Process Management: Achieve Value-Based Results
“If you can’t describe what you are doing as a process, you don’t know what you are doing.” Such a profound quote by W. Edwards Deming, largely recognized as the Father of the Quality Movement. Dr. Deming's famous 14 Points, originally presented in Out of the Crisis, serve as management guidelines. The points cultivate a fertile soil in which a more efficient workplace, higher profits, and increased productivity may grow. These management principles have a direct correlation to navigating the path to achieving results in the uncertain healthcare industry of today.
Deming’s 14 Points for Leadership/Management
While traditionally applied to product manufacturing, Deming theory has direct application across multiple industries, especially when rising consumer and regulatory requirements demand greater value. View healthcare service delivery as a product in high demand from consumers (patients, families and others). Expectations of lower cost and superb quality, delivered in a highly patient-centric and serviceoriented environment, create an imperative healthcare systems must meet to remain relevant.
Healthcare leaders are served well when focusing on Deming’s 14 Points:
Create constancy of purpose toward improvement of product and service, with the aim to become competitive, to stay in business and to provide jobs.
Adopt the new philosophy. We are in a new economic age. Western management must awaken to the challenge, must learn their responsibilities, and take on leadership for change.
Cease dependence on inspection to achieve quality. Eliminate the need for massive inspection by building quality into the product in the first place.
End the practice of awarding business on the basis of a price tag. Instead, minimize total cost. Move towards a single supplier for any one item, on a long-term relationship of loyalty and trust.
Improve constantly and forever the system of production and service, to improve quality and productivity, and thus constantly decrease costs.
Institute training on the job.
Institute leadership (see Point 12 and Ch. 8 of Out of the Crisis). The aim of supervision should be to help people and machines and gadgets do a better job. Supervision of management is in need of overhaul, as well as supervision of production workers.
Drive out fear, so that everyone may work effectively for the company. (See Ch. 3 of Out of the Crisis)
Break down barriers between departments. People in research, design, sales, and production must work as a team in order to foresee problems of production and usage that may be encountered with the product or service.
Eliminate slogans, exhortations, and targets for the work force asking for zero defects and new levels of productivity. Such exhortations only create adversarial relationships, as the bulk of the causes of low quality and low productivity belong to the system and thus lie beyond the power of the work force.
Eliminate work standards (quotas) on the factory floor. Substitute with leadership.
Eliminate management by objective. Eliminate management by numbers and numerical goals. Instead substitute with leadership.
Remove barriers that rob the hourly worker of his right to pride of workmanship. The responsibility of supervisors must be changed from sheer numbers to quality.
Remove barriers that rob people in management and in engineering of their right to pride of workmanship. This means, inter alia, abolishment of the annual or merit rating and of management by objectives (See Ch. 3 of Out of the Crisis).
Institute a vigorous program of education and self-improvement.
Put everybody in the company to work to accomplish the transformation. The transformation is everybody's job.
EVERYTHING IS A PROCESS. “If you cannot describe what you are doing as process, you do not know what you are doing.”