Confessions of a Quality Manager  

Being the adventures of four jet-setting quality consultants who like to talk shop even more than they like good food and drink.

This is fantasy consulting. For the real thing, go to Fell Services' Quality pages.


 

 Part I

Dietrich's nose was twitching: a sign of severe emotional stress. He was trying to do a root cause analysis and getting absolutely nowhere. It could be because we'd all met up for an impulse weekend in Athens, officially to see the Acropolis. Unfortunately, Horace, as a closet romantic, had insisted that we should spend most of the time tramping round the Greek concrete jungle in search of Byzantine churches. I'd have been happy just to look (briefly!) at the Church of the Metamorphis on Ermou, now that it's been redesigned as part of a pedestrian walkway, but Horace had insisted on looking in far too many little courtyards and poking his nose round far too many nondescript buildings. When he'd muttered about the juxtaposition of the profound and the profane, none of us had interpreted that as averting our eyes from the grey apartment buildings ("polikatikios" corrected Horace, grumpily, I think his feet hurt as well) and concentrating instead on the numerous examples of Art Nouveau wrought iron, all of which he'd meticulously photographed.

A small mutiny by everyone bar Horace had meant that we could take a break at the Acropolis, which, after all, was the reason we'd all converged on Athens in the first place. I wanted to see the plaque of the two Greek boys who tore down the Nazi flag in 1941, though Dietrich, who feels uneasy about his country's past, preferred to look at the Caryatid statues, copies only, four of them being in the Acropolis museum and the fifth in exile, thanks to Lord Elgin's acquisition and determination that it could only be kept safe in the confines of the British Museum.

In the interests of completeness, the names of these two guys were Maonolis Glezos and Apostolis Santas, though I'm ashamed to say I concentrated more on the spectacular view -- the buildings of Athens stretching into the distance, the green of the Olympic stadium by a hill of pines and the temple of Olympian Zeus. It's easy to believe in the Gods, faced with a view like that, though somewhat more difficult to imagine how King Aegeus could have thrown himself into the sea in grief that his son Theseus had been killed by the Minotaur. For one thing, Theseus was still alive (another example of assuming the worst) and for another, the sea is miles away. But I'm the one making assumptions now -- things have changed since Aegeus' time, the Eridanos river which once flowed through the city is now underground (covered by the Romans), I have no reason to assume that geographical features should remain the same for all eternity.

There was universal relief when we got back to the hotel and collapsed in the suite, ready for retsina, stuffed vine leaves and octopus tentacles. Everyone kicked off their shoes with varying degrees of relief, and Dietrich immediately started worrying about his root cause analysis. Looking up at our politely non-judgemental faces, he started stammering in embarrassment. His nephew was doing a school project, thought that his uncle knew everything, it was all practice and didn't we all do continuing professional development anyway?

If we'd liked Dietrich a little less and if we hadn't all been aware of occasions in the past when we'd done each other favours, we'd have explained (forcibly!) that weekends together were rare at the best of times and that, thanks to Horace, we'd walked what felt like hundreds of kilometres. We only had one more day of freedom which Horace had already suggested could be spent walking round Kerameikos, the ancient cemetery in downtown Athens. Horace, I think, was due for a disappointment -- Julio and I, and even Dietrich, had other plans for tomorrow.

If anyone could give a definition of root cause analysis, it would be Julio. He was very good at folding his hands piously and reciting definitions in a counter-tenor monotone. "Root cause analysis is the systematic process of gathering and ordering all relevant data about counter-quality within an organisation, then identifying the internal causes which have generated or allowed the problem, then analysing the comparative benefits and cost effectiveness of all available prevention options" he intoned, exactly on cue. Personally, I would have defined it a bit more succinctly, as the practice of determining the root causes of problems, root causes being the fundamental causes that, if removed or corrected, would preclude the occurrence (or reoccurrence) of the problem.

Root cause analysis, of course, is one of the tools of lean methodology. It's fundamental to the continuous improvement philosophy, since treating the symptom will not remove the cause and it's one of the fundamental tenets of the Toyota Production System. "What isn't?" asked Horace, who was not a fan of the TPS. (I'm sure his feet hurt -- for him to say something like that, he must have had at least two painful blisters).

It's so easy, when faced with a problem, to go for the obvious solution, especially since the symptom of the problem may be relevant to customer dissatisfaction. Supposing a customer complains that a package is late arriving or went missing completely. The instinctive thing to do is to concentrate on that customer -- make sure the next package arrives well in time or send a replacement immediately. But although this may please the customer for now and retain the customer's custom (a bulky phrase, but I can't think of a more elegant way of putting it), it won't stop the problem reoccurring at some time in the future. Worse, the extra time spent on the customer may mean that the next few customers don't get their allocated period of time or even, because you're rushing, a simple mistake may occur, leading to more customer dissatisfaction.

One classic example involves a pool of oil on the factory floor. The Plant Manager notices it, while on the way to the daily logistics meeting, and asks the foreman to see it gets mopped up. The next day, doing the same thing, the Plant Manager sees what looks like exactly the same pool of oil in the same place. There then follows a predictable scenario of blame and resentment. And more oil.

If the Plant Manager had been at all interested in root cause analysis, a logical question could have been why the oil was there at all. The foreman could have replied that it was due to a leaking gasket in the pipe above. Further investigation might have revealed that the supplier's gaskets had a bad record of leakage but that they had been selected as a supplier of choice because of the lowness of their original tender. And should the Plant Manager then ask why economy was used as the deciding criterion for selection of equipment, he might have received the answer that the directive from above (I mean, ultimately from him) had been that procurement, who did the ordering, had to be "extremely cost conscious".

The moral of this long-winded fable is that the Plant Manager was responsible for the oil pool himself, and the words "stone" and "glass houses" somehow come to mind.

The advantages of root cause analysis resemble those of other quality initiatives. The incremental approach of the process can lead to the identification of barriers and causes of problems which will ultimately lead to permanent solutions. Using root cause analysis can establish repeatable step by step processes, which are, of course, a good thing, said Horace, a true auditor. This logical approach means that a repeatable step by step process can be mapped and can then be documented and repeated as necessary.

On the other hand, although root cause analysis can be applied to any problem, it?s not always the preferred improvement technique. For a start, data is needed for any meaningful analysis, so that the mechanics of the situation are understood and obtaining this can be very time intensive. The technique is also better with processes, rather than individual occurrences, but is normally used for fairly major problems, with the caveat that the solution may actually be more expensive than a short term fix. One problem is normally found in a network of related problems and may have an interlocking system of causal roots -- and a situation can very easily arise when one factor could be at the root of two problems, but that each problem requires contradictory things for improvement. There was also the problem, as Dietrich had found, that repeating occurrences of the problem are separated by time (so people may not realise that they are reoccurring) or the situation may apply to different people (so there is no awareness that the problem is reoccurring).

  posted by Dovya R @ 12:28 PM : 


Saturday, December 14, 2002  
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