Chris's blog

Six Sigma in Purchasing

I will be delivering a talk at the next AmCon show in Bellevue Washington on February 19 or 20, 2008. I've given this talk a number of times, so please stop by and say hello if you've found the topics interesting and/or useful.

Critical Success Factors for an Enduring Quality Program

Lake Louse Alberta

During a recent NWQF (Northwest Quality Forum) meeting, the team members discussed how to market quality. There were some very interesting discussions. The list below attempts to capture some of the key ideas. In no particular order -

Creating an Effective Agenda

Recently I attended a training session on "Running Effective Meetings". It was a nice refresher course and summarized a number of practices quite well. Below I've included some notes on creating an agenda that was included in the course. Running Effective Meetings Recipe for Creating an Agenda

The Five Dysfunctions of a Team

Just finished "The Five Dysfunctions of a Team: A Leadership Fable" by Patrick M. Lencioni [Book Link]. It's written in the same style as "The Goal" (Goldratt, Cox) [Book Link], i.e. a method taught in the form of a story.

Engineering Quality Cycle | Driving Engineering Best Practices

Often we focus on quality when our impact is greatly diminished.  Trying to improve the quality of widget at the manufacturing phase is only marginally effective considering a large portion of defects are designed in.  This is also true for software and services,  If we were to consider quality in the upfront design or creation process our decisions would have a greater impact and cost a great deal less than discovering them further down the chain.  In this article, I describe the DFQ/QA/QC/CE model (Engineering Quality Cycle) which is used to build quality into the engineering process.

Upcoming Talk on Purchasing & Quality Practices

Just wanted to remind everyone that I have a talk coming up next week, February 19th, at the AmCon conference in Bellevue Washington - it's FREE, so don't pass up this opportunity to learn more about "Six Sigma in Purchasing" - more here including the presentation material. The talk focuses on presenting a number of Supplier Management practices and describing the quality tools that can be used to execute supplier management better.

Performance Management "Buy-In"

Q: How do you get an organization to "buy-in" to Performance Management and make it part of their day-to-day operations?

Kaizen at PMI - Puget Sound Chapter

On Friday, I will be delivering a talk on Kaizen Blitz for a Software Company in Bellevue, WA for the local Project Management Institute (PMI) chapter. You can find a copy of the presentation material here.

Microsoft Business Intelligence Conference, Seattle WA

I had the opportunity to attend the MS BI conference in Seattle, May 9 - 11, 2007. The conference focused on the IT professional, not so much on the Business user.

Kaizen at PMI - Puget Sound | End Notes

The talk on Friday went well - everyone seemed engaged. There were a number of questions:

1) How do you make these type of efforts sustainable?

Ans: We all have suffered from the 'flavor of the month' program and are quite aware of the pitfalls that lie ahead of us in championing these types efforts. Some of the ways that were talked about include:

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