Plan, Do, Check, Act

 

1 Planning is an exercise we all use daily, but seldom do we use it on our own growth. In order for you to get where you want to be in the next 5 years, a plan is essential. This post will take you through the planning cycle using Deming’s famous Plan-Do-Check-Act cycle.

1.1 Plan:

Planning includes defining what you want to achieve. I use a mission statement, roles (like mother, wife, friend, and worker), and goals (like become an expert Digital photographer, have a solid financial plan for retirement…) and break those down into short term and long term goals.

You can use any number of these and other tools to plan your ideal future. Remember; don’t let that demon that says “you can’t do that” get into your head. You can do anything you set your mind to!

Once you have a written account of where you want to go, it is time to determine how you should go about achieving it. Use time management techniques, prioritization, visioning and other tools to help you complete your plan. I will talk more about these techniques in later posts.

1.2 Do:

Practice your plan for a month or so and see how it goes. Keep a journal and write down what is working and what is not. Even though I am talking about long term plans here, that doesn’t mean they won’t change all along the way.

1.3 Check:

Take some time to analyze your successes and failures. Remember – failures are not bad. They are simply learning mechanisms. If someone never failed, that would mean they never took risks. Risk taking is an important key to moving ahead in life; so no punishment or feeling bad if something doesn’t turn out like you thought it would. Just change the way you go about it!

1.4 Act:

This is the fun part. You have worked out the kinks and are ready to fully act on your mission. Your chances of success are greatly enhanced by a positive attitude. Keep a journal of successes, what you are grateful for and what things you may want to look at during your next Check cycle.

2 Prioritizing:

When you are in the Planning stages, prioritizing is a great tool to help you hone in on what is most important to you. First write down the actual priority of these roles in your life. What do you spend the most time on? Then write down your desired priority of these roles. There is probably something you should fix to get back in line with your authentic self.

3 Goal Setting:

Goals should be written as SMART goals. S = specific, M = measurable, A = attainable, R = realistic and T = timely. Specific means the goal states exactly what you are going to achieve, measurable means you can measure whether it was successful or not, attainable means you are giving yourself a goal that is within your grasp to achieve (no flying to the moon), realistic means it can be done within the limits you set and timely means it has an end time in which it should be completed.

Write the goal in positive language so it is something you would like to do, not something you’d like to put off.

Goals can be achieved over different timeframes; short term (within a month), medium term (within 6 months) or long term (within a year or several years).

4 Planning Your Goals:

Here are some steps you can use to plan your goals:

·         Visualize how your will feel, what you will see once you achieve your goal. Close your eyes and hold this vision in your mind. Write down your thoughts on a sheet of paper.

·         Write down the steps you think you need to take to achieve it.

·         Arrange the steps in time order

·         List all the resources you need to help you get your goal.

·         Identify any blocks or risks that could get in your way.

·         Establish plans for managing the risks.

·         Make a list of action steps and take your first action!

 

PMP Notes for Quality Managment

• Quality – characteristics; ability to satisfy stated or implied needs; conformance to requirements; fitness for use
• Grade – a category or rank given to entities having the same functional use but use different technical characteristics. Determining and delivering the required levels of both quality and grade are the responsibilities of the Project Manager and project management team.
• Modern quality management complements project management in customer satisfaction, prevention over inspection, management responsibility and processes within phases (plan-do-act-check).
• Quality planning – determine quality standards; may need to modify organization quality policy, stakeholders fully aware, have inputs from the scope statement, product description and other related processes; risks weighed.
• Quality assurance – monitor overall quality; provide confidence that the project will satisfy the relevant quality standards; through the project; internal and external.
• Quality Control – measure specific quality
• The quality assurance and control processes share the same inputs as the quality management plan and operational definitions, which are outputs of the quality planning. The work results and checklists are inputs to the quality control while the results of quality control measurements input to quality assurance. The outputs of both have quality improvement.
• Cost of quality – tools of quality planning, prevention, appraisal,  and failure (prevention, evaluation, repair)  costs the  the latter is broken down into internal and external costs; memeasurement and test equipment costs. Deming  said “85% of the cost of quality are the direct responsibility of management”.
• Metrics – operational definitions; output of quality planning; specify what and how to measure.
• Quality inspection – attributes or measurements
• Attribute sampling – result can either conform or not; fast; cheap; accurate
• Variables sampling – result rated in a continuous scale that measures the degree of conformity
• AQL (acceptable quality level)- % limit to accept; AQL 5% in 100 means that among 100 tested, of no more than 5 unqualified are found it will be acceptable.
• “Buyer’s Risk” – unqualified products are shipped to the customer as the result of sampling not being able to detect issues
• “Seller’s Risk” – qualified products are rejected to ship to the customer as the result of sampling not treating the whole
• In a control chart, the X is the mean value of the process data; X bar is the line. The Upper Control Limit (UCL) is 3* SD, the LCL (lower control limit is -3*SD.
• R chart means the range chart. Usually the sample’s range is calculated and the R is the mean of the range. R bar is the line.
• Usually the sample average ford not equal to the control average, X bar can be a calculated value or intentionally set up to manage the control.
• “Rule of 7” – if there are 7 or more points in succession that are either above or below the mean value there is cause for concern about the process.
• Special causes – unusual events; specific people operating; intermittent and unpredictable; output is not stable over time and unpredictable; output is not stable oer time and not predictable; all processes must be brought into statistical control by first detecting and removing the Special cause variation.
• Common causes – system design; only corrected by  the management; output distribution stable over time; no adjustment; normal process variables
• Kaizen – continuous quality improvement; even the processes are operating without problem