What is required to be a good quality manager? IV

All right now we possible are clearly understand the needs of bosses and subordinates, in a way utmost reducing their resistance and willing to make their achievements. Next step what we should do is to provide them a systematic approach to solve problems. So the fourth knowledge we need should be systematic thinking.

During daily work, our colleagues and bosses likes cause and effect diagram, which is most widely used and meet our bird view over problem solving. But in most cases, they like have a meeting to get everybody sitting around and list all possibilities on a 8D report, which indicate everybody on the meeting have problems and likely wise everybody have been involved in the problem solving. What a team work. They just forget the second step of fishbone method, which is prioritizing. You may appreciate their readiness to locate possible cause (true or not, so what), after this meeting all will be left to quality department to follow through who have to beg for their feedbacks, and progress reports. This is a false systematic thinking.

A true systematic thinking is a science, which is subjective to real proofing and can be proved. The team can’t just be dissembled right after the meeting. Team should stick together to prove their guesses right on the desk. As Theory of Constraints claims, if we locate the true constraint, the process throughput should be substantially improved, or we should do the finding again.

In most cases, we would like to believe the pseudo systematic thinkers don’t know the true steps of this method, and then we have to possess this knowledge first and guide them through the correct process. Of course you are right here, we need support and involvement of top management to get them have motivation to be trained on method.

In other cases, somebody just want to mess up the situation, make the issues seems related to every departments, so they can hide behind big shadow, which usually come from quality department. It won’t be difficult for you getting into this situation in a blame oriented company. And naturally, quality people are deemed to guide other department for quality improvement. Buddy, on this issue, you are next to none.