Lean Consulting Tips - Who Is Responsible?
Posted on Mon, Aug 16, 2010
Readers of the previous Operational Excellence Insights “Are You Improving or Counting” most likely saw an error immediately upon reading the headline. (The letter “n” was substituted for “m” in the word “Improving”.) After all, it wasn’t too difficult to notice the misspelled word. Seeing this, initial thoughts were probably along the lines of:
How could these process excellence professionals do this? Don’t they proofread? That must be embarrassing. I wonder if anyone else noticed. Don’t they use spell check? I wonder how that happened. Who’s at fault? I’m curious if they’ll identify and eliminate root cause(s).
As readers of Operational Excellence Insights, each of you is a customer of these articles and as such our offering last week failed to meet your requirements (or ours). In our never-ending pursuit of excellence this provided a valuable opportunity to investigate the process, implement improvements, and most importantly, practice what we preach as Lean Six Sigma consultants.
It is unlikely that many people would consider the question in the list above addressing root cause. Normally, the initial reaction is more focused on “who’s at fault.” Being customers of products and services throughout our business and personal lives, we frequently encounter defects or levels of quality that are less than desired.
When such situations arise, we typically are content with receiving credit or some other allowance, none of which has anything to do with getting to the root cause and eliminating it.
Read the full article "Who Is Responsible?"