Does your organization talk about quality? Does it put quality concepts into practice in every aspect of the business, from design and development to product delivery? Is your firm practicing quality from top to bottom, from the chief executive to your newest hires?

Commitment to quality starts at the top and flows from there throughout the organization. Whether management is sold on the notion of “quality in everything we do” or they’re not, the rest of the company follows suit. Here are ten indicators that your company’s top management is making the quality commitment:

1. You have a quality budget for Corrective and Preventive Action, Training, and Internal Audits. If management puts money on the table, they’re obviously committed to quality.  Quality requires a budget to prevent problems from occurring and recurring.  Quality requires training.  And Quality requires gentle prodding from internal audits, to ensure the quality system is continuously improving, not stagnating.

2. You’re allowed to use the quality budget for Corrective and Preventive Action, Training, and Internal Audits. Having a monetary budget for Quality is great but if you can’t use it because there are too many orders that need to get out or there are never enough worker-hours to work on Quality, do you really have a budget for Quality? Don’t forget — time has to be budgeted, too.

3. You track the cost of quality in your budgeting process. Your cost of quality includes scrap, defects, rework, corrective actions, preventive actions, quality training, audits, management reviews, lost business due to customer complaints (i.e., returns), warranty claims, and other such “quality” costs.  If you’re actively tracking and comparing your cost of quality to your revenues, expenses, and profits, you’re displaying a keen sense of what quality means to your business.

4. Top management actively participates in your regular (weekly/monthly) management reviews. Quality management reviews are critical to management’s understanding of the future of the business.  Top management’s attendance demonstrates that the future of the business is important to it and the results of management reviews are a valuable input to management’s strategic direction and execution.

5. Quality management participates in regular (weekly/monthly) management meetings, planning sessions, and decision processes. Quality management’s attendance at the management meetings demonstrates that input from quality is important.  Can your company expand, add new products, contract, cut costs, or implement strategic actions without understanding how it may impact the operation’s quality?  Cross-functional teams at all levels provide an early warning to management that improves the execution of your plans.

6. Quality management reports directly to top management. Quality management’s input is vital to strategic execution and requires that quality management be a peer (equal) at the top management level.  Quality management needs to attend critical meetings, needs resources to act on Quality issues, needs to act across the organization chart, and needs the active support of top management for quality success.  Can you really achieve high levels of quality by delegating quality to lower levels of the organization’s management?

7. Top management champions quality, communicates it, and understands its bottom line impact. In order for top management to appoint a quality manager at the top management level, that quality manager has to have a budget and has to interact with all other departments. To ensure the future of the business is secure, top management needs to understand how quality impacts the company and it needs to communicate that impact to the entire organization.  Quality takes discipline and only top management can instill the discipline required for success.

8. Management’s strategic plan includes quality milestones. The road to quality takes time measured in years.  Top management can communicate its commitment to quality through the successive achievement of quality awards over the years (e.g., ISO 9001, Shingo, state Quality awards, Baldrige).  I have seen one organization that, after winning Baldrige, required its individual operating units to all go for Baldrige.  Top management can keep on the continuous improvement road by driving quality milestones deeper into the organization.

9. Management allows people to fail, make mistakes, experiment, and improve without serious repercussion. Improvement is really about failure. If you’re allowed to fail, you can learn from your mistakes. Conversely, if you’re not allowed to make mistakes, you’re being deprived of learning and growth opportunities.

Without learning, there is no quality.  When top management allows people to fail, they allow people to learn and grow.  Fire people for failure and people will stop reporting failures…and they will stop learning, too.

10. Quality is implemented as a strategic requirement to build competitive advantage, not as a customer requirement to qualify for new business. A committed top management is focused on quality because it represents improvement, being better than others, and the future.  If a customer has to ask you for proof of quality, do you have a problem?  Even worse, if you only implement quality because the customer asks and not because you want to, then do you really have quality?  Committed top management doesn’t wait for customers to ask for quality — they integrate quality into their strategy.

Top Ten Signs of Management’s Commitment to Quality

1. You have a quality budget for Corrective and Preventive Action, Training, and Internal Audits.
2. You’re allowed to use the quality budget for Corrective and Preventive Action, Training, and Internal Audits.
3. You track the cost of quality in your budgeting process.
4. Top management actively participates in regular management reviews.
5. Quality management participates in regular management meetings, planning sessions, and decision processes.
6. Quality management reports directly to top management.
7. Top management champions quality, communicates it, and understands its impact.
8. Management’s strategic plan includes quality milestones.
9. Management allows people to fail, make mistakes, experiment, and improve.
10. Quality is implemented as a strategic requirement to build competitive advantage.

