The Final Exam

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The Final Exam

Juran defines strategic quality management as efforts that are carefully planned and aimed at meeting a particular goal of fitness for use regarding the conformance, design, safety, availability and field use. On the other hand, Madu and Kuei define Strategic total quality management as management of an entire organization to the extent that it excels to all the products’ extends and those services that the customers find important.

By definition, the difference between reliability and validity is that reliability refers to consistency in someone’s measurements or rather degree to which instruments measure the same ways in every instance that it is used and under same conditions as with similar subjects while validity refers to the strengths of someone’s conclusions, propositions and inferences.

The seven management tools include the affinity diagram which organizes large amounts of data that is disorganized and grouping of information based on their natural relationships. The tree diagram breaks down those categories that are broad into levels of detail that is finer and finer. Prioritization matrix is used when one wants to prioritize items and then describes these items in terms of criteria that are weighted. Matrix diagram, another management tool, shows relationships between items. Relationships can either be absent or present at each intersection. Interrelationship digraph displays interrelated cause-and-effect relationships and the factors which are involved in complex problems and describe the desired outcomes. Process decision program chat breaks down tasks, using a tree diagram, into hierarchy. Lastly, activity network diagram plans appropriate schedules or sequences for related subtasks and sets of tasks. These management tools bring order to complex jobs, delegate tasks, organize staff and identify issues.

A work instruction is a document in an organization that describes the specific tasks and activities within the organization. The roles of this document include it acts as a training plan, is a reference for what is expected of each employee, it as a continuous improvement tool and a problem solver during the dilemmas in the work place.

Experimental design refers to the techniques of gathering information whereby the designs have variations; whether or not these variations are under the experimenter’s full control. The experimental designs are important since the conclusions drawn from the experiments greatly depend on credibility of the experiment. A flawed experiment will result in flawed conclusions that will be drawn.

During problem solving some of the errors include syntax, semantic and conceptual errors. Conceptual errors deal with products of mathematics problems e.g. the defined concepts for example the theorems. Semantic errors are the types that are committed when one does not understand the meaning of the problem for example when you when you differentiate partially instead of integrating. Syntax errors are committed when the problems are given a direct translation for example wrongly writing a computer program.

Benchmarking is a process and it involves comparison between one’s business practices and metrics of performance and those of the industry’s bests. The dimensions that are measured during benchmarking are time, quality and cost. A specific indicator is used when measuring performance and this is what directs us to the performance metric used to compare the business with others in the same or different industries as long as the processes are similar.

A variable data is one which measure information. This type of information is subject to change and is measured on an infinite and continuous scale. An example for variable data is pressure, distance and temperature. Attribute data on the other hand show whether or not an item exists. An example is that of pass or fail attribute accorded to a set of data.

Deming believes that the cost of losing one customer is unknown and unknowable while Crosby believes that it is wrong to assume that there are tasks that are impossible to measure. If you have to do it then everything is measurable, Crosby believes. Both Deming and Crosby however believe that there is a cost incurred when a business loses one customer.

To begin with, inadequate availability of data that is important in the development of research that helps improve quality is one of the barriers to quality improvement efforts. Moreover, it is difficult to determine the right directions towards which improvement efforts need to be focused. Lack of, or inadequate, employee engagement also acts as another barrier.

Reference

Vanhaecht, K., Panella, M., & Sermeus, W. (2013). What would Deming, Juran and Crosby have to say about “a zero tolerance” for patient harm?. BMJ-British Medical Journal.

Leang, S. S., Zahariev, F., & Gordon, M. S. (2012). Benchmarking the performance of time-dependent density functional methods. The Journal of chemical physics, 136(10), 104101.

Sternberg, R. J., & Frensch, P. A. (Eds.). (2014). Complex problem solving: Principles and mechanisms. Psychology Press.

Myrtveit, I., & Stensrud, E. (2012). Validity and reliability of evaluation procedures in comparative studies of effort prediction models. Empirical software engineering, 17(1-2), 23-33.