All Posts Tagged With: "PDCA"
My Personal Baldrige: Process
Baldrige is a process model. The first six categories in the Baldrige Criteria ask “how” things are done more than 130 times—and “how” means “what’s the process.” Processes are evaluated based on how systematic and effective your approaches are, how consistently they are deployed, how systematically they are evaluated and improved, and how well they are aligned with what your organization is trying to accomplish. In addition, the Process Management category specifically explores how you design, manage, and improve your key processes.
Here are steps you can take to apply process thinking to your job:
- Identify the processes you participate in. Everything you do is part of a process.
- For each process, figure out who your customers and suppliers are (they may be internal).
- Determine your, your customers’, and your suppliers’ requirements. You all have requirements of the process, i.e, levels of quality, delivery, service, and cost. Ask customers and suppliers what their requirements are.
- Identify measures you can use to evaluate how well these requirements are being met and start collecting and graphing the data for these measures. You can find information about tools to collect and analyze data here.
- When you have enough data (you need three data points to show a trend, so start with three months…
KEYSTONE: Organizational Learning
Learning is a keystone in the Baldrige Criteria. Organizational and personal learning is one of 11 Baldrige core values, and learning is one of four factors used to evaluate every process. According to the Criteria, “learning refers to:
- refining your approach through cycles of evaluation and improvement
- encouraging breakthrough change to your approach through innovation
- sharing refinements and innovations with other relevant work units and processes in your organization”
Plan-Do-Check-Act is a learning cycle. Organizations in which PDCA is a natural part of how they do things are learning organizations. “Organizations that have acquired the learning habit are endlessly seeking new methods or new products, forever testing and then reflecting, consciously or unconsciously pushing round that wheel,” wrote Charles Handy in Learning Organizations (Sarita Chawla and John Renesch, 1995).
Creating a learning organization means creating a climate in which learning is encouraged, assisted, applauded, and rewarded. It also means engaging employees in the learning process. Peter Senge, one of the gurus of systems thinking and learning organizations, wrote in his seminal book, The Fifth Discipline, “People learn most rapidly when they have a genuine sense of responsibility for their actions. Helplessness, the belief that we cannot influence the circumstances under which we live, undermines the incentive…
19Nov2009 | Steve George | 0 comments | ContinuedEducation: PDSA + Quality Tools = AYP
In the spring of 2008, Community Consolidated District15 learned that eight of its schools had failed to meet adequate yearly progress (AYP) for reading. This is a common issue for school districts across the country that is often the result of student subgroups failing to meet the AYP standard.
District 15 serves 12,000 students in northwestern Chicago at 15 elementary schools, four junior high schools, a preschool early childhood center, and an alternative public day school. It received the Baldrige Award in 2003.
A lot has changed since then. Several key leaders retired. A referendum failed and $25 million had to be cut from the budget, which led to hiring several first-time teachers. Key positions that supported the Baldrige initiative were eliminated. New board members were elected. A new superintendent started in June 2008.
Under such conditions, a Baldrige mindset can easily disintegrate. The opposite happened at District 15. The PDSA cycle (plan-do-study-act) had become part of the district’s culture, as had the use of quality tools. In the summer of 2008, a team of principals and other district leaders was formed to tackle the AYP problem. The team analyzed test scores and discovered that the district’s intervention programs weren’t working. It developed…
2Oct2009 | Steve George | 0 comments | ContinuedReengineering Revisited
The reengineering revolution was poised to take off when Michael Hammer wrote a book with that title in 1995. It sputtered. Organizations had little time and even less desire to dump their processes and start over on blank sheets of paper.
The revolution was too daunting, but the ideas behind it remain valid. I was reminded of this as I was reading the book, Rethink: A Business Manifesto for Cutting Costs and Boosting Innovation, by Ric Merrifield (FT Press, 2009). He notes that seeking advice from people who actually do the work “tends to be more confusing than helpful. That’s because employees and managers…think of their jobs in terms of how they do them rather than what they are intended to accomplish.”
It’s always a good thing to involve the people working a process in improving that process, but you have to be careful not to lose sight of what that process is intended to accomplish. In Baldrige terms, that means being clear about whom the process serves and what the customers of that process require. It also means systematically evaluating key processes to identify opportunities for reengineering.
That’s one of the great benefits of a Lean kaizen event: Fresh eyes tear apart…
3Sep2009 | Steve George | 0 comments | ContinuedThe Most Popular Improvement Tools
The list comes from the Global Benchmarking Network’s 2008 survey on business improvement and benchmarking. Which of these does your organization use?
- Mission and vision statement
- Customer/client surveys
- SWOT (Strengths/Weaknesses/Opportunities/Threats)
- Informal benchmarking (encouraging employees to learn from other organizations)
- Quality management system (think ISO)
- Improvement teams
- Employee suggestion scheme
- PDCA (Plan-Do-Check-Act)
- Performance benchmarking (comparing process/activity performance levels)
- Knowledge management
- Business process reengineering
- Balanced scorecard
- TQM (total quality management)
- Business excellence (using Baldrige, EFQM, or other national excellence models)
- Best practice benchmarking (structured process for comparing performance and implementing best practices)
- Corporate social responsibility system
- Lean
- Industrial housekeeping (5S)
- Quality function deployment (QFD)
- Six Sigma
More than 450 responses from 44 countries ranked their organizations’ usage of these improvement tools in the order above. The percent of usage ranged from 77% for “mission and vision statement” to 22% for Six Sigma. Every tool from the top through PDCA was used by more than half the respondents; the rest were used by fewer than half.
The Baldrige message is a good news/bad news deal: “Business excellence” is currently being used by just 40% of the respondents, which is pretty good considering that only 59% said they understood what the “business excellence” tool is.
You can read a summary of the survey here.
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3Sep2009 | Steve George | 0 comments | ContinuedThe Power of Process
Cargill Corn Milling (CCM) North America received a Baldrige site visit in October 2008, four months after the Cedar River crested at 20 feet above flood stage and caused an estimated $100 million in damage to its facilities.
It was ready. Despite having to remove and recondition 600 motors, 500 pumps, and more than 100 blowers, CCM was up and running in September and operating at full capacity in November—the same month it learned that it had received the Baldrige Award.
In “Watershed Moment” (Quality Progress, August 2009), CCM President Alan Willits credits his organization’s fast recovery to its process-oriented business culture. “We didn’t need to go back and ask how we were going to manage this project,” said Willits.” We had all the processes in place. We were simply able to use them to react to a very significant and difficult event.”
In the summary of its award-winning application, CCM describes how it uses its Best Practices Model to improve work processes. The model is a variation of Plan-Do-Check-Act or the DMAIC model that has four stages and nine steps:
- Plan: Identify opportunity / identify key measures / standardize measurement system / evaluate and identify best practices
- Evaluate: Document best practices / Implement best practices
- Analyze:…