Your thoughts?

Some of you may be familiar with the recently released and much maligned PowerPoint diagram someone in the US military came up with (“We Have Met the Enemy and He Is PowerPoint“, NY Times, Apr. 26, 2010). It is thought to be one of the worst uses of a much-overused, yet little understood, business tool. I’m compelled to say in the author’s defense, though, that they did get one point across extremely well.  The military strategy in Afghanistan is FAR too complex.

It’s not just governmental entities that commit egregious “fails” in communication. Business is as likely, if not more so, to commit atrocious communication gaffes using so-called communication tools, such as PowerPoint.

PowerPoint’s misuse and overuse has spawned terms like “death by PowerPoint”.  Microsoft isn’t to blame, though. They put the tool out there — it’s up to us to use it effectively.

Everything from pencil and paper to streaming video can be used to “get the message across”. But whatever the medium, you have to have a message worth saying AND you have to make sure people understand it. That, in a nutshell, is quality communication.

However great you think your message is, if you can’t easily get it across to a 9-year-old, you’re probably not going to get that point across very well to anyone who doesn’t speak your language on an everyday basis.

That’s not saying the people you work or do business with are on a mental or experiential par with the average nine-year-old, of course. However, a typical 9-year-old makes a great litmus test. Here’s what I mean. Try summarizing your presentation, your argument, your sales pitch, or whatever in a sentence of 15 words…or fewer.

“Why a four-year-old child could understand this report!
(Run out and find me a four-year-old child.  I can’t make heads or tails of this.)”
Rufus T. Firefly (“Duck Soup”, 1933)

Now, run this “elevator speech” past your nine-year-old. If you don’t have a 9-year-old living with you, go next door. Or, just find a friend or neighbor who isn’t in your line of work. If nobody gets the condensed version, forget the 200-page slide show with all the cool transitions, dancing letters, and the entire Pantone palette.

We have discussed a number of times how with quality communication, things get done. For instance, I wrote about keeping things simple in PowerPoint last fall. We ran another article last year about how improving the quality of internal communications benefits the entire organization.

What’s true for PowerPoint is true for any medium or message. Your policies and procedures — whether you use MS-Word, Adobe Pro, XBRL, a document management system, a picture book, or plain old text — must be clear and concise.

Every form of communication in your office, for whatever reason or however critical to your company’s mission, MUST be straightforward and clean. Get your message across in a way that leaves no room for confusion, misunderstanding, or error. Make sure the message is worth saying AND make sure everyone in your audience understands it.

Do you have an example of an e-mail, PowerPoint, or procedure fail that you’d like to share? Send me an e-mail or go to our web site and leave a comment.

Thanks for your time.

We’re conducting a poll on LinkedIn, asking users what their company’s acceptable use policy is with respect to “Twitter”. Does your company:

• Encourage you to use Twitter?
• Tolerate it?
• Discourage its use?
• Forbid you to use it?

If respondents aren’t familiar with the phenomenon and/or they don’t care, they can click on “What’s ’Twitter’?” The results in this highly unscientific poll, to date, are:

• 50% – Encourage its use
• 19% – Tolerate it
• 26% – Forbid it

Three percent responded “What’s Twitter?”  Looks like two-thirds of this sample is already there or is close to getting there.   On the other hand, if we assign a value to each response, like so:

• Encourage = +2
• Tolerate = +1
• Twitter? = 0
• Discourage = -1
• Forbid = -2

The result is between zero and one, which gives us the impression that while this group of companies is aware of Twitter, they’re not ready to make a commitment, either.  They’re a little “lukewarm”.

As I said, this isn’t a scientific poll. LinkedIn doesn’t allow us to gather demographics, so we don’t know if the sample is all B2B, if the respondents are top management or rank-and-file, etc. Still, a dirty window is better than no window at all, isn’t it?

So, what about your company? Are you using Twitter? Do you have a company policy on the use of Twitter? Is Twitter better suited to B2C than B2B?  Take our poll and let us know where you stand.

Thank you.

As I mentioned in another recent post, I’ve begun using the “Polls” feature of LinkedIn to gather data, however unscientifically done, that might tell me what’s going on in the minds of the Websphere’s inhabitants. It seems people love to take polls, especially when their commitment is minimal. They not only get to express an opinion (sort of), but they also get to compare themselves with other “pollees” (looked up that last word — Merriam-Webster‘s OK with it).

