DMAIC to Avoid Zombies at Work Part-III

This is the concluding part of this series.

 

It’s probably not hard to identify Workplace Zombies at your organization. If,
for whatever reason, they have left your company, you probably think all is
well. Right? Unfortunately, no. Just like in the movies, a zombie seems to come
from nowhere, and their kind can spread rapidly. One zombie can bite two, two
zombies can bite four, and soon a zombie apocalypse is underway.

 

In the movies as well as the workplace, all zombies start off as real, live,
productive people. But when a member of the undead bites them, they get
infected, and their fate is sealed. How can you keep the Workplace Zombie
infection from spreading in your quality system? Zombies can only be kept at bay
by removing the source of the infection or the root cause. In the business
world, certain processes are the source of the infection, and these must be
identified and removed. One of these sources is the dead-end process.

 

You have probably experienced a dead-end process. Perhaps you were told to
prepare a report every week, only to find out months later that nothing was ever
being done with them. No decisions were made based on your conclusions, and the
entire project was a waste of time. Dead-end processes can also be part of other
processes, such as completing forms with information that is no longer needed,
or submitting requests that are never fulfilled. The unfortunate result is not
just lost revenue but the bitterness and apathy that comes from from working at
a place where this happens.

 

Dead-end processes, and other corporate systems that make people hate their
jobs, can be sources of the infection. Dead-end processes make people want to
sit in their cubicles and stop trying. That’s the first sign of contracting the
Workplace Zombie infection, and it’s difficult to contain. Before it spreads
from one department to the next, start eliminating dead-end processes and other
sources of the disease. There are plenty more sources.

Staving off a Workplace Zombie pandemic is well worth the effort.

 

When work is being done by real people instead of Workplace Zombies, the DMAIC
process is much more effective:

 

Define: For real people, if
the problem is a nonconforming product or excess waste, the solution is to
determine the attributes that are critical to quality.

Measure: Real People collect
all of the relevant data. They see all the inputs and outputs that are related
to the process and determine the best way to measure them.

Analyze: Root causes are
always circulating through Real People’s minds. For them, the only goal is to
determine how the process inputs affect process outputs.

Improve: Real People always
look for a better way to serve customers. They will never rest until they find
simple, innovative solutions.

Control: No matter how many
customers are helped by the changes, Real People continue to monitor the outputs
to ensure continued success.

People are the foundation of every quality system. Are yours looking to serve
your customers, or to bite them?