Quality Can be a Thankless Job But It Doesn't Have to Be

In ASQ’s post this month from Paul Borawski, he asks if quality professionals are happy at their job. You might be wondering why this question is necessary but that is because quality professionals sometimes have a thankless job.

Quality professionals are expected to possess in-depth knowledge on a variety of both complex quality issues and general business skills. In addition, although they are often the first to receive complaints when products fail, they seldom get praise when everything goes according to plan.

Actually, it is a very rewarding job, for several reasons. Firstly, you know that you are helping to make the product a better experience for the customer, which gives you sense of accomplishment. Secondly, it is rewarding to help drive out waste and rework through continuous improvement. Thirdly, being a catalyst for change and a voice in the formation of the culture is meaningful work. Lastly, when you make a difference in employees and customers lives it is hard not to feel pride in your job.

Quality assurance is all about character, courage, activism and passion representing the moral qualities, ethical standards and principles to fight for quality. Managers, supervisors, and leads all have to be strong leaders, versed in communication, they have to be able to sell quality each and every day; carry the message of quality to the masses. Quality professionals must be able to challenge the current norms and take on executives that balk at change. Those in quality understand the need and role of quality in the organization yet the further you are from the customer the more likely this understanding is lost.

The job of a quality professional is not easy. You have to want to make a difference because there are those who will put up a fight. Quality assurance can be a thankless job, if everything goes right, the project managers get the credit, if something goes wrong, quality management gets the blame, after all they touched it last. The purpose of quality systems in an organization is to increase internally, the quality of the people, process and products and externally the quality of the consumers experience for the products and services provided by your company.

Personally, I have found the change from a direct Lean leadership role to quality management a challenging one but a rewarding one. The opportunity to make a difference is the same but the connection to the customer is more direct. Like anything in life it is what you make of it. I choose to make a positive meaningful difference and this brings joy and reward to the work that has to be done.


I’m part of the ASQ Influential Voices program. While I receive an honorarium from ASQ for my commitment, the thoughts and opinions expressed on my blog are my own.

Lean Quote: Leadership is About Farming Not Hunting

On Fridays I will post a Lean related Quote. Throughout our lifetimes many people touch our lives and leave us with words of wisdom. These can both be a source of new learning and also a point to pause and reflect upon lessons we have learned. Within Lean active learning is an important aspect on this journey because without learning we can not improve.

"Networking is not about hunting. It is about farming. It’s about cultivating relationships." — Dr. Ivan Misner, NY bestselling author & founder of BNI

This is true of leadership as well. The best analogy of a Lean leader that I have heard is related to this quote. A Lean leader is a farmer not a hunter. Farmers take the long view, and win in the long term. Hunters take the short view, get early gains but ultimately die out. Farmers are shepherds.

The Lean leadership role has many names. Whether you call them a sensei, champion, coach, or leader; the role is no less critical for the organization to be successful. I am not one that pays much attention to titles. A Lean leader is an individual involved in the direction, instruction and training of the operations of a team or of individual.

The following characteristics are desirable for a good Lean leader:

• Active-learner open to new ideas
• Natural problem-solving skills
• Basics technical skills (comfortable with spreadsheets, graphs, data, etc.)
• Keen Observer
• Hands-on
• Passionate about improving processes
• Leadership skills
• Strong interpersonal skills
• Excellent communicator (writing & speaking)
• Systems thinkers (able to understand process flows, etc.)

These characteristics alone don't make a Lean leader. The Lean leader must have technical knowledge in the lean tools and tacit knowledge from experience. Nobody is born knowing these principles and how to implement them. Everyone has to learn them through practice, trial and error, and coaching. Success is not based on who you are but rather on what you do. Behaviors can be learned and unlearned.

Priorities Matter When Changing Culture

Many change cultures fail to achieve results simply because they try to do everything at once. A “can do” culture makes progress one step at a time and develops the ability to prioritize the order of these steps. Strategic priorities position the organization to achieve its goals. Only a few priorities should be central to all areas of the organization.