Many of us participate in opinion polls routinely. Polls give us validation, as well as a sense of belonging. We vote online for everything from “Who’s the most popular talk-show host?” to “What was the worst outfit at the Golden Globes?” to whether news sites should charge for their online content.

Companies shape their actions and their policies, in part, on what people say. If we’re good, we understand what our customers are saying and act accordingly; if we’re not, we come up with “new Coke”.

At Bizmanualz, we want to know your opinions. We want to know how you feel about certain issues such as policies and procedures, process improvement, lean thinking, quality, and tools and techniques associated with those concepts. My first LinkedIn question is “What’s Your Company’s ‘Acceptable Use Policy’ with respect to Twitter?

Another question I just posted is “What’s the PRIMARY Goal of Your Social Media Program?” Even if you don’t have a social media program, take the poll (we have a “don’t have one” response). Then, please come back to Bizmanualz and comment further on the question, the poll results, or about something in the realm of policies and procedures, quality, etc., that concerns you. Create your own poll on LinkedIn and share the link with us, or ask us a question and we’ll see about creating a poll for the community.

Thank you so much for your participation.  As always, best of luck.

You’re invited to join the Group on LinkedIn. Joining will allow you to find and contact other Bizmanualz Policies Procedures members on LinkedIn. The goals of this group are to help members:

• Reach other members of the Bizmanualz Policies Procedures Group;
• Start or participate in discussions on policies, processes, and procedures (for instance, you could ask members, “What’s your company’s policy on…?”);
• Accelerate careers/business through referrals from Bizmanualz Policies Procedures Group members; and
• Know more than a name – view rich professional profiles from fellow Bizmanualz Policies Procedures Group members.

Here’s the link to join: http://www.linkedin.com/e/gis/86367/4EC1947970BF

Hope to see you in the group soon.

— The Bizmanualz Policies Procedures Group Leader

Yesterday (11/30/2009), the United States Department of Labor (DOL) announced it had released an updated version of its “Employment Law Guide“, an online system designed to help workers and employers understand many of the Federal laws affecting the workplace.

The Employment Law Guide is written to be especially helpful to employers who do not have a dedicated legal or human resources staff.  The update addresses recent and important changes in Federal employment law, including the 2009 Federal minimum wage increase, changes to the Family and Medical Leave Act (FMLA) pertaining to relatives of veterans, and the EEOC poster update referencing the Genetic Information Nondisclosure Act (GINA).

The Employment Law Guide is a companion to the DOL’s FirstStep overview advisor, an online system that allows employers to quickly and easily determine which Federal employment laws apply to them.

You can see the DOL’s press release at http://www.dol.gov/opa/media/press/asp/oasp20091467.htm#.

You may have noticed that on some of our web pages, Bizmanualz is soliciting your feedback in “Talkback” dialog boxes. On our consulting pages, we invite you to share your “Toughest Process Challenges” and your “Training and Communicating Challenges“.

By prompting you with the right kinds of questions in the right places, we hope to gain a better understanding of your wants and needs and how we can help.  Your responses will help us update our web site so that it better addresses the issues and questions on your mind.

Some of your questions invite engagement — great!  That’s exactly what we’re looking for! We ask only that you limit yourself to one question per web page and give us your name and e-mail address so we can begin a dialogue.  That’s it! You can tell us what you think without leaving the page…even without scrolling.

To date, your input has been instructive and has helped us improve our site. Some of you have continued to correspond with us by e-mail; we plan to add more Talkback dialog boxes on more pages to serve you even better.

Here’s a list of talkback questions and links as of this week (we’ll update the blog with new Talkback links as we add them):

Consulting Services main page:
What is your toughest process challenge?

Procedure review page in the consulting section:
What is your primary documentation difficulty?

Process implementation page in the consulting section:
How do you train and communicate with your team?

Process optimization in the consulting section:
What is your toughest process challenge?

Thank you for sharing what’s on your mind with Bizmanualz.  For those of you who haven’t yet taken part, check out a recent Talkback inquiry on a process training question and our response, taken from case studies.  And, tell your friends and business associates about us!

We received an inquiry recently on our process implementation page, where we ask: ‘How do you train and communicate with your team?’ A reader from a large school district wrote in using one of our new ‘Talkback‘ links saying that their district is in the midst of many changes. The district faces many communications and training challenges, especially when introducing new information technology for employees. The reader went on to ask, ‘How do large companies communicate and prepare training for organizational change or implementation?’

Will Employees Skip Training When A Customer Calls?

