Every month, ASQ – American Society for Quality selects a quality-themed topic for Influential Voices bloggers to discuss as part of a round table. The October topic is: How can employers leverage quality to invite innovation? Here is my answer: It is well known that innovation is an important driver of Read more…
Among different definitions out there I like the one that says: “Employee engagement is the extent to which employees feel passionate about their jobs, are committed to the organization, and put discretionary effort into their work.” In every organization you can find employees who fall in any of these 3 Read more…
On June 24, 1980 NBC, the television broadcasting company, presented a documentary called “If Japan Can… Why Can’t We.” as part of NBC’s White Paper series. They featured Dr. W. Edwards Deming, an american who went to Japan on 1950 and taught the Japanese his leadership philosophy and all about quality and productivity Read more…
Talking about Quality to the C-Suite is a real challenge. There are a lot of strategies and tools than can help any quality professional to make the C-Suite understand and take decisions through a quality perspective. This month I read an interesting post in the ASQ blog called “Talking To Read more…
Have you ever thought of incorporating quality tools into your daily life? Consider this scenario: a family of 4 (mom, dad & boys), schools, extra school activities, doctor’s appointments, my husband’s job, house chores and running own businesses; in summary: LIFE. There are so many things going on in my Read more…
As every year, ASQ has released the 2013 Manufacturing Outlook Survey that was fielded to respondents in the aerospace, automotive, food, medical device, pharmaceutical and utility industries, among others. After reading the summary on the ASQ blog, an interesting fact reflected that “only 13% of respondents use smart manufacturing, but 82% Read more…
How many times you have to answer the question: What do you do for living? It is not as simple as saying ‘I’m a Quality Software Engineer’, sometimes people don’t know exactly what does it mean and you have to find the correct way to explain them what are your Read more…
How “soft skills” influence in an interview, your job or daily routine? Are they more important than “hard skills”? This month, Julia McIntosh of ASQ’s Communications department wrote about different themes discussed in the past ASQ’s World Conference on Quality and Improvement 2013 in Indianapolis-Indiana, and I’ve selected “soft skills” to be Read more…
In Part 1, we have learned what ISO 26000:2010 is about. In this post we are going to go deeper and understand a little bit more about its implementation. How to use the standard? – Schematic overview –(Click on the image to enlarge) This image is intended to assist organizations in Read more…
What is ISO 26000:2010 – Guidance on SR?ISO 26000 is an international standard released by ISO – International Organization for Standardization – in November 2010, that focuses its discussion on Social Responsibility (SR). It was developed using a multi-stakeholder approach involving experts from more than 90 countries and 40 international Read more…
“You’re away from the office—at home, at the store, at a sporting event, at your children’s school—and you spot a situation where a quality tool would really come in handy. Or, you find that a quality tool is being used, quite unknowingly. Have you spotted a non-work situation that could use Read more…
Paul Borawski asked in his new post a simple/complex question: How do you define quality? As the world keeps changing, the definition of quality does too. So Paul extended his question to: “What do you use as the best, most inclusive, and illuminating definition of quality? Test your definition against Read more…
