Quality management and continuous improvement
Quality as meeting requirements: the ISO 9001 principles, the plan-do-check-act wheel, nonconformity and the responses to it, Pareto, Ishikawa and the five whys, certification and the CMMI maturity levels.
- 23 cards
- 5 topics
- Free
The outline, topic by topic
Each topic is weighted the way the exam weighs it.
- Concepts
- Questions
- Sort and link
- On the timeline
- Scenarios
A few cards from the deck
Nonconformity: what is it?
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A requirement that is not met: a gap found between what was expected and what was done or delivered.
It is always measured against a written or agreed requirement (specification, procedure, standard). Without a requirement there is no nonconformity, only an opinion.
An IT department measures user satisfaction after every ticket and uses it to set its priorities. Which ISO 9001 principle does it apply?
- Customer focus
- Engagement of people
- Process approach
- Leadership
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Customer focus
The seven principles are customer focus, leadership, engagement of people, process approach, improvement, evidence-based decision making and relationship management. Here the customer is listened to in order to decide.
The continuous improvement wheel chains four phases: …, do, … and act.
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The continuous improvement wheel chains four phases: plan, do, check and act.
Plan sets the target and the method, do applies it, check compares results with the target, act generalises or corrects. The wheel keeps turning: act opens a new cycle.
Correction: what is it?
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An immediate response that removes a defect that has been found, without tackling what produced it.
Restoring a crashed server corrects the incident. If nothing else is done, the same failure will come back: a corrective action must follow.
A deployment failed; the conclusion is "the operator forgot a step" and he is reprimanded. The failure recurs a month later with another operator. What is the probable cause, and what should be done?
- The operators lack rigour: punish every future slip more severely
- The analysis stopped too early: dig down to the process, for example the lack of a checklist
- The operators are badly recruited: require more experience at the next hire
- Two failures do not make a trend: wait for a third failure before concluding
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The analysis stopped too early: dig down to the process, for example the lack of a checklist
When two different people forget the same step, the cause lies in the process, not the people. The five whys lead to what is missing, here a checklist, and the corrective action targets it.