Quality is a Frog
“It’s funny how day by day, nothing changes. But when you look back everything is different.” - Calvin and Hobbes
You’re probably wondering what on earth I could possibly mean by the title. How could quality be a frog??? I assume you’ve heard the fable about boiling a frog. If not, here’s the short version:
If you put a frog in boiling water, it will simply jump out. However, if you put a frog in tepid water and very slowly increase the temperature of the water, the frog will not notice the difference and will eventually die due to the boiling water.
The same thing can happen with our quality processes if they are not under control. Over time, little changes to the way we do things slowly change our process and we do not even notice it. Then, a year or more later, we do not understand how a quality escape happened when our process should have prevented it. The Calvin and Hobbes quote at the top also strengthens this thought.
What I find the root cause to be is process drift. If our process is not well defined and well controlled, it will naturally change over time due to many variables. I call this process drift. And, in truth, all processes can be affected by it, not just quality processes.
In my opinion, the only antidote we have to the process drift poison is robust process controls. Some examples are:
- SPC (Statistical Process Control) – think control charts
- Live metrics that monitor process indicators (preferably leading indicators if possible)
- Error proofing (so that it’s not physically possible for the process to drift outside of the acceptable range)
- Automated notifications (think email/text sent by a monitoring system when process metrics are trending or out of spec)
The hardest part of dealing with process drift is remembering that the change(s) didn’t happen overnight, so you’ll need some patience when changing the process back to how it should be. While we don’t want the fix to take too long, it’s hard to fix years’ worth of process drift overnight.
Right on Patrick! I see this happen a lot. And it tends to happen more in the good times when sales are booming and we are tight on people & resources. So another question to ask is: How do we prevent or correct drift when times are good? While we want to make hay when the sun shines, not letting it dry enough before storing it will lead to a barn fire!
I like it also