originally posted on one of my several now defunct blogs, called On Engineering on 10th May 2012
Quality issues cannot be counted amongst my favourite activities. They can normally be categorised as “urgent-uninteresting”, which is just about the best demotivator I can imagine. They’re negative, cause huge floods of emails, assumptions, obfuscation and general panic. Some people thrive on this sort of situation. I, generally, don’t, as was again proven by a quality concern with some Chinese colleagues. I get involved simply because our Tech Centre has the best kit, so we can test what others can’t. It’s annoying, because development people rather prefer looking forwards than downwards at self-shot feet. Nevertheless, some quality issues are useful (“never let a crisis go to waste” and all that). Some are excellent impromptu team-building exercises and others simply turn up some interesting artefacts, like this beauty below. It stopped me in my tracks - never have I seen an Ishikawa diagram illustrated so literally as by my Chinese colleagues…!
For those not yet in the know, the Ishikawa, or fishbone, diagram is a way of formalising the investigation into the potential causes of a particular issue. It’s a methodology that forces you to look at each the 6 M’s (others call 7 or even 8) in order to gain the full picture of what might have gone wrong to cause the issue (sorry, problem) that we’re working on (the Environment one is clearly an awkward ‘M-ification’ for the purposes of alliteration):
Machine (technology)
Method (process)
Material (Includes Raw Material, Consumables and Information.)
Man Power (physical work)/Mind Power (brain work): Kaizens, Suggestions
Measurement (Inspection)
Milieu / Mother Nature (Environment)
I can’t tell you precisely what the 5 Chinese characters represent in this one. Whatever the causes of this particular quality issue, the discovery of this putrid gem of a rotten, stinking fish amongst the rotten, stinking debris of a quality concern almost made up for it…