When your organization is undergoing change, consider altering its priorities. Changing priorities is a significant change, but it does not tamper with the personality or character of the organization, as long as any new priorities are aligned with its purpose and the philosophy.

Prioritizing is not an easy task. There seldom is an absolute right or wrong decision, but rather several options with advantages and disadvantages. Like many soft skills, it can be taught or grown through champions within the culture who have the training or natural abilities.

The ability to prioritize enables the ability to focus, but they are not completely identical. Once the priority is set, every member of the culture needs to be informed and directed toward the specific goal to achieve the focus necessary for meaningful improvement. Again, working on too much at once is the enemy of focus. The elephant must be divided into bite-sized pieces and everyone needs to be focused on the same bite at the same time.

From the individual perspective, focus is about concentrating attention. From an organizational perspective, focus is about centralizing the attention of the group through communication and collective problem solving. These abilities can be taught, but they often are more a matter of learning by doing rather than of formal education or training.

Strategic priorities are the values that guide how the purpose and the philosophy of the organization are put into practice. Priorities matter especially when changing the culture.

A Healthy Lean Road is Paved with Exercise

Lean is a journey that never ends. There will always be a gap between where you are (current state) and where you would like to be (True North). Since there will always be a gap, there will always be an opportunity to improve. Walking the path on a Lean journey can be an overwhelming experience.

A Lean journey is full of steps not all of which are forward. Failure will occur. Its ok, the purpose is learning, and we learn through experimentation. Trying new approaches, exploring new methods and testing new ideas for improving the various processes is exercise for the mind.

Lean grew out of years of practice and experimentation at Toyota. No matter how much better they are than their competition, they continue to find more and more opportunities to improve each and every year. Lean involves the creation and implementation of continuous experiments to improve your strategies over time. This means experimenting with every process every day to get it right. We learn problem solving through hands-on improvement experiments. In Toyota and in lean thinking, the idea is to repeat cycles of improvement experiments forever.

So leaders must create a culture that puts failure in its proper place: a useful tool for learning, and a natural part of iterative experimentation. Management must avoid the temptation to harshly judge unsuccessful ideas. A leader who allows for experimentation sends a clear signal that personnel are encouraged to find better methods and products.

Organizations embarking on a Lean journey should follow a disciplined process of systematic exploration and controlled experimentation. Kaizen is the process which determines whether processes resulted in improvements. It refers to an on-going activity by all people (including managers) to relentlessly and incrementally change and improve practices in small experiments.

The road to continual improvement is a rocky one with many ups and downs. Value the incremental improvement approach to continuous improvement. Through simple, common-sense, and low cost experimentation a great deal of process improvements can be made. Experimentation is the exercise of a healthy Lean journey. Understanding this allows one the opportunity to begin the journey.

New Sponsor: OpenCollege - E-learning Content Library

I am pleased to announce a new sponsor from OpenCollege on A Lean Journey Blog. OpenCollege e-Learning Content Library is the ultimate resource for the Internet-based education of the future. It provides online course developers, teachers, and students with access to more than 700 interactive learning models covering the following subjects: Biology, Chemistry, Algebra, Calculus, Geometry, Astronomy, Physics, Economics, and many more.

OpenCollege was launched in 1993, when OpenTeach Software  joined efforts with faculty members of several European universities to create an interactive educational system. Today, OpenCollege is a comprehensive online library with a convenient Web-based interface and a full capacity to support online learning.

So if you are looking for a resource to supplement your learning in these areas then I would try OpenCollege. Refer to their catalog for a complete listing of all the content in the library.

Lean Quote: Defining the Problem

On Fridays I will post a Lean related Quote. Throughout our lifetimes many people touch our lives and leave us with words of wisdom. These can both be a source of new learning and also a point to pause and reflect upon lessons we have learned. Within Lean active learning is an important aspect on this journey because without learning we can not improve.

