Do It Right the Second Time: Benchmarking Best Practices in the Quality Change Process

Failure of a quality initiative, either in part or in whole, can happen to any organization. What differentiates successful organizations is that they learn from their failures and do it right the second time. Author Peter Merrill takes you sequentially through the activities required to lead a lasting change, from vision to final realization. More importantly, he stresses the balance between process improvement and people improvement. Throughout the book are checklists, tables, questionnaires, and other helpful tools to support your quality implementation. In addition, Merrill supplies examples showing you what went wrong with other organizations and the successful course of corrections they made. Merrill captures many of the developments of the intervening years since the first edition of this book, particularly Six Sigma and lean. Three completely new chapters on ISO 9000 will draw the reader into systems thinking, discourage overdocumentation, and encourage the use of measurement to drive improvement. The new Chapter 23 shows the linkages between ISO 9000, Six Sigma, and excellence awards. This book embraces the essentials of quality management, presents them in a simple format, and gives you a sense of flow as you implement.