Allowing your staff to do their best

I was perusing my November 2013 copy of ASQ’s Quality Progress magazine and the article “Words to Work By” caught my eye.  Not so much an article, it was a collection of Quality quotes submitted by other readers.  Some were predictable (“Quality is never an accident…”) and some were pretty iffy (“There is more than one way to skin a cat … but it matters to the cat”).  

But there was one that caught my eye.  It was ascribed to Deming, and maybe that is true: ”It’s not enough to do your best.  You must first know what to do, and then do your best”.  

First off let me say that in a quick peruse of the internet, many ascribe the words to Deming, so I guess I will have to believe it.  But I also will say it is pretty inconsistent with his own 14 points, specifically the one about “eliminate slogans, exhortations and targets for the workforce” and the other about “remove barriers that rob people of pride of workmanship”.  Somehow I have my doubts.  What Deming probably said was something more like “if your worker’s best doesn’t measure up to what you expected or wanted, perhaps it is because you didn’t tell them what you wanted.”  Don’t blame the worker, look more closely at yourself.  

All my career I have seen folks write job descriptions which gets read, signed off, and then put in a file where is sits forever, provided that it doesn’t get lost.  The job changes over and over, but the document remains written in stone which progressively becomes as immutable as granite.  As new tasks come on stream, there may be efforts to train workers, but in many situations the process of learning is one of self-discovery.  

It seems to me that if our organizations wants people to know what they are supposed to be doing, so that they can then “do their best”, what we have to do is start seeing their job descriptions as living documents that documents each change that gets implemented.  

There are many advantages in ensuring that job descriptions remain current.  First, the description becomes the foundation for ensuring that appropriate training and confirmation and follow-up competency assessment occur.   Second, it becomes a foundation for task ownership.  Third it becomes the foundation for management to know what exactly they are expecting their staff to be responsible for.  Fourth it provides a foundation for ensuring that when the job becomes vacant, the next person in can be made aware of all the tasks they will be expected to address.   

Let me focus on one of the above foundation statements, specifically management awareness.  

Has this happened at your place?  It certainly has in mine.  Over time, the number of tasks required incrementally increases, commonly at a rate that is faster than revenue generation.  We can always hire more people, so we tack the new tasks on to existing personnel.  Research and development, or provision of new programs sometimes requires what seems to be just a few more hours per week to get a new service or program established; at least that is what you estimate.  But the task becomes a little bigger than you anticipated or takes longer than you thought.  Now your staff are incrementally busier than before.  Then another “small change” gets added in, and then another.  Nobody says anything, but after a while the signs of stress and distraction start to show up.  Mistakes start happening.  People seem angry, or worse, burned out.  All of a sudden, a key person quits.  Now you and your program are in trouble.  Unchecked persistent incremental change all too often leads to precipitous crisis.  

The problem wasn’t that people stopped doing their best; the problem was that you let the operation get out of control.  Management dropped the ball by not keeping an eye on what you were expecting of your staff.  

So here is the solution.  May sure that the job description is kept as a living document which is checked regularly and often.  If you know what you are asking people to be responsible for, and you monitor that list to ensure that it is feasible, then and only then can you count on your staff meeting expectations.

You hired your staff because you saw their strengths and merits.  Good management provides the opportunities that allow them prove your judgement and assessment was right. 

Doing it Right or Doing it Wrong?

Doing it Right

Recently I was reading the recent (August 2013) edition of ASQ’s Quality Progress and came across an opinion article by Bob Kennedy who jumped into the fray between W. Edwards Deming and Philip Crosby and said that in his opinion that Crosby’s first essential, Do it Right the First Time (DIRFT) was wrong on every level.  The foundation of his argument was that Deming proscribed against slogans and therefore Crosby and DIRFT was wrong.

 I have to say that Crosby was NOT wrong, and that DIRFT was NOT wrong.  I am not sure that Deming’s concerns about sloganism was meant to include concepts like DIRFT, but if they were, then in all due respect, in this circumstance, I would have to side with Crosby.  Even a pioneering genius like Deming could not always be correct all the time. 

When is comes to concepts like DIRFT, Crosby was spot on, and Deming should have acknowledged it.

First off, let me put some context around my opinion.  I understand Deming’s point of view.  There are some slogans that I think are unhelpful.  “There is no such thing as an Accident” .  “Accidents poison to our organization”.  “Time is money – time loss kills growth and progress”.  These are not slogans, they are less than idle threats that lead people to hide slips and simple mistakes.  There is little place for threats in the workplace.

But DIRFT is not a threat, and indeed makes sense.  Given the alternative I would hope that a neurosurgeon makes triplely sure he does it right the first time.  And by the same token, the same goes for the airplane pilot.  Even the woodworker says, “Measure twice and cut once”. 

DIRFT is in fact a reiteration of a concept that Deming was so proud to adopt, even if he did not state it, “PLAN DO CHECK ACT”.  (For the origins of PDCA see Deming did not create PDCA.  [ http://www.medicallaboratoryquality.com/2012/06/deming-did-not-create-pdca.html ] .

