R. Tague’s The Quality Toolbox, Second Edition, ASQ Quality Press, 2004, pages 271-274.

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Failure Mode and Effects Analysis (FMEA) Tips & Tricks
By Ron Atkinson, ASQ past president

FMEA is a step-by-step approach for identifying all possible failures in a design, a manufacturing or assembly process, or a product or service. Keep in mind the following tips to make sure you and your organization succeed when applying FMEA.

§ Give initial FMEA training on an object that is common to the students and not part of their work processes. That way they can concentrate on the concepts. Move on to actual work processes when the concepts are understood.

§ The logical sequence is to do Design FMEA training followed by Process FMEA training. It is actually easier to grasp the concepts by doing the Process FMEA first and then transfer the concepts to the Design FMEA.

§ Failure is the inability of the item or activity being studied to perform its intended function. This can happen even if the part or process does not 'break.'

§ FMEA evaluates potential failures. An FMEA does not mean that the failure has occurred in the past or will occur in the future; it means that it could occur.

§ The cause of the failure is often given as the potential failure mode. This creates a problem and results in confusion when identifying the cause. Example: People see a tire without air and state that the failure mode is a nail in the tire. The tire losing air pressure slowly is the potential failure mode and a nail in the tire is the cause.

§ Better definition of the requirements of the design or process make the rest of the FMEA easier.

For more hot topics and resources on quality in manufacturing, visit the ASQ Knowledge Center .

These tips first appeared in the ASQ Automotive Division's Automotive Excellence summer 2008 newsletter.

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Quality professionals must cultivate success in their ‘organizational gardens’

--Excerpt from Quality Progress, November 2008—

Quality professionals are constantly confronting practical questions that are always specific to the organizations they serve: How do we grow our quality efforts? How can I keep my organization’s approach to quality vibrant? How do I keep the leadership focused on quality? Should we be changing the focus of our quality program? How do I transplant a successful quality endeavor from one part of the organization into another?

Many quality professionals understand that the answers to these questions require the ability to envision their organizations as living entities, existing within their understanding of systems theory. This requires quality professionals to function along the lines of organizational gardeners who cultivate their organizations so they can produce beauty on many levels.

A basic approach

Regardless of whether an individual is an organizational gardener in a manufacturing, healthcare, service, government, education or not-for-profit setting, the task of tending to an organization can be difficult because it’s easy to lose sight of four basic gardening principles:

1. Expect the seasons. Start with the premise that everything changes and that no action you or your organization takes will ever be permanent. Your task is to study your organization as it exists right now, to think about how it can be improved, and then to perform the necessary pruning, spraying, transplanting and other actions.

2. It is all an interconnected ecosystem. Each organization is a complex system of interconnected parts that exists within an even larger ecosystem of social, economic and political conditions. The term "unintended consequences" is just another way of saying we didn’t think things through from a systems perspective before we implemented change.

3. Don’t spray everything. Just because you own a set of garden tools does not mean you are a gardener. It is important to have a variety of tools and even more important to know when to use them and when not to use them. Don’t spray the herbicide on everything in sight just because you have it.

Most quality professionals have experienced a time when their organization went overboard with a particular tool and attempted to apply it in an uncritical manner. This causes cynicism about quality simply responding to the fad of the month.

4. Get dirty. Organizational gardening requires a lot of hard work and the mastery of a complex body of knowledge (BoK). This mastery only comes through a process known as praxis, in which we use our understanding of theory to inform our practice and use our practical experiences to reflect on and refine our understanding of theory.

Alter your perception

We sometimes get in a rut when it comes to how we approach organizational issues and the perspective from which we understand organizational gardening. Research into how the mind functions suggests our perceptions about quality and our preferences for approaches might be influenced by our brain preference, leading us to ask whether we are left-brained or right-brained gardeners.

For the purposes of helping quality professionals think about getting dirty as organizational gardeners, it could be useful to look at quality methods simultaneously from two dimensions. One dimension would organize principles and methods according to whether they establish and promote order or whether they engender change, as Whitehead might suggest. The other dimension considers whether the principles and methods are linear and orderly (the left-brain preference) or relational in terms of complex systems (the right-brain preference). Figure 1 provides a matrix of the BoK from this perspective.

The greatest challenge for the quality practitioner as organizational gardener might be facilitating the movement from one quadrant to another when the needs of the organization require a change in thinking and action. While the detailed, day-to-day digging in the organizational dirt in the conformance quadrant is essential, it is equally important at times to move over to the assessment quadrant and evaluate the relative beauty of the garden and decide what to uproot, trim or fertilize next.

When it comes to promoting change, quality professionals show a marked preference for working in the orderly change quadrant. Remember, the orderly introduction of change (improvement) needs to be balanced by the work in the conformance and assessment quadrants. So where does the right-brained, relational approach to promote change fit in?

Ethical dilemma

When quality professionals are dealing with macro-level quality issues in their organizations while functioning as organizational gardeners, there are some ethical considerations to ponder.

When working within a system, there is no neutrality. Quality practitioners cannot park themselves in a safe, neutral part of the system. That’s because they are part of the system. From Whitehead’s perspective, every action we take is either going to promote greater order or promote change.

