Ever find yourself at the tail end of a project, swamped with unfinished tasks, and wondering where things went awry? Are there important recommended actions that the team was excited about that just didn't get done? These are the conundrums we tackle in this episode of Quality During Design, with a special nod to Arnold Schwarzenegger's "Be Useful" for his proactive approach to work.
We dissect the all-too-familiar scenario of projects saddled with incomplete actions, despite our best-laid plans. We don't just commiserate—we arm you with a strategy to ensure that things are seen through to the end.
We pull lessons from Schwarzenegger's tenure as California's governor and his hands-on approach during crises. We dissect the significance of staying involved and the vital role of follow-up and follow-through in implementing recommended actions from customer studies to FMEAs. Join us as we cast a critical eye on why management systems sometimes fail in practice and what to do to help ensure success. This isn't just about weathering audits or ticking boxes; it's about a commitment to excellence in product and service design.
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About me Dianna Deeney helps product designers work with their cross-functional team to reduce concept design time and increase product success, using quality and reliability methods.
She consults with businesses to incorporate quality within their product development processes. She also coaches individuals in using Quality during Design for their projects.
She founded Quality during Design through her company Deeney Enterprises, LLC. Her vision is a world of products that are easy to use, dependable, and safe – possible by using Quality during Design engineering and product development.
Dianna Deeney:
Have you ever gotten to the end of a project and you realize that there's just too many loose ends? There are too many things that need to get done and we end up being in a mad dash to try to get them done so we can close out our project already. Or we're working in a team environment and we expected someone else to do something for us or for the project and it didn't get done. What can we do about this? Let's talk about it after the brief introduction. Hello and welcome to Quality During Design, the place to use quality thinking to create products others love for and less. I'm your host, Dianna Deeney. I'm a senior level quality professional and engineer with over 20 years of experience in manufacturing and design. I consult with businesses and coach individuals on how to apply quality during design to their processes. Listen in and then join us. Visit qualityduringdesign. com. We're talking about what to do when things don't get done that we expected to have gotten done. It could be that we worked hard on an analysis, by ourselves or with a team, and came up with some meaningful recommended actions. It could be customer studies, reliability analyses or continuous improvement projects. Out of these analyses, we have recommended actions that we know will make a positive difference, but then they didn't get done. Or if you're setting up systems, quality management systems or a design control system and you're defining these processes and these integrated systems and communication methods to be able to do a good job at what that process is supposed to do. When you share it with the company, it's official, people are supposed to follow it. But then when you get something, a project, that goes through your design control system and you find out that something fell through, what happened? Or if you have an audit done of your process and then you realize that it's not being followed, we tend to think that we set up these processes and expect things to happen and then, when the time comes, things don't happen.
Dianna Deeney:
I'm reading a book Be Useful by Arnold Schwarzenegger, and in it he talks about a time when he was governor of California. They had seen what happened in New Orleans during their environmental crisis and they wanted California to be better prepared for crises that California would potentially have in the future. So he and his team developed processes and systems to be able to react to and handle a crisis and environmental crisis in California, to be able to help the citizens the best that they could and to help save as many lives as they could. They practiced, they delegated, people knew what they were supposed to do and then, unfortunately, a crisis did happen. Some people just leave it at that. They think, well, I'm governor, I've set up these processes and systems and everything's going to go as planned, everything's fine. But he knows that that's not necessarily the case. Even though reactions were happening with these crises, he decided he better show up with his team to make sure that things were happening as they had planned. And probably not a surprise to you listening to this story, there were some hiccups and some problems. Signals were getting crossed and some people just weren't following through or things weren't happening as they had planned. So they needed to be boots on the ground, available and coordinating to make sure that things were set up and ready to go. I know we don't have to be governors of states to experience this kind of thing and especially in engineering and product design, we're exposed to this kind of thing all the time.
Dianna Deeney:
As a quality practitioner working on some projects early on some of the early FMEAs that I did, I was facilitating and leading a team through FMEA Failure Mode Effects Analysis. The team was synergizing and coming up with ideas and recommending actions that everybody bought into and wanted to implement. So we assigned somebody and assigned a due date and we left it at that and guess what happened? Nothing happened. Things didn't get done.
