Here are ten great reasons to attend the ASQ World Conference on Quality and Improvement, coming to St. Louis, Missouri, this May:

1. Bizmanualz will be there! Look for our booth, where we’ll be showing off our new policies and procedures management software.

2. One of the strongest ASQ sections (#1304) in the country is here. Any of our knowledgeable and personable members will be more than happy to assist you while you’re here.

3. The largest gathering of quality professionals in one place means a myriad of opportunities for exchanging quality information and ideas.  A wise dude once said, “Ideas flourish best in the light of day.”

4. There will be dozens of quality training opportunities. Register early for a seminar…or two…or more!

5. The ASQ World Conference on Quality and Improvement takes place in late May. That’s generally one of the best times of year — weatherwise — in St. Louis, though as someone once said about St. Louis weather, “If you don’t like (it), wait a while…it’ll change.”

6. St. Louis is home to Ted Drewes Frozen Custard, Crown Candy Kitchen, Forest Park (one of the largest city parks in the nation), and the St. Louis Cardinals.

7. Arm+Leg > Cost of Parking. Same goes for the cost of meals, lodging, entertainment, and just about anything else you can think of.

8. The Cardinals aren’t in town (they’ll be in San Diego), so you’ll be spared the huge crowds. On the other hand, you’ll miss the game-day sea of red shirts and caps that washes into downtown. (More than awe-inspiring, it’s scary!)

9. Quality speakers like:

• Alan Mulally, Ford CEO;
• Robert Stephens, “Geek Squad” founder; and
• Terry Jones, founder of Travelocity.

10. First one to register for the Quality Conference after March 24 AND send me their proof of registration gets me as a guide for the evening of May 24. (We’ll work out the details.)

There are many, many more outstanding reasons to be here! Don’t miss this event! The World Conference on Quality and Improvement is only two months away, so make your plans!

See you in St. Louis!

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.

Sitting here at Soulard Barber Shop Saturday morning, I am reflecting on the IT Innovation Conference I attended last week in St. Louis. First of all, it was satisfying to see more than 500 IT professionals, infrastructure managers, staffing providers, storage, and computing vendors and CIOs gathered at a regional conference amidst the poor economic news of our time.  But it made sense, in light of the “glimmer of a turnaround” described in the closing keynote by CIO magazine publisher emeritus Gary Beach. Perhaps those who showed up had sensed the same. It was reassuring.

But even more reassuring was the talk of planned projects and ongoing implementations. One company was bringing a supplier management program on line. Another was doubling data center capacity to support an anticipated spike in consumer demand. Yet another was implementing an electronic records conversion across dozens of hospitals. (Check out the meeting agenda.) What was reassuring was not only the volume of activity presented in sessions and discussed in the hallways, but also the realization—in demonstrable, robust terms—to what exactly is required for success: great communications.

More so than in years past, project managers showed how they involved users from the very beginning, long before requirements were set or vendors were selected. They described involving users in large collaborative sessions to define requirements and evaluate vendors against requirements.  One healthcare company went so far as to invite three vendors in for a long weekend of product demonstrations and working sessions, and hundreds of professional employees showed up voluntarily on their weekend to participate!

Nobody wants to feel like an IT implementation was done to them. Users need to feel buy-in, like they helped design the solution. If they designed it, they will use it, and you will get a return on your IT investment, now, and throughout the system’s life. Since every system falls short in some ways, users must be committed to helping you improve the system. That implies that you, the project champion, have a communications plan. And that plan has to foster three-point communication:

• You gather input, often from users.
• You reflect back what you heard in some demonstrable way, such as in a beta test or feature set.
• Your user acknowledges—ultimately through increased usage—that you heard them and acted appropriately.

No matter how great your technology, communications must be robust. Prior to launch, gather input. Reflect what you heard with written requirements. Involve users in source selection and beta demonstrations. Build in channels for active and frequent user response. If users are not coming to you, go to them. That’s what so many of this year’s conference presenters demonstrated.