Though a school district may be an extreme example, it shares practical challenges similar to many geographically dispersed organizations where employees work independently. Teachers may work at dozens of locations. Culturally, teachers work independently most of the time and are highly self-directed. Every teacher answers to many customers–classroom parents–to whom they must be responsive. Daily schedules are rigid, driven by the defined length and periods of the school day. Non-class in-service training and meeting time is scheduled long in advance.

Any organization with a distributed workforce that works directly with customers faces similar training challenges. Does your workforce travel? Do your employees manage customer relationships in the field? Would your field employees skip training if a customer calls? Think: field sales, field service, field engineering, route delivery. For many such organizations, in-person group training is probably not practical.

 If training Is Not Practical, What Do You Do?

But training is still essential. For example, your route sales and delivery professionals across the Americas require training on a new ordering system. As in the case of teachers in a school district, their workdays are prescribed by customer’s strict time constraints. Any time available for training needs to be measured in tens of minutes. Further complicating matters, every employee’s availability is different.  And by the nature of their work and work culture, they operate independently.

Clearly, building a training program based on inflexible, one-size-fits all classroom training isn’t going work. But self-paced user-driven independently administered training would work. So video content was developed in three to 10-minute bites that employees could access at any time. The information was organized so that students could approach the training either sequentially, or as needed during the day.  Materials and delivery were customized to work with the limited mobile bandwidth and small screens employees had.

A technology partner configured an on-line “campus” web site, complete with quizzes and completion-tracking built in so that the corporation knew who had been exposed to the material, and had demonstrated proficiency. Compliance metrics helped the company roll-out new features and capabilities at times when metrics indicted likely acceptance by workers.

Do You Have a Distributed Training Challenge?

If your corporation, school district or other organization employs independent workers and you are budgeting for a training solution, contact Bizmanualz for a demonstration. While the content can be custom-developed for your organization, you will benefit by sharing the on-line infrastructure, which today is hosting proprietary video training for several large, distributed organizations.

With an understanding of your needs, your content can be developed and hosted in an on-line campus customized for you. Just as Bizmanualz has the largest library of pre-written policies and procedures, we can provide an existing on-line campus so that you don’t have to re-create the wheel.

Call us at (314) 863-5079 x18, e-mail Sales@bizmanualz.com or use the ‘Talkback’ dialog on our Training and Roll-Out page.

Among the top ten reasons that managers give for why their company’s policies and procedures don’t work is that “Employees don’t use them.” When procedures aren’t used, you may wonder why you bothered writing them. Did you waste your time? When procedures are written but not used, lessons that have been learned are forgotten. Mistakes that were corrected on paper long ago are made over and over again. Continuous improvement gives way to continuing problems and waste.

Waste costs money.  Yet, when organizations don’t follow their own core procedures, it’s hard for them to know what works and what doesn’t, so improvement evades them. They risk quality problems and customer disappointment. Customers may defect to competitors. Revenue may suffer.

When even core procedures are not used, you risk not complying with health, safety, and environmental regulations. That can endanger employees and gain unfavorable notice from auditors and regulators, further distracting you from using best practices and making continuous improvements.

Why aren’t your policies and procedures used?

When we hear employees say that procedures are getting in their way rather than helping, we usually find that procedures are too numerous, too long, poorly written, hard to follow, and/or hopelessly complex.  Writing and development problems are the chief reason that policies and procedures suffer such deficiencies. (See our web site for several articles explaining how to avoid and overcome procedure writing and development problems.)

How Bizmanualz Estimates Your Policies and Procedures Project

When companies come to Bizmanualz with poorly written policies and procedures, we typically recommend reducing and simplifying what they have today. Typically, we can cut from 30% to 60% of their documentation load, reducing the cost and complexity which at the same time lessens employees’ objections.

We can recommend an approach for your policies and procedures improvement project based on your answers to the following questions:

• How many procedures do you have today within the scope of the improvement project?
• Send us two or three sample procedures in MS WORD or PDF format. Let us know what format you want for the final procedures.
• What industry are you in?
• List the countries in which the procedures will be used. List each of the languages into which the procedures need to be translated (if any).
• Who is the lead regulator for your industry in each of the countries where the procedures will be used? Provide a link to the regulator’s web site and on-line regulations if available. List any other regulators that are likely to review or audit your procedures.
• Mention any quality standards that you are using or plan to use within 24 months.

Pictures and Graphics Help Bridge Cultural Gaps

If the procedures will be used in more than one country, we typically recommend replacing text with graphics, illustrations and pictures. Graphics are interpreted more consistently across cultures, which drives uniform interpretation and more consistent usage of procedures.