Don’t be afraid to dig in

There is no shortage of quality practitioners who can conduct an audit, lead a group through a Six Sigma process improvement routine or plot control charts, even though these specific areas require expert skill and knowledge. Today’s challenge goes back to the issues that prompted Philip Crosby to establish the Quality College, that motivated Joseph Juran to establish the Juran Center, and that called Deming to teach countless workshops at George Washington University.

All three of these quality leaders were trying to help everyone see quality from a systems perspective and impart a breadth of understanding that could enable us to nurture and grow quality in organizations for the betterment of society. The garden is calling, and it won’t wait. You probably have some organizational gardening of your own to do. Dig in.

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Scatter Diagram
The scatter diagram graphs pairs of numerical data, with one variable on each axis, to look for a relationship between them. If the variables are correlated, the points will fall along a line or curve. The better the correlation, the tighter the points will hug the line.

When to Use a Scatter Diagram

When you have paired numerical data.
When your dependent variable may have multiple values for each value of your independent variable.
When trying to determine whether the two variables are related, such as…

When trying to identify potential root causes of problems.
After brainstorming causes and effects using a fishbone diagram, to determine objectively whether a particular cause and effect are related.
When determining whether two effects that appear to be related both occur with the same cause.
When testing for autocorrelation before constructing a control chart.

Read more about Scatter Diagram on the ASQ website in the Quality Tools section. It’s an excerpt from Nancy R. Tague’s The Quality Toolbox, Second Edition, ASQ Quality Press, 2004, pages 471-474.

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Spaghetti Map
In this month’s article, “Tackle Waste, Inefficiency, and Variation in Healthcare Using the Spaghetti Map,” Anantha Kollengode describes the tool as, “a simple Lean Six Sigma visual tool that provides a powerful overview of a process. It helps in mapping the flow of people and material, delivering care or service in an organization.”

The spaghetti map is a simple Lean Six Sigma visual tool that provides a powerful overview of a process. It helps in mapping the flow of people and material, delivering care or service in an organization. The pathways taken by people working in the process and the use of supplies when drawn on a paper often resembles cooked spaghetti, hence the name. The spaghetti map helps in quantifying the distances traveled, in addition to helping to surface the bottlenecks, poor layout, workarounds and inefficiencies in the process.

You can find the complete article at: http://www.sixsigmaiq.com/article.cfm?externalid=1874

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QFD – 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. Here is how QFD and its house of quality can be used to better schedule and scope audits.

One of the guiding principles of quality is cross functionality. This principle is embedded in many current quality management standards. For instance, ANSI/ISO/ASQ Q9001-2000 says the following:

“The application of a system of processes within an organization, together with the identification and interactions of these processes, and their management, can be referred to as the ‘process approach.’

“An advantage of the process approach is the ongoing control that it provides over the linkage between the individual processes within the system of processes, as well as over their combination and interaction.”

How do you audit interaction? In Figure 1’s example, the columns are the general departments at most companies (or they could be specific processes). The roof becomes all the interactions between any two departments.

There are eight departments in this example, making the number of two-way interactions 28 (8C2). With eight departments, the roof would be made up of 28 interactions. Is it necessary to audit all 28 interactions? Probably not. You can always do a Pareto chart and audit the six vital few interactions. Which six? Probably by consensus we can agree on four or five interactions of the six vital few.

Not only do we have four bad (–) interactions, we also have four good (+) ones. You can audit for objective evidence of the bad interactions to begin a process of determining root cause and implementing effective corrective action. We can audit the positive interactions to collect “what we do well” information (the appreciative inquiry method).

For example, you can audit the bad interaction between the engineering and production departments to objectively shed light on the problem. You can audit how the engineering department produces and delivers standards to the production department. You can audit the production department on how useful it finds the engineering department’s standards. A revealing exercise is to see if the supplier output is equal to the customer input, as illustrated in Figure 2.

As a positive example, you can audit the interaction between the HR and production departments to identify something you want to continue and perhaps replicate. You can audit HR on how it hires production workers. Perhaps you would find that HR goes to observe the actual work environment. You can audit how the production department’s new hires perform. Per-haps you would discover that HR receives feedback one month later on how a new hire is working out.

Auditing interactions would require you to expand the scope of audits to include more than one department or process. Auditing several departments or processes might sound impossible with time and budget constraints. But remember, scope down audits of suppliers to a specific commodity in the main process you are auditing. If nothing else, make sure all your audits cover at least two departments or two processes. You must begin auditing the way the business actually operates—a system of processes, including interactions.

Another use of the roof is to determine how to build cross functional teams, perhaps to tackle a Six Sigma project. If you know there is a weak relationship between two functions, why not put representatives from these areas on the same team with a single purpose? I have seen a weak relationship become strong through a team building process. Moreover, this strong team relationship might have a spillover effect on day-to-day business operations.

Whether forming cross functional teams or auditing process interactions, you will provide value added information for management review of the effectiveness of the quality system. Using the house of quality for cross functionality and interactions makes sense.

After all, aren’t your departments and processes under one roof?

RONALD L. SEDLOCK is the principal consultant and trainer at the quality Catalyst in Melrose, FL. He earned a bachelor’s degree in science from Cleveland State University. Sedlock is a senior member of ASQ and past chair of ASQ sections 1313 in Boulder, CO and of 1506 Jacksonville-Northeastern Florida.

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