So You Think You're Effective?
Author: Lisa Walters
Monday, November 23, 2009
Something has gone wrong…perhaps miserably wrong! And because you are committed to continuous improvement and the rewards it brings, you implement some level of corrective action. Congratulations! That’s exactly what you should do. But how sound is the corrective action plan (CAP)? How do you know your plan actually worked? You know because you determined a plan to measure its success. Let’s discuss the importance of measurement and some ways to achieve it.
You can be assured of your corrective action success only if you decide how you are going to measure its effectiveness. Deciding effectiveness checks ahead of time allows you to know quickly that the action taken was ineffective. And when action is ineffective, it’s usually due to inadequate root cause analysis.
What can one measure to determine effectiveness? Russell and Regal in After the Quality Audit (2nd edition) indicate that “effectiveness of a corrective/preventive action has two components: 1) is it achieving the desired result?; and 2) is the process capable, efficient, and consistent with objectives?”
This means that we have defined the output of what we want from a process-and yes, everyone wants a zero defect process. That goal would be fine, if your process was really capable of zero defects.
Let’s face it: many times processes simply are not capable of the objective of zero defects, admirable as that objective is. And the pursuit of that objective is what continuous improvement is all about. True effectiveness measuring occurs when you have both historical data and prospective data for a basis of comparison.
The very sticky wicket in many companies is that there just isn’t a lot of process data for the myriad processes in place. You know you have a problem and are putting fixes in place, but you are not quite sure where you were before the fixes. Does this sound like the story of your life? What are you to do? Well, you can at least check deliverables to ensure that the corrective action plan was implemented. That is, look for proof, like compliance statements, training records, and such. These then are just simple verifications. They make absolutely no judgment about effectiveness.
Take some time and put some “process expert” heads together to define what you want the outcome to be—and by all means, feel free to make sure this outcome is consistent with your organizational objectives. The success of the outcome will be in terms of a defined expectation with regard to your tolerance. In other words, what outcome do you think you should get, realistically, as compared to what you (or your customer!) can tolerate? It is vitally important, however, to keep current data and adjust your expectations once that hard data are compiled. Once you start to collect appropriate data, you can start to apply meaningful statistics to generate both incremental and breakthrough improvement.
Interestingly enough, a lot of companies like to just verify deliverables, hoping the problem doesn’t occur again, and call it a day. And if it does occur again, companies also like to “pin the tail on the donkey,” and place blame on the poor soul that happened to commit the offense—this person is the true victim of the process. Without measurement, this vicious cycle of blame continues. A review of the corrective action reports associated with these repetitive issues often reflect root causes such as “operator didn’t pay attention;” “she didn’t listen to the supervisor;” “staff didn’t read the memo posted on the work board with the other 3 bazillion memos.” These of course are not root causes, but rather symptoms. As a result, corrective actions did not intervene systemically on behalf of the classical process inputs of man, method, machine, material, measurement, and environment. And as such, the corrective action was destined to fail.
But if on-going measurements are taken of critical processes, it becomes clear that processes only are corrected and improved when systemic actions occur, after special circumstances are eliminated. Only in this way can any activity be deemed effective. At the end of the day, the mantra remains, “In God We Trust; All Others Bring Data.”