All posts by Sal

30 years in the Quality field including experience as QA Manager for a Fortune 100 company and as a Quality System Certification auditor for the top Registrars in the field - plus over 10 years of Information Technology Management in dual roles. Specialties:ISO 9001 Quality, ISO 14001 Environmental, OHSAS 18001 Safety, ISO/IEC 27001 Information Security, RAB QSA Certified Assessor,
5 Whys, Improvement, Quality Tools

More 5 Whys – How To’sday!

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5 whys have been introduced here already, but I wanted to expand on it briefly, cover a few of its pitfalls and give you a tip on how to 5-Why TURBOCHARGE.

As a quick summary, 5 Whys is essentially asking the question “Why” a number of times, expanding on the answer on each iteration. In this way the root cause of a problem will eventually be revealed. The magic number of question levels tends to be five. After five, there will likely be found a missing process or an action item, or some unmitigatable (okay, that’s not a word) natural force – like “gravity”.

Beyond that, it is a vehicle for investigation. There is no substitute for careful, fact-rich, investigation.

Benefits:

  1. Low barrier to understanding and use
  2. Introduces the concept of disciplined problem solving
  3. Helps avoid the “Hammer = Nail” effect; the tendency to apply a known solution to an unknown problem.

Drawbacks or criticisms:

  1. Tends not to be data-driven
  2. Answers are particularly subject to cognitive bias
  3. Stymied by multiple-cause situations
  4. Often the only tool used

Let’s look at these in turn:

Tends not to be data-driven. This is the 5 Why’s double-edged sword. Because it isn’t data driven it is easier to adopt and use; the learning curve is approachable. However, without data the conclusions are often not repeatable, especially when the problem is complicated. Generally, this isn’t a big problem, but it is something to be aware of.

Answers are particularly subject to cognitive bias. What is a cognitive bias? These are  shortcuts the mind uses due to numerous factors such as the human brain’s processing limits, emotional and moral motivations or societal influences. Consider the audiences of Fox News versus MSNBC – the respective audiences tend to watch only one or the other, depending on what their political view is. This type of cognitive bias is called “Confirmation Bias” – interpreting data to fortify existing views.

Cognitive biases, while hugely interesting as a field of study, are very powerful and part of what makes us human – but they can often lead to incorrect conclusions. This drawback is linked to the lack of data used with this tool. Much of the mental process is “off the cuff” – especially if the investigations are weak. Again, something to be aware of.

Stymied by multiple-cause situations. 5 Whys seeks to find a single cause, that is what it does. Be aware that there may be other factors at work.

Often the only tool used. There are many other tools that can be used – fishbone (Ishikawa Diagrams), 8Ds, Design of Experiments, House of Quality, cause-effect diagrams, FMEAs. I won’t explain these now, but there are these and more. With all of these available, it’s a shame to use just the one.

5 Whys – Turbo Charged

How to get a little more out of 5 Whys, once you feel the technique has been mastered.

For each “WHY” answer, consider in what way it could have been detected, and what could be done to prevent this particular why. Once a cause has been determined, review those countermeasures and decide how to implement them, or a selection of them.

Example:

Problem: Delivery trucks are late 60% of the time.

1 Why are they late? Interviews with drivers reveal they sometimes get lost en route.

2 Why do they get lost? Unfamiliar with territory.

3 Why are they unfamiliar with the territory? New hires, new to area.

4 Why don’t the new hires know the area? They haven’t been shown.

5 Why haven’t the new hires been shown? Never needed to be; expanded business has led to the hire of several new drivers.

As you review each of these, you should allow yourself to get a sense of the arbitrary nature of some of the answers. Again, this is a feature of 5-Whys and no reason to avoid using it.

Now, the turbocharging comes into play like this:

1 Why are they late? Interviews with drivers reveal they sometimes get lost en route.

HOW COULD THIS HAVE BEEN DETECTED and/or PREVENTED [SOONER]?

  1. Provide a means for drivers to communicate with HQ when they are running late.
  2. Determine a “comfort zone” for timeliness
  3. Escalate awareness of late deliveries

2 Why do they get lost? Unfamiliar with territory.

HOW COULD THIS HAVE BEEN DETECTED and/or PREVENTED [SOONER]?

  1. Communication path (as above)
  2. Provide GPS devices

3 Why are they unfamiliar with the territory? New hires, new to area.

HOW COULD THIS HAVE BEEN DETECTED and/or PREVENTED [SOONER]?

  1. Place hiring preference on local inhabitants

You probably get the idea here. Real-world problems may have more sensible details, but the lesson is the same. For each why, determine what could detect or prevent it.

From the exercise above, it could be that the company chooses a few, or all of the countermeasures determined. Flexibility is key.

Having said all this, please do remember that adding inspections, or detection layers without modifying the process to eliminate their need is a recipe for failure. Always strive to create a process whereby failure is not an option.

So.  5 Whys; a nice, easy to wield tool – but has some limitations mostly because of it’s simplicity.

Thanks again for your time and attention. Go forth – Why? to calibrate thyself, of course.