"We need to first define the problem. Albert Einstein once said: “If I had an hour to save the world I would spend 59 minutes defining the problem and one minute finding solutions” And I find in most organizations people are running around spending sixty minutes finding solutions to problems that don’t matter." — Stephen Shapiro

The problem statement is a clear and concise statement that describes the symptoms of the problem to be addressed. Defining the problem statement provides three benefits for the team:

• creates a sense of ownership for the team
• focuses the team on an accepted problem
• describes the symptoms in measurable terms

The following four guidelines are effective in creating a problem statement that is clear and concise:

• Define the problem - In the problem statement, team members define the problem in specific terms. They present facts such as the product type and the error made.
• Identify where the problem is appearing - Identifying where the problem is appearing, or manifesting, as specifically as possible helps the team focus its improvement efforts.
• Describe the size of the problem - The size of the problem is described in measurable terms.
• Describe the impact the problem is having on the organization - The description of the problem's impact on the organization should be as specific as possible.

The truth of the matter is that the more specific the statement, the better the chance the team has of solving the problem. Accurate problem statements save time and effort by focusing the team on root cause identification.

Save you Inbox with 5S for Email

Email has become an all too convenient way to communicate. Some much so for many of us that our inboxes are overflowing with new messages. There have been hundreds of productivity related strategies written about for dealing with email. I have even shared some of those myself. There must be a better way.

In Lean manufacturing we utilize 5s to improve the workplace organization. 5s is a systematic method of identifying, organizing, cleaning, maintaining, and improving your workspace. It is often referred to as the foundation or building block of a Lean transformation and aims to create a structured and disciplined approach to continuous improvement.

In this post I am going to show you how you can use these same concepts that you use to manage your workspace to save your inbox.

Step 1: Sort
First things first, it’s time to get rid of all of the messages that are old and obsolete. Be aggressive in this step. Don’t keep messages that you know will never be returned. If there are attachments that need to be saved or printed, do so now. Get rid of as much as you can.

Step 2: Set-in order
Straighten the inbox, as in "a place for everything and everything in its place." Find a place for all of your e-mails. The easiest and most obvious way is to create folders based on tasks or other buckets of work where emails can be neatly filed for future use. Put e-mails you need to act on in the proper folder. The goal is to remove as much from your inbox as possible.

Step 3: Shine
Since we’re talking about computer applications, there really isn’t the necessary cleaning activities that would be required in a physical workspace. Shine in 5S is cleaning to prevent future cleaning. E-mail 5S shine is to get rid of e-mails and prevent them coming back. Block spammers who make it into your inbox to prevent repeat offenders. Unsubscribe to newsgroups or other e-mail marketing rather than deleting them. Don’t reply to informational e-mails with "Thanks" and certainly don't CC everyone.

Step 4: Standardize
Standardize how you handle e-mail. This step is critically important as you will need to set rules for yourself to keep your e-mail account clean. Some rules you may consider:

• Set a maximum number of e-mails in your inbox and once that number is exceeded, complete another sorting and sifting cycle. 
• Check e-mail at certain times of day rather than playing whack-a-mole with every new "you've got mail".
• Spend a set amount of time on e-mail checking.
• Agree to limit who is Carbon Copied (CC) so that extra inbox material is not created.

The key is to set rules for yourself to keep things organized.

Step 5: Sustain
The final step in the process is setting up a quick audit process to make certain your rules are being followed and your account is staying in good shape. In the beginning, this audit may need to be more frequent to force the discipline to adhere. Overtime, it will become a learned way of working and you will be the envy of all your coworkers.

By applying 5S, the management of emails can be simplified and restructured. This will enable you to add value to your day and minimize the time spent on dealing with emails. You will no longer look at your e-mail workspace with dread and you will be far more responsive in replying to other’s requests. At the very least, this exercise is a great way to apply one of the cornerstone Lean tools to the knowledge world. Give it a try.