Read about next year’s IT conference in Saint Louis.

I love teaching business training classes.  I tend to get engaged, intelligent participants who are eager to learn, willing to share, and with a desire to improve their organization.  Frequently, I get as much out of the experience as they do.

In a recent Well-Defined Processes class I had a particularly great group.  As usual, I came up with a very simple process example to illustrate concepts about processes.  In this case, I talked about baking a cake.

One participant really latched onto this concept, particularly in terms of writing procedures to document processes. “I am going to ask for cake recipes,” he said (in terms of developing procedures for his organization).  It is a great point.  Look at the back of cake mix box and see how effectively and efficiently it guides you through the process.

There is no unnecessary detail or descriptions of how to do things that you don’t need to be told how to do (like getting a mixer or turning it on).  There is no needless long-winded description of the chemical reactions that take place between the ingredients while mixing, and no explanation of the physical transformation that takes place while the cake is baking.  It has just a few simple steps with effective use of graphics that helps you properly execute the process.

Do you have too much information in your procedures?  To make your procedures usable, focus on the things people need to be told in order to execute the process, and leave out pointless directions and unnecessary explanations.

Have you ever wondered how to get rid of old ISO quality procedures originally designed for ISO 9000:1994?  Many of those old legacy procedures are no longer required by ISO 9001:2000 or the current ISO 9001:2008 standard.  In fact, those procedures may be so out of date that many people aren’t following them, anyway.  If your ISO 9001 QMS contains too much documentation and/or much of it is outdated, this workshop is for you. 

Using Lean Thinking, you can reduce your organization’s reliance on procedure documentation.  Using a visual workplace you can perform trending and analysis that generates buy-in for change.  How about a lean Corrective & Preventive Action Kaizen Process that engages your workforce and communicates the latest improvements to your employees? 

Using lean, you’ll understand how to conform to the minimum document and record requirements and reduce the bureaucratic waste commonly (and unfairly) associated with ISO 9001.  Now’s the time to learn how to “lean out” your ISO 9001 Quality Management System.  Attend the ASQ St. Louis Spring Quality Conference at the Crowne Plaza in Clayton on April 2-3, 2009, to learn about lean and other great quality topics.

The long awaited update to ISO 9001:2000 arrived last November.  While ISO 9001:2008 isn’t a huge change from its predecessor, it’s still a great time for us to update our ISO 9001 QMS Policies, Procedures, and Forms manual.

So, I’d like to hear from you.  Whether you purchased our product some time ago, purchased a competitor’s product, designed and implemented a quality management system on your own, or have yet to consider a quality management system for your business, we value your input.

How can we help you?  What are the pitfalls in designing and implementing a quality management system and how can we help you avoid them?  What information do you need?  What features would you like to see?  What would you change in our current product, and what would you keep?  In short, how can we improve our product to serve you better?

We also offer a number of courses dealing with quality and process improvement.  Maybe you’ve taken one of our courses - perhaps you weren’t aware of our offerings.  Either way, take a look at our course listings and let me know what you think.

I look forward to hearing from all of you.

I will be leaving to speak at and attend the ASQ Lean Six Sigma Conference on Mar 2-3, 2009 in Phoenix, AZ.  If you are in the area then stop by to hear about Setting Goals with Lean Thinking.  You will learn the importance of position goals for lean thinking, finding your lean goals/metrics or what success will look like. Many people wonder about what lean tools are used to determine where to start your lean journey. I will be talking about using Value stream, Visual space, and Material flow analysis to create your lean improvement opportunities plan.  Stop by the Lean Six Sigma conference to learn about Setting Goals with Lean Thinking.

Are you frustrated by problems that seem impossible to solve?  In today’s economic climate problems abound.  Persistent deficits, complex solutions, and special interests all combine to create major headaches.  Why is solving problems so hard? 

