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Mid-1700s: A Habit of 3-year Preventive Maintenance

Mid-1700s: A Habit of 3-year Preventive Maintenance

By 1792, six Royal Navy dockyards employed about 1500 workers each. The dockyards had a wider variety of technical specialties than was found in any other manufacturing enterprise. The dockyards “were some of the largest manufactories in Europe and dwarfed almost all private industries.” (Morriss) The dockyards built new ships, but maintaining ships was just as important. The Royal Navy’s dockyards constituted one of the largest industrial maintenance organizations in the world…and their only peer organizations in terms of the scale of maintenance management were the dockyards of other superpower navies.

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Why Fist to Five is a Powerful Decision-Making Technique

Why Fist to Five is a Powerful Decision-Making Technique

Fist to five voting is a simple and effective way to gather group feedback or to gauge consensus in a meeting or discussion. In this method, participants are asked to rate their level of support for an idea or proposal on a scale of 1 to 5, using their fingers. However, fist to five is a decision-making technique that should be described in the project charter and agreed upon by all participants. Ample time should be allowed between the initial poll and the final vote for negotiation and agreement to occur. [Read more…]

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Project Requirements are a Risk

Project Requirements are a Risk

Guest Post by John Ayers (first posted on CERM ® RISK INSIGHTS – reposted here with permission)

Some common reasons why requirements can cause risk to a project are:

  • To be determined (TBD)
  • Late requirements definition
  • Unclear requirement definition
  • Changing requirements
  • Late requirement flow down to subcontractors
  • Incorrect or poorly defined interface documents

This paper explains how poorly defined requirements can impact the project.

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Poll: “Is life data required…?”

Poll: “Is life data required…?”

My wife says I am wasting my time trying to change reliability statistics, so I polled the www.linkedin.com Reliability Leadership…, ASQRRD, IEEE Reliability, “Biostatistics, and No MTBF groups. The polls claimed that “Life data, censored or not, is required to estimate MTBF, reliability function, failure rate function, or survivor function. TRUE? FALSE? or DON’T KNOW.” I am grateful for the responses.

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Application of Quantitative Criticality Analysis in FMEA

Some defense-related applications require a special type of criticality analysis, called Quantitative Criticality Analysis to supplement FMEA applications. This is the “C” in what is called FMECA: Failure Mode, Effects and Criticality Analysis. I’ll shorten Criticality Analysis to CA in this article.

What is Quantitative CA? When and why it is used? Can Quantitative Criticality Analysis be used in commercial applications?

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Five Impactful Elements of the New Book, Facilitating with FINESSE

Five Impactful Elements of the New Book, Facilitating with FINESSE

Facilitating with FINESSE:  How to Guide People to Powerful Business Solutions is a practitioner’s guide for ten common applications that technically trained professionals are frequently asked to facilitate. The range of applications covers quality and reliability techniques such as block diagrams and tree diagrams through master plans and strategic plans. This article provides five impactful elements for professionals who are often enlisted to lead teams to workable solutions, despite having little or no facilitation training,

Content

The book focuses on ten practical applications and provides specific ways to facilitate them better. There is not a lot of wasted time on the basics covered by most facilitation books. Each self-contained application includes examples ­­­– good and bad – from my experiences on some complicated and controversial projects.

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Business Process Redesign the Plant Wellness Way

Business Process Redesign the Plant Wellness Way

A presentation slide set titled “Simpler Industrial and Business Process Redesign”. Presented by Mike Sondalini to The Institution of Engineers, Malaysia, Electrical Engineering Technical Division.

The presentation opens with examining three universal business problems:

  1. Wasted effort and resources
  2. Wrong business process for the purpose
  3. Wide and out-of-control process variation

He also explores the implication of the quality loss function and then incorporates the concept of maintenance work quality. Then Mike explore specific steps you can implement to improve the fundamental processes within your organization.

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Electoral Quality and Integrity

Electoral Quality and Integrity

Guest Post by James Kline (first posted on CERM ® RISK INSIGHTS – reposted here with permission)

On September 15, 2021, ASQ announced the formation of the Center for Electoral Quality and Integrity. This announcement caused a conflicted reaction.  On the one hand I liked that the Government Division, which was pushing this action, was showing some level of activity, after almost none for several years. One the other hand, I just laughed at the idea that ASQ and Government Division was going to, or even be capable of, having an impact on electoral quality or integrity. This is not a case of believing the objective is bad.

It is a case of realizing that this is not the 1990s when quality was a key priority of governments around the world. And that ASQ does not have the same level of influence it had, when in the 1990s it was instrumental in getting Education added to the Baldrige Award.

This piece discusses the white paper on Electoral Quality and Integrity which the Center seeks to implement. It also discusses the forces likely to prevent ASQ from being successful.

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Self Ownership Part 3

Self Ownership Part 3

Think back to the restaurant mess we talked about a few pages back, who was responsible?

The lesson for grown-ups (and more importantly executives and business leaders) from The Boy Who Cried Wolf is that the boy was at fault when he lied the first time, but the person who was really responsible for the sheep being lost was the shepherd who left his flock with a boy who he knew couldn’t be trusted.

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