Dianna Deeney:
If the problem is that we set up things to get done but then they don't get done, the strategy to address that is our own follow up and follow through. If you're part of designing products and creating them, you have an important responsibility to many people. You have a responsibility to the customers to be able to develop products that are safe and perform the way that we say they're going to perform and actually do a job that's going to help our customers. We have a responsibility to the business to be able to create something that the market's going to want to buy. We may also have responsibility for sustainability, for the environment and to the other people that work to help make these ideas a reality. I'm going to quote from Mr Schwartz and Nager's book. He says if you have a job to do or a goal you're trying to achieve, or you've made a commitment to protect something or someone and it's important to you that everything happens the way it's supposed to, it's up to you to follow through all the way. What would follow up and follow through look like for us With the example I gave with the FMEA, that we were coming up with recommended actions and assigning people.
Dianna Deeney:
We had buy-in for the people but then those recommended actions weren't getting done. I own that. I was the facilitator, I was leading the group. Even though the group was synergized and had buy-in and was ready to go, I needed to follow up and follow through with the people on those recommended actions Ensure that after the meeting space that they were still on board and still agree that this was an important thing to do. And if they were getting pushback on the other priorities of their job, I could follow up and follow through further, maybe to their managers, to ensure that these recommended actions were being prioritized within their daily priorities, that this was a project that we really wanted to get done and if that meant working to get buy-in from their manager, that's something that I could follow up and follow through to get.
Dianna Deeney:
If it's a new product development project, we know how these things go. There's going to be things that are going to pop up now and again and we want to make sure that we keep track of them and address them. I was contracting as a quality engineer on a new product development project. The primary quality engineer on that project had a whiteboard in his office. Anytime anything quality related to the project, whether it be the quality of the product itself or complying to regulations or meeting the requirements of our design control procedures if there was a hiccup or a problem it would get added to the whiteboard. And you know what? We kept bringing up these problems and asking for updates. We followed up and followed through on the status of these things time and again, and that's something else that we need to do with follow-up and follow-through. We need to keep circling back to close the loop. We may need to say it again and again, we may need to bring it up over and over again, but that is part of following up and following through.
Dianna Deeney:
I'm going to quote from Arnold Schwarzenegger's book again. Arnold says I am a follow-through fanatic. In a lot of ways, I consider following through the crux of the hard work that is necessary for important things to get done, because important stuff is never simple or straightforward. It almost always depends on timing, on other people, on lots of moving parts, and you can't count on any of those things. Ironically, follow-through is usually the easiest part of the work, at least in terms of energy and resources, yet it's almost always the thing that we either take for granted or let slip through the cracks. We say I want to do this great, fantastic thing. Then we get the ball rolling and we just expect it to keep rolling simply because we want it to, as if hope and good intentions are worth anything. I see this as especially true when we're collecting information from our team to put into a design. We're collecting those early design inputs.
Dianna Deeney:
Our team is going to expect us, or you, to follow up and to follow through on the ideas and the information that they gave you. Here's the thing we can't control other people. We can say that, yeah, they want us to follow up on their ideas, so they should be the ones doing the following up and following through. Right, we know how important follow-up and follow-through is. We can't control other people. We can only control what we do for ourselves as part of working with a greater team. With those other people, we want to maintain trust and good working relationships with them.
Dianna Deeney:
If we're asking other people for information in order for us to better make a decision, then we're going to take ownership and follow up and follow through on the information they gave us. Does that mean that we need to adopt and run with every idea that comes our way? No, Part of following up and following through could be hey, you gave us this idea, we prioritized it against the other needs of the project and we're not going to be able to implement this. Here is why that's an acceptable form of follow-up and follow-through for the people that are giving us our information. Other forms that they'll be happier about is hey, we liked your idea and this is how we're incorporating it, even if it's different from the initial concept that they're sharing with you. Show them, follow up and follow through with them on how their idea evolved and was incorporated into the final product design. That's today's insight to action.
Dianna Deeney:
Whether you're doing FMEA, investigating a failure, moving ideas into creation, there are things that need you to follow up and follow through if they're important and if we want to get them done. This is not just for me. Conan the Barbarian says so, too. If you work in new product development or you're developing new services for customers, and quality during design has some resources for you. We promote early work with a cross-functional team using quality tools so that you have the inputs into your product design that you need. At qualityduringdesigncom there is a library of podcasts that are very informative and informational that can help you with these things With the use of quality tools in a product development setting on working with a cross-functional team. Visit qualityduringdesigncom, click the heading with a podcast blog and there is a searchable library where you can find more information. This has been a production of Deeney Enterprises. Thanks for listening.