Most people who have been through basic management or quality management training will have been exposed to the work of Edwards Deming. Known particularly for his work in helping Japanese companies establish a quality culture, Deming is regarded as a founding father of the quality movement. Although Deming is best known for his use of process improvement as a tool for improving quality, Deming’s thinking covered a considerably broader view of the organization.
One of Deming’s greatest contrib...
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Training
The Process Fallacy
As many readers will know, the idea of “continual process improvement” is a pillar of the quality management movement. By improving processes, the root cause of problems that allow mistakes to be made can be eliminated, thereby allowing the organization to produce higher quality goods and services.
Although the idea of continual improvement started in the manufacturing sector, in the mid 1990’s the idea gained ground in the IT sector as well. Models such as the Capability Maturity Model (CMM)...
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Steering Clear of Shoddy
Although home renovation projects and IT projects may not appear to have much in common, there is one regard in which they are striking similar, both suffer from undesirably high failure rates. In Canada, TV personality and master contractor Mike Holmes draws attention to failed home renovations projects in his show “Holmes on Homes”. Each week Mike visits a home owner who has been the victim of a shoddy contractor and exposes the poor workmanship they left behind.
The problems in the home re...
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