What is going on in the wild world of quality management? Well if you missed any of these excellent articles, then now’s your chance to get caught up.
The words and wisdom of the immortal and inspirational W. Edwards Deming are alive and well. From Statistical Techniques Allow Management to do a Better Job:
Once again this paper shows the insight W. Edwards Deming had as he aimed to improve the functioning of the entire organization over 60 years ago. Those who continue to think he was focused on the factory floor alone have missed most of what he proposed.
If you are in quality management and not familiar with his legacy, then drop everything you are doing at this moment and get yourself acquainted! Simply put, the man is an icon.
Next our friends over at a View From the Q present a roundtable piece that dives into the question, what exactly should voice of the customer mean to the quality professional? Expect to find excellent words of wisdom within such as rountable contributor Luigi Sillé‘s take.
The Voice of the Customer helps you prioritize on those aspects that are valuable to your customers, and eliminate those that are not (you can absolutely lower your WASTE). The Voice of the Customer also helps in identifying GAPS in your service and or products. It provides early stage warnings, so management can pro-actively react on them. To stay competitive in this modern world, the Voice of the customer is the KEY.
Last but certainly not least, Tim McMahon covers five steps for creating a lean implementation roadmap.
Lean thinking is a great business system, but its approach requires support and commitment for organizations. Lean provides a framework to improve the flow of a process, it is therefore important to create a plan or roadmap describing the improved flow, highlighting changes, and areas for improvement.
Roadmaps are handy little things, helping to point the direction while on a journey. Sometimes they serve to identify markers on the road letting us know how far along we are, or telling us how far to go to the next marker.
Be sure to look out next month for another Quality Round Up where we at AQM will share the latest and greatest from all over the web.
image credit: vimeo.com