Seven Basic Quality tools documents
Definition of Quality Management -- it is a method for ensuring that all the activities necessary to design, develop and implement a product or service are effective and efficient with respect to the system and its performance. It is also a principle set by the company to endure the continuous advocacy of quality services and products, or the further improvement of it.
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Quality Maturity Analysis
Patti Casto:Boise State University;Dr. Thomas Foster, Instructor
(original text on www.freequality.org)
Quality
maturity analysis [QMA] may be defined as an assessment of an organization’s
level of maturity in relation to the quality system it has chosen to operate
within. The assessment may take on
different forms depending on the type of organization, quality system employed,
current level of quality maturity, or other factors.
The
goal of all quality management systems is continuous, measurable improvement in
quality related to the production of goods and services, and overall
organizational operating excellence.
Quality maturity analysis is a tool that enables an organization to
evaluate its progress toward quality goals, and in setting new goals.
A
good time for an organization to perform its first QMA is prior to, or in the
process of selecting a quality management system to adopt. A thorough assessment of current quality
levels and practices will assist the organization in selecting the quality
system that provides the best fit for the organization’s products, culture, and
business strategy. This prior assessment
will also point out existing strengths and weaknesses, and define additional
resources that will be required to begin implementation of the quality system.
Once
a quality system is selected, and a continuous improvement strategy is
developed, regular benchmarking of measured progress to established plan goals
should be performed using QMA as a tool to perform the assessments.
Hewlett
Packard has employed a form of QMA that it terms “Quality Maturity System”
reviews as a part of the Total Quality Control system adopted by the company in
the late 1970’s. Each business unit
within HP has a QMS review every two years at a minimum, the time-frame of
repeat reviews may be shortened if urgent improvement goals are set by the
business unit managers and the reviewers.
The
QMS review process has three objectives:
v
To
develop understanding of the strengths and weaknesses of the business unit in
implementation of TQM.
v
To
provide expert consultation by the reviewers to assist and guide business unit
managers in the implementation of TQM.
v
To
identify best practices within individual business units and share them across
the HP organization as a whole.
A review normally lasts two days, it is performed by a
team of two company trained and certified reviewers; with at least one of them
being a HP quality manager. The second
reviewer may be a business unit manager of another product line who is familiar
with quality methods and the QMS review procedure.
During performance of the review, the purpose or
underlying intent of the review is to assist and support the business unit
being reviewed in making positive progress toward quality goals, not to find
what is “wrong” with its practices. Five
critical areas are the focus of the review process:
v
Planning
– how the business unit develops its strategic plan and how effectively it is
implemented.
v
Customer Focus – how the business unit
identifies/stratifies customers, understanding of customer needs and
analysis/response to customer feedback.
v
Process
Management – how products and services are delivered to customers, does the business
unit function as in integrated organization?
Is clear ownership of processes exhibited and are SPC procedures
employed to ensure process integrity?
v
Improvement
cycle – evidence that customer data is used in the Plan-Do-Check-Act problem
solving process.
v
Total
participation – How actively the organization enlists the active support of all
employees in its quality model.
The reviewers use a tightly structured agenda in order to
complete the review in a timely manner, typically the review agenda is as
follows[1]:
AGENDA
ITEM PARTY REVIEWED TIME ALLOWED
Business
Overview General
Manager
˝ hour
Planning Management
Team 3 hours
Customer Focus
Marketing/Quality 2 hours
Departmental
Reviews
Functional Mgrs. 3 ˝ hr. each
-
Process
Mgmt.
-
Improvement
Cycle
Participation General Manager 1 hour
Quality/Personnel
Quality
Contribution Quality 1 hour
The
reviewers provide initial feedback to the business unit team at the end of the
second day of the review. A full written
report of the review is provided to the business unit managers within two
weeks. The report includes assessment of
observed strengths and weaknesses; and recommended actions to address
weaknesses. The business unit management
team then has one to two months to develop a corrective action plan and submit
it to the reviewers.
Quality
maturity analysis in the end is about the journey an organization takes on the
continuous improvement path, it may result in an organization continuing to
evolve within the same quality model, point out a need supplement the current
model with another, or to adopt an entirely new model.
The
following resources were used in the preparation of this paper, and provide
more information on quality maturity as it is applied and used in different
quality models and industries:
Breen,
Ken, et al., A Direction: Integrated Management Systems; http://www.qualitydigest.com/aug97/html/ims.html
Harrington,
Brad Hewlett-Packard’s Quality Maturity
System; Center for Quality of Management Journal, Volume 2, Number 1,
Winter 1993, online: http://www.CQM.org
Hattrick,
Mary and Hutchison, Eugene, Moving from
QMS Conformance to Business Excellence in Telecom; http://www.qualitydigest.com/april02/html/ti9000.html.
Pryzdek, Thomas, Why Six Sigma is not TQM; http://www.qualitydigest.com/feb01/sixsigma.html
The Five Levels of Software
Process Maturity; http://www2umassd.edu/SWPI/sei/tr24f/tr24_c2.html;
[1] Harrington,Brad. Hewlett-Packard’s Quality Maturity System;Center for Quality Management Journal, Winter 1993