One reason could be as - Johann Wolfgang von Goethe once said “the solution of every problem is another problem.”  Yet Problems also create opportunities.  So perhaps it has to do with your paradigm and depends on how you look at problems.  The impossible is a paradigm - Change your mind and you change your performance. 

To the wise, life is a problem;
to the fool, a solution.
            - Marcus Aurelius

Process improvement rules can guide us to finding the solution.  The trick is in having the right frame of mind and discipline to use them.  For example, one simple rule to finding the root cause of a problem is to ask “why” five times to get to the root cause.  The first answer is never the whole story. 

How about “do it right the first time.”  If it was done right in the first place then you wouldn’t need to make excuses for fixing it.  Perhaps you didn’t have time to do it right, then when do you think you will have time to fix it?  Either way you should correct the errors immediately.

So you asked why five times, which is giving you a pretty good idea what the problem is.  What is the solution?  It is time to involve everyone - we are smarter as a group than a single individual.  But the group comes up with ideas that have been tried before.  You need to reconsider rigid thoughts, situations change.  Try to look at it from a new paradigm to eliminate the impossible thinking.

Once you have narrowed the ideas down to possible solutions, pick the simplest answers.  Mother Nature may appear complex but it is usually the simple solution that solves the problem.  At one time people thought the planets moved in circular orbits, which caused astronomers to create complex calculations with odd retrograde motions to explain planetary motion.  Then Kepler derived that the planets moved in elliptical orbits.  At first he rejected the idea because he had previously assumed this to be too simple a solution.  But he reconsidered such rigid thoughts and he was proven correct.

Complex solutions can also mean expensive.   In Lean Thinking we like to use our mind more than your money.  It is amazing how simple and inexpensive many solutions can really be.  Why do people insist on spending hundreds of billions of dollars to solve problems?  Because it is much easier to spend money then it is to change people’s paradigms.  If you think a problem is impossible, then you also might think the solution is complex and you will need to spend a lot of money to solve it.

The goal of continuous improvement is just that continuous improvement, not delayed perfection.  Continuous improvement implies we are always working toward perfection but never reaching it.  There is always an improvement.  So accept the fact that it is a process, make time for it, nothing is impossible, and discipline yourself to do it right the first time.  Otherwise fix it immediately when it’s discovered, involve the group in the solution and select simple solutions to resolve the answer to the fifth why you asked.  Problems are also opportunities waiting for you.

 Ten Golden Rules of Continuous Improvement

1. Problems create opportunities
2. The impossible is a paradigm - Change your mind to change your performance
3. Ask why five times to get to the real answer
4. Eliminate excuses, do it right the first time
5. Correct errors immediately
6. Involve everyone - we are smarter as a group than a single individual
7. Reconsider rigid thoughts, situations change
8. Think simple, not perfect solutions
9. Use your mind more than your money
10. The Goal: Continuous improvement over delayed perfection

Lean is not a set of tools, a set of procedures to follow, or a series of logical steps. Lean is a thought process, a culture, and belief system.  So the most important thing is how to change the thinking in your organization so that lean happens. First we need to identify our goals. For this we use position goals.

Instead of looking at how to change a situation from the outside we examine it from the inside to discover its potential energy and find the energy flows.  In other words, we need to determine the natural forces of flow or the starting point position of the situation and then use this flow to achieve the results we desire.

As we implement lean, the focus is not on the lean tools but instead our own thinking of what the customer needs, wants, and values. We look for ways to build flexibility into the system to handle the variation in customer demand instead of forcing the customer to fit their demand into our system.  We look for solutions that increase flexibility and create a more agile system.  Your thinking governs your performance. So, if you fail to change your thinking, you have failed to truly implement lean.

When we start with the right goals, we are working towards the right answers. The result is to end up with the right solution to the right problem. If you understand the flows inside your organization then you are half-way to thinking lean. The other half is to understand how to use those flows and the lean tools to achieve your goals. That is the power of position goals and lean thinking together.