To analyze a problem using quality tools, project managers should clearly understand their problem because it is crucial to identify the right tools to solve the problem. So, in this article, we’ll discuss the 7 quality tools needed to analyze a problem.
Table of Contents
What is the problem?
When we live as humans, we must face many problems. And those are different from person to person. Because of that, they are searching for various ways to find solutions. In this journey, someone can win their life while someone cannot win because those depend on their personality, knowledge, experience, etc. Such problems arise in your professional life as well. It depends on the services or products in your organization. Simply put, an expected gap between employees and employers. As follows, we can identify expectations between employees and employers.
Employees’ expectations
- High salary
- Less work
- Less production
- High incentive
- Good working environment
- High bonus
Employers’ expectations
- Market level salary
- More work
- High production
- Reasonable incentive
- Good working conditions
- Affordable bonus
According to the above expectations, numerous problems may arise. And those problems you can solve in six steps.
How far can you go?
As a project manager, you should be strong when facing crucial situations in your project. On the other hand, you can use quality tools to solve those problems effectively and efficiently.
How to Analyze a Problem Using Quality Tools?
According to the project quality management, you can identify seven quality tools as above. Before using seven quality tools, you should consider the quality tools’ brainstorming rules as follows,
Quality tools’ brainstorming rules
- Diverse group
- Go around the room and get input from all – one idea per unit
- Continue until ideas are exhausted
- No criticism
- Group ideas that go together
- Look for answers
Cause and Effect Diagrams
Purpose: Graphical representation of the trail leading to the root cause of a problem.
How is it done?
- Decide which quality characteristic, outcome, or effect you want to examine (may use a Pareto chart)
- Backbone – draw a straight line
- Ribs – categories
- Small bones – root causes
Remember💡 You need to identify the root causes of the problem before you put a “solution” into place.
Benefits:
- Break problems down into bite-size pieces to find the root cause
- Fosters teamwork
- To figure out of factors that arise the problem
- Road map to verify picture of the process
- Follows a brainstorming relationship
Flow Charts
Purpose: Visual illustration of the operations required to complete a task
- Schematic drawing of the process to measure or improve
- That is starting point for process improvement
- Potential weaknesses in the process are made visual
- Picture the process as it should be
Benefits:
- Identify process improvement
- Understand the process
- Shows duplicated effort and other non-value-added steps
- To explain working relationships between people and organizations
- Target specific steps in the process for improvement
According to the flow charts, there are two types of flow charts. Those are Top Down and Linear.
Top Down flow chart
How is it done?
- List down major steps
- Write the major steps across the top of the chart
- List down sub-steps under each in the order they occur
Benefits:
- Simplest of all flow charts
- Used for planning new processes or examining existing ones
- Keep people focused on the whole process
Linear flow chart
Toolbox
How is it done?
- Write the process step inside each symbol
- Connect the symbol with arrows showing the direction of the flow
Benefits:
- Show what happens at each step in the process
- Show what happens when non-standard events occur
- Graphically display processes to identify redundancies and other wasted effort
Check Sheets
Purpose:
This tool is used for collecting and organizing measured or counted data. After Collecting Data (details) you can use it as input data for other quality tools.
Benefits:
- To gather data in a systematic and organized manner
- To determine the source of the problem
- To facilitate the classification of data (stratification)
Histograms
Purpose: To decide the spread or variation of a set of data points in a graphical form.
How is it done?
- Collect data,50-100 data points.
- Determine the range of the data.
- Calculate the size of the class interval.
- Divide data points into classes.
- Determine the class boundary.
- Count all of the data points in each class.
- Draw the histogram.
Benefits:
- Allow you to understand at a glance the variation that exists in a process
- The process behavior will show by the shape of the histogram
- Usually, it will tell you to dig deeper for otherwise unseen reasons for variation
- The shape and size of the dispersion will help identify otherwise hidden sources of variation
- Used to determine the capabilities of a process
- Starting point for the improvement process
Pareto Charts
Purpose: prioritize problems
How is it done?
- Create a preliminary list of problem classifications
- Tally the occurrences in each problem classification
- Arrange each classification data in order from highest to lowest
- Construct the bar chart
Benefits:
- Pareto analysis will help graphically display outcomes that the few crucial problems emerge from the general background
- It tells you what to work on first
Control Chart
Purpose: the primary purpose of a control chart is to predict the expected product outcome.
Benefits:
- Forecasting process out of control and out of specification limits
- Distinguish between specific, identifiable causes of variation
- Pareto chart can use for statistical process control
Scatter Diagrams
Purpose: To identify the correlations and exits between a quality characteristic and a factor that may be driving it.
A scatter diagram displays the correlation between two variables in a process. These variables could be critical to quality (CTQ) characteristics and a factor affecting it are two factors affecting a CTQ or two related quality characteristics.
Dots representing data points are scattered on the diagram. Furthermore, you can see, The extent to which the dots cluster together in a line across the diagram shows the strength with which the two factors are related.
How is it done?
- Decide which paired factors you want to examine. Both two factors must be measurable on some incremental linear scale
- Collect 30 to 100 paired data points
- Discover the highest and lowest value for the two variables
- Draw out the vertical (y) and horizontal (X) axes of a graph
- Plot the data
- Title the diagram
Benefits:
- It helps identify and test probable causes
- By knowing which elements of your process are related and how they are related, you are aware that they vary to affect a quality characteristic.
Analyze a real-world problem using quality tools
This is my own experience which gets from my college. In our project management department, the students were facing this problem in their first-year first-semester examinations. The problem is 92% of students failed the Information Technology subject. For that reason, I started to research why they failed that subject. In this case, I used both the check sheet and Pareto chart to analyze this problem.
Step 1
In this step, I collected details from students. As a result, I was able to classify them into five areas. Those are,
- Inability to attend lectures on time
- Difficulty understanding lectures
- Language barrier
- Being a tough exam paper
- The impact of the A/L subject stream
Check-List
According to the checklist, analyze this data using a Pareto chart. Through a Pareto chart, you can identify what are the most significant problems in your trouble. After understanding that, you can take a few actions to prevent that problem. However, you should keep this in mind! After taking the solutions, don’t forget to monitor them.
Pareto chart principles: 80% of all problems arise from 20% of the causes.
According to the Pareto chart principle, the most significant cause is the language barrier. Then, I was able to took some recommendations to avoid that problem.
Conclusion
Quality tools are the elements that play a crucial role in every difficult situation. That help to gather data, analyze data, identify root sources, and measure outcomes in problem-solving and process enhancement. Using these tools can solve problems, create new ideas, and do proper planning.