Mind Your Ps & Qs: How to achieve Quality through Process Improvement: a handbook for humans. - Softcover

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Freelancing since the mid-80s, in companies such as Alcatel, Motorola, Nokia, Philips and VW, David Covey has been involved in many quality and process improvement initiatives. Fed up with facing the same old problems, he decided to write the book he could have done with 15 years ago?

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Ps And Qs?
Every management guidebook has to have a snappy acronym or easy to understand
method which might stand a chance of circumventing our stupidity chips,
at least until the next book we read. As if you haven t got enough to remember
from all those other books! I like to think that this one s easy, as I didn t have to
go through any complex linguistic shenanigans to make it fit. The idea just came
to me in the bath one day1 and soon became part of the family.

Mind your Ps & Qs what could be easier to remember than that? It was a
rhetorical question

Perhaps you can remember how, as a child, you were warned before you went
out in public in your Sunday Best to mind your Ps & Qs ? You probably never
had any idea what the proverbial Ps and Qs were, but the warning tended to
be enough. Even if it might not work quite as well today, I hope you can understand
that this was a warning you were being told to be on your very best
behavior.

I m going to ask you to do the same in order to ensure that not you, but your
organization, will be on its best behavior. Throughout the book, I will describe
specific Ps and Qs, which are intended to help you in your quest to reach the
Holy Grail of giving your customers what they want. Failing that, at least what
you think they want

Roles
One of the things which motivated me to complete this book, was the fact that I
see a real need to make sure that everyone plays their part in Process Improvement.
I have seen initiatives falter, or fail, because of one or other of the main
players not playing their part. To succeed, Process Improvement programs have
to have the active involvement, albeit sometimes in a support role, of everyone in
the organization. Too often, people step back from, don t accept, or just don t
know that they have, responsibilities in Process Improvement programs.
I have used the following fairly loose and debatable terms to encompass
the roles which have to be filled in any Process Improvement program:

Policymakers the people who hold sway over whether your program
will work because they have the power to say YAY or NAY .

Managers the folks in the middle who have to do all that tedious stuff
like meet other peoples budgets, meet other peoples deadlines, not have
heart failure every time somebody else s problem is dumped in their lap

Practitioners the techies or operators and the people who support
them. (I started off using the term developers but that is somewhat
restrictive. Whatever you call them, these are your process users .)

Improvers the people who will facilitate the program, usually a dedicated
team assigned for part (preferably all) of their time to support work
on Process Improvement issues, specifically in implementation of
changes. (I know it s not a particularly inspired choice of name, but it was
the best I could come up with. Feel free to call them what you will.)

These roles apply regardless of the size of your program.

That means regardless of size. Sure as eggs is eggs, there will be people reading
this who will say, well, of course, we don t have to worry about [insert role or
roles here] . You do. Unless you re doing this entirely alone in a one-person company,
you have to fill all those roles. Maybe you will have to do some thinking
about who they actually are in your organization, but they are there, and they
have to be identified.

You will find more about each role later on.

Four Peas and a Queue
For any Process Improvement program to succeed, as well as all of those with a
part to play (Policymakers, Managers, Practitioners, Improvers) doing their bit,
there has to be some commonly understood form to the program itself. There are
some Ps and Qs that apply to the program as a whole and without which success
will be difficult to achieve.

These are:

PREPARE

QUANTIFY

PREACH QUALITY

PERSEVERE

PEOPLE

Although some of these can be logically ordered, there is no specific ordering
to this list, it simply reflects the order of the corresponding narrative chapters
which follow. You should therefore consider these elements not as separate entities
in a chain, but rather as parts of one of those very simple jigsaw puzzles for
small children. Each piece has some recognizable meaning in itself, but it s only
when you put them together that you see the whole picture.

Pertinent Questions (PQs)
These are questions, which you need to be asking and working out the answers
to in order to progress. Rather than just telling you to do this, do that , I want
you to work out for yourself what needs to be done. If you can resolve a question
to your own satisfaction in the context of your organization and what it does,
then you will have a basis for moving forward.

Although I find the same problems in different organizations, the approaches
to solving those differs sometimes greatly.

Find honest answers to the PQs and implement your solutions in a constant,
controlled way and review their success. That way you will not only improve your
processes but also learn how to improve your improvement processes!