What DIRFT was intended to mean was before you do something, make sure that you have organized your thoughts before you put a plan into action.  It is the essential corollary to PDCA.  Think before you do. 

In the medical laboratory we have tons of examples where things don’t work that way.  Tests get implemented without proper validation.  Tests are done and reported before checking the Quality Control results.  Reports are sent to the wrong person before confirming who was truly was the intended receiver.  These happen all the time and in every instance they result in external failures with potential false reports, misleading information, loss of confidentiality and huge cost of poor quality.  And most of them were pointless and preventable. 

A few seconds or at most minutes of thought and planning could prevent most of these problems, and save the laboratory from embarrassment or potential liability, and save the patients from inconvenience or harm.

Perhaps in Deming’s time, folks were very aware and sensitive to threats in the form of slogans.  Labor protections, either under the umbrella union protection or workplace legislation either did not exist, or were in their infancy.

That is not the world in which we live today.  Today we live with 40 character headlines and 140 character tweets, and thirty second commercials.  We live in a slogan society, and we by-and-large put them into a more current context.  We may see slogans as jargon and trite or sophomoric, but we don’t see them as threats.

Personally I see DIRFT as rather aspirational.  I fatigue of avoidable errors, or repeated mistakes.  I embrace the notion that doing things RIGHT is better than doing things WRONG, and believe that many errors result from automaton-like behaviour.  I absolutely support “Plan before you do; Prevent the avoidable error”  and even more importantly, “Learn from mistakes; support continual improvement”.

So to Bob Kennedy I think with respect it is OK to relax on the absolute adherence to Deming’s word.  It is time to embrace context and circumstance, and to acknowledge that it is also possible to acknowledge that both Deming and Crosby were giant contributors to our current concepts of Quality. 

Overthinking Quality

I took a little time to do some journal reading over the holiday break and found an interesting short article in the December 2012 edition of ASQ’s Quality Progress.  I want to thank all the authors who contribute and the editors that regularly put together a good read, even if I don’t always agree.

In this particular story, the author, a Master Black Belt in Lean Six Sigma is in a store where there is a huge amount of last minute shopping going on and all of a sudden the retail computer system fails thereby causing all credit card transactions to freeze.  Needless to say the mass of customers goes through the normal and predictable hostile reaction which pretty soon gets ugly.

The author standing helplessly and hopelessly second in line with a single small item in his hand, scans his knowledge and experience and Quality expertise, and comes to the conclusion that the best solution is to allow those people who are prepared to pay cash to come to the front, make their cash transaction and move on.  

That should be the end of the story, right?  Unfortunately is it not.  First he discusses this with his partner (aka wife, spouse), who does what partners tend to do, and informs him that his idea is nuts and is never going to happen.  Maybe this is a relationship between two Master Black Belts, because for reasons unclear, he decides to agree and then yammers on about how he was just being selfish and not thinking of all the other people like the information technology (IT) folks who are internal customers and might have a problem with cash transactions and a loss of tracking data.  I had had enough.

The reality is that he was right in the first place.  Had the store had a strategy of providing their customers with a variety of ways to pay for goods (cash, credit, debit, cheques) while the inconvenient crash probably would have occurred anyways,  a sizable portion of the crowd would have kept moving and the unruly mob would be been contained.  Some folks who were primarily intending to use plastic probably would have gone back to the old fashioned way of paying with cash.  While there would be some with major purchases who would have been upset, they could have been calmed down perhaps with some free juice or maybe a promise of a small discount when the register was again working.   Some folks would have been angry, some likely would have given up and walked out (swearing never to return!), but for most folks the whole mess would have been a non-event.  This would have taken some of the pressure off the IT technologist who was tasked with getting the mess back up and running.  The bottom line would have been instead of 100 percent of folks inconvenienced and angry, the truly perturbed probably would have been reduced by 80-90 percent, maybe even more.  

To me the answer was easy.  So why did author feel compelled to overthink it, and make a simple problem complicated.  What happened to KIS(S) (Personally I have never thought that adding the word “stupid” to the end of “Keep it Simple” was much of an enhancement!).  And more importantly what happened to all his Lean training and expertise.  

In the medical laboratory we sometimes have an analogous situation when the laboratory information system computer has a problem.  In that situation, it is really easy to focus on who is the customer,  what is the problem and what is the solution.  The point of the laboratory is to generate accurate information in a timely fashion so that clinical decisions can be made.  The tests continue to be performed, the information is gathered perhaps by pencil or maybe an off-line computer, faxes and telephones convey the information until the computer is up and running again.  Yes it means some extra work and cooperation and pulling together, but that is all part of the laboratory’s culture of Quality and culture of Community.  

In many respects this story addresses the true core of the Quality movement.  Quality Management reminds you of who your customer is and Risk Management and Preventive Action strategies highlight where bad things may happen that can have a negative impact on that customer.  Lean principles show the path to simple and direct solutions, and Culture development keeps your staff pulling together for mutual benefit of customers and organization success, and personal and collective  job satisfaction.  

Message to the author, not everything your partner says is a pearl.  You were right and your partner was wrong.