"I" Is For Improving
/As always, I want to offer my sincere apology to Sue Grafton for using (stealing??) her approach for the titles of her many outstanding mystery novels for this series of articles that I hope makes YOU a happier and more effective leader working with a truly empowered team that really enjoys what they do! Oh, and if you have not read any of Ms. Grafton novels I highly recommend that you give her a try.
How to Improve Your Quality
“If you want to achieve excellence, you can get there today. As of this second, quit doing less-than-excellent work.”
- Thomas J. Watson
Improving your quality is simple, find a problem or process and fix it. Have regular team building meetings and empower your Teamers to find things to fix or improve. Help your Teamers adopt the “do it right the first time” attitude in all that they do to help improve the quality of the products and services provided by you and your Teamers.
Start with having a staff meeting to announce the start of your new quality improvement system. Send out your announcement with the single agenda item of having each Teamer bring their idea(s) on a potential problem to fix that the team should tackle. My guess is that some “old problems” will come up, things that you’ve heard before. “Purchasing always takes too long to approve printing bids and puts us behind schedule,” or “The designers never check the proofs quickly enough!” Be prepared! Some of the problems that your Teamers will bring to the meeting may have been “stewing” for them for some time.
If you can afford it, get a copy of Quality Is Free by Philip B. Crosby for all of your Teamers, sort of like a “handbook” for their new quest to improve their quality.
Some of your Teamers will complain that they “Don’t have time for this” so you should reassure them that all of the quality improvement stuff can be recorded as “administrative time” on your time recording system. Simply, I would encourage you and your Teamers to find the time to address quality improvement. If one of your Teamers simply does not want to participate in any of the “quality BS,” don’t force them to participate. Give them the option to leave the meeting.
Here’s the agenda that I suggest for your first quality improvement meeting:
Collect The Problems - Collect all of the problems from your Teamers on a flip chart or a blackboard. Have a scribe, if you need one, to create an electronic list of the problems. Ask each Teamer to explain and describe the problem briefly and why they think it should be considered. Also consider using a recording device. The key is to collect all of the problems so everybody’s got “skin in the game.”
Vote On The Problems To Work On - Have your Teamers vote on which problems to attack. I suggest that you give them more than just one vote with these options and of course make the voting anonymous as follows: The top problem to work on, the top three things to work on, the top five or the top seven (this may be way too many!)
Choose Up Sides For Teams - Once you have the “winners” of the problems to work on, you will need to have quality improvement teams formed for each problem selected. My suggestion is that you don’t want to take on too many quality improvement projects since in the beginning you will most likely be the only facilitator for all of these meetings. Depending on the size of your staff, I would start with three to five quality improvement projects and teams.
Volunteers Anyone? - Once you have the projects selected, ask for volunteers to work on each project. Try to get a cross section of your team to work on the project to give you a variety of views and opinions. You need to have at least three Teamers for a team, but don’t have too many Teamers assigned to any single problem. Try to spread them out and a Teamer can serve on more than one team if they like. Work to get as many of your staff involved in a quality improvement team as possible. Again, if Teamers don’t want to participate don’t force them.
Collect Results and Problems – Each team needs to take minutes of each meeting highlighting their results, plans and any problems or concerns that they have on making the needed changes to address and fix each problem.
“For you to sleep well at night, the aesthetic, the quality, has to be carried all the way through.”
- Steve Jobs
How to PROVE That You Are Improving Your Quality
“Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.”
- Carl Sagan
As your quality improvement teams begin to implement changes in your processes and procedures to address quality problems you need to follow-up and make sure that these changes really do bring about the results and improvements that you want to achieve. Simply monitor the results from each “fix” or change that is implemented from the work of your quality improvement teams to prove the improvements in quality.
Also, if you think of the people that your Teamers do projects for as your “clients” you need to ask them how satisfied they are with the projects or services provided to them. At the end of a project, send them a “satisfaction survey.” Email is not good for this since it is not anonymous, so I suggest that you send the survey by email, suggest they print it and then snail-mail back the completed survey to you. Keep the survey simple to encourage your clients to respond. A team that I worked with had a simple five question survey sent to the client after the completion of all of the marketing communications projects with these questions:
·Was the project completed on time?
Was the project completed within budget?
·Did the project meet your overall communication needs?
Would you use the team’s services again for your next project?
How satisfied overall was the client with the project or service provided to them by rating their satisfaction on a scale from “1” (Very Satisfied) to “5” (Very Dissatisfied)?
Collect the responses to these questions and prepare anonymous reports to your Teamers and to your Senior frequently, perhaps monthly. If you get a survey with really poor satisfaction ratings meet privately with the client and even do a Post-Mortem meeting on the product or service to find out what went wrong and why, but always keep this information anonymous.
“Strive for continuous improvement, instead of perfection.”
- Kim Collins
I wish you empowerment, happiness and every success! Jonesy