Page for page, graphics are more expensive to produce than written material. But a single graphic may eliminate a lot of pages of written material, mitigating the cost of development.  Most companies consider investment in graphics worth-while because:

• Procedures are used more consistently
• Compliance improves
• Injuries and work disruptions decrease.

Your Budget Considerations:

If Your Budget is Less than $10,000 US:

At budget levels less than $10,000 US, we would typically recommend training for your in-house procedure-writers on how to write more effective procedures. The training is similar to our Well-Defined Processes training, but emphasizes authoring procedures. After the training, your in-house team rather than Bizmanualz would apply the principles and update your procedures. Depending on the experience level of your procedure-writing team, more than one training event may be required.

If Your Budget is $10,000 to $30,000:

At budget levels above $10,000, Bizmanualz relieves your team from the production responsibilities, and provides the man-hours and expertise to update your procedures more quickly than most companies can train and do it on their own. At budget levels in this range, Bizmanualz:

• Evaluates the content and format of each of your existing procedures within the scope of the project
• Provides you with our written critique
• Provides a visual storyboard outlining the specific changes
• Drafts the procedures for your review
• Completes the graphics and reviews them with you
• Provides one revision to text and graphics, incorporates your comments
• Completes and delivers the procedures.

Projects above $30,000 are larger projects in scope; they might require deployment in more than one location, translation, optimization, or a lot of information graphics.

Larger projects may include procedure implementation of your procedures with your employees to make sure that they perceive value and use the procedures.  This may include additional buy-in training for your in-house procedures team on how to build and maintain support for your policies and procedures project.  You may need other communications tools such as job aids or videos that are not strictly considered procedures, but which nonetheless help workers apply the procedures consistently.   Process procedures optimization may require implementing lean, ISO or quality systems.

You can control the scope and budget of your project by:

• Controlling the number of procedures
• Working in phases, and reducing the scope of the current phase.
• Creating fewer language translations and limiting the number of geographies where the new procedures will be used.
• Using fewer graphics and more text.

If you would like Bizmanualz to estimate your policies and procedures project, please send us the information listed above under ‘How we Estimate Your Policies and Procedures Project.’ Don’t forget to send us samples of your current procedures. We will recommend an improvement approach that will increase compliance, safety and communication.

Contact: Dan Davison, Dan@bizmanualz.com, tel. (314) 863-5079 x23, Bizmanualz, Inc.

What would you do if you were set in the middle of the Pacific, on a raft, with no provisions, no motor or oars, no navigational aids, and no way to contact the rest of the world?  It’s just you, the boat, and the unending blue above and below.

If you’ve ever been assigned the unenviable task of writing policies and procedures, maybe you can imagine better than your fellow workers what being cast adrift is like.  How many of you were given an office in a remote part of the building (think Milton in “Office Space”), ostensibly to keep the disruption to a minimum, and instructed to develop a set of policies and procedures for accounting, or IT, or (gasp!) the entire company?

And when they eventually pulled the plug on the project, did you feel relief that the misadventure was finally over?  That is, were you rescued, or were you left adrift, watching the circle of sharks — blame, recrimination, etc. — tighten around your little blow-up craft?

Did you feel this harrowing experience could have been avoided, or perhaps produced the desired results, if only someone had given you the tools, resources, direction, and – most of all – the guidance and support of top management before you spent the last six months marooned with Gilligan and the Skipper?

That’s exactly where our Chris Anderson is going with this month’s series of articles on the Process-Procedure Journey.  If you’ve already been to the first article, you’ll remember Chris’s description and map of the Process-Procedures Journey. I’ve reproduced the process map with one minor alteration.

Even a simple map like this might be a huge improvement over your current procedure development process.  Well, guess what?  We don’t even get this much in all but a few isolated circumstances.  (And to the lucky few who’ve gotten what they needed, please tell us what was it like.)

Like a castaway on the raft, it often seems as though we’ve been dropped into the middle of the sea without a sense of where we came from, where we’re going, or how we’re going to survive the journey, let alone get to our destination, wherever that might be.  Too often, we start our journey somewhere in the middle (Template Design or Procedure Writing) instead of at the appropriate starting point (Project Management).

For direction, advice, and tips on how to make your journey a successful one, keep on reading (or start reading) this month’s articles.  If you’d like more in-depth assistance – something tailored to your unique circumstances – please contact us or visit our web site.

Best of luck to all of you.  Smooth sailing!