Sal

 

 

 

Deming, Inspection

Republicans, Inspections, Democrats, Deming

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W. Edwards Deming, widely regarded as having had more impact upon Japanese manufacturing and business than any other individual not of Japanese heritage, is famous for saying you can’t inspect quality into a product. The US government shutdown is one more example of how dangerous relying on inspections can be.

Some of you may be intimately familiar with the US government shutdown. Essentially, Congress failed to pass a spending bill and the government has stopped providing services that are not considered “essential.”

Without getting too political (for example, I won’t mention that Congress and the president are exempt from the furlough and continue to get paid), I wanted to report on a few impacts of the shutdown from a quality-related and inspection perspective.

For example, according to Reuters, the U.S. government shutdown is blocking Boeing and Airbus from delivering aircraft to U.S. airlines and raising safety concerns, even though hundreds of furloughed workers have been recalled (it could have been, and was for a short time, worse).

It’s a question of having government workers available to certify components, and finalize delivery of completed aircraft. It is uncertain when these certification and inspection procedures will operate normally.

Unsettling.

The closure of one Registry office in Oklahoma City, similar to a DMV but for aircraft, has stymied almost 1.5 billion US dollars in private plane deliveries. Not quite Quality-related, but certainly one that may lead to shortcuts being taken in established procedures once the floodgates do re-open – and that is yet another Quality concern with consequences.

Besides aircraft, there’s the air traffic control system itself. Radar, buildings and other equipment need frequent inspections. Many of these are not considered critical – and are not being done. Over time, these could build upon themselves.

And the quality challenge isn’t just limited to machines, an article in “Medical Daily” reports that FDA Food Safety Inspections have been suspended. The government has furloughed 60% of the Inspectors.

Caroline Smith DeWaal, director of food safety at the Center for Science in the Public Interest says, “For every day the government is shut down, it’s going to take them many weeks to make up the work that’s not being done. When they come back to work there’ll be a backlog of plants that should have been visited during this period that aren’t being visited. Our inspection system is already pretty anemic, and now it’s not even moving, now it’s totally dysfunctional.”

Safe food to our tables, with the existing process, relies on these inspections – they aren’t happening. And when they do begin again, what are the chances they’ll be done with the same [already suspect] care they had before the shutdown?

I’m not saying doing away with all inspection is possible, or even practical – but the need for inspection is a symptom of an imperfect system. Processes that have embedded controls, for example, or utilize mistake proofing (poka yoke) techniques have a proven track record of higher reliability and are less expensive to operate.

We might learn from what is being reported as our government inspection and certification processes fail with the removal of adequate resources. One lesson is clear: reliance on inspection, often one of the last steps in a process, creates a bottleneck in production, and likely long-term reliability issues once the process is restarted.

Do Mr. Deming proud, and consider where you have inspection steps in your processes, and see what you can do to eliminate them, without sacrificing quality.

Do that, go forth – and calibrate thyself.

Sal

 

Certification, Events, Improvement, Leadership, Quality Tools

Sunday Summary

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Here’s a look at the week gone by.

This week’s “Toolsday” brought us a tutorial on how to create a Pareto chart using Excel 2013, which may be helpful to some of you. You’ll find how to create one in other versions of Excel with a little Google-fu, but ours may be the only currently available for the latest version.

That was the extent of the formal posts this week, excepting tweets and Facebook updates. A large part of my week was occupied with a reCertification audit. This is, by the way, what happens after two yearly “surveillance audits” – you may remember we covered the audit cycle in an earlier post.

This company was actually very good – one of the better implementations I’ve seen as a point of fact. Thought I would spend a few moments listing a few bullet points on why this is so.

  • First, it’s a long-time implementation; they started their journey, albeit in a slightly different structural form, in the mid-nineties. That would have been the 1994 version of the standard. So, in a word, Experience.
  • Secondly, they have strong quality system leadership; a competent and vocal Management Representative who enjoys the technical and practical respect of those around him. Call that, summarily, Stewardship. This differs slightly from leadership, which some may call this and they would be still correct, if imprecise – in that a steward also helps operate the machine and knows how it works. It is vitally important that the leadership support the system, and that is truly a component of Stewardship and something at which this particular company also excels.
  • Thirdly, there is little difference between how seriously the formal management system is taken at the different levels of the organization. Soldier and general alike reference and follow the established processes and are actively concerned with improving them. Let’s call this Cultural Integration.

Most companies have some or all of these, and other nice-to-have’s, to varying degrees – but these folks are rock solid, “Best in Show” in each of these three. So, three keys to a successful, world class formal management system implementation: Experience, Stewardship, and Cultural Integration.

Would like also to make mention of another activity from the week, a meeting of the Granite State Quality Council. I’m planning on a dedicated post about the Council, but this event made recognition of two outstanding New Hampshire organizations.

There were presentations on these organizations’ best practices and lessons learned to help audience members improve their own organizations. Part of the night was devoted to recognizing the dedicated Examiners and Judges who participated in the program. It was my first experience with the Granite State Quality Council and I do hope to become more involved.

Looking forward to three audits next week: California, Massachusetts and good ol’ New Hampshire.

And I do hope you have a fulfilling week as well. Get some rest.

Sal