Suggested Length: Three Days

Continuous Quality Improvement

Overview of Continuous Quality Improvement (CQI)

• CQI as a customer-driven approach
•  Everybody in your organization is a customer and has a customer
•  Getting familiar with the CQI vocabulary and basic principles
•  What CQI is and is not
•  The winners: organizations noted for quality and what you can learn from them
•  Knowledge, skills, and abilities you need for CQI  A case study of CQI at work

Developing Your Thinking Skills for CQI

• Developing your most valuable asset: your ability to think
•  The benefits of adopting a questioning approach to your job
•  How to scan your work area for CQI opportunities
•  Eliminating thinking habits that limit your ability to solve problems  Framing and stating the problem you want to solve
•  Tapping all of your creative talents
•  Making sound conclusions and generalizations from what you learned

Looking at an Entire Process

• Taking a step back to see your entire system or process
•  Why your “quick fixes” often backfire
•  Adopting an interdepartmental and interdisciplinary point of view when tackling a quality issue
•  Which process steps just add work and which add real value?  How to map a process from beginning to end

Interpersonal skills for CQI

• Learning to ask the right questions
•  Eliminating fear of failure
•  Accepting and finding value in negative feedback  Helpful hints for working effectively in your CQI team
•  Blaming is not the same as solving
•  What to do when there are different points of view about a quality issue  Dealing with people who resist changes in the way they work

Analyzing a Problem or Process

• Fix the cause, not just the symptom
• Do’s and don’ts for applying CQI in your job
• Non-statistical techniques for identifying and analyzing critical processes
•  Deciding where and when to start  Finding the root cause of a problem 
• How time spent up-front can save more time in the future

Planning Your Course of Action (Intervention) –

• Designing a framework and plan for improving quality
• Identifying possible solutions (hypotheses) to your CQI problem 
• Defining your plan objectives, criteria and key indicators for improvement
•  Controlling factors that may interfere with your solution
•  Securing the support and resources you need to implement your plan 
• Maintaining the CQI initiative over time

Measuring the Results of Your Action –

• Characteristics of effective quality service
•  Benefits of quantifying quality  Defining your “customers” and what they expect
•  How to get the data you need  Simple measurement and statistical tools for analyzing data
•  Using CQI on a daily basis 
• Ongoing learning through data over time  Making decisions based on facts  How to keep track of your data and results

Building Your CQI Team

• Making CQI a collaborative team effort
•  Engaging your entire team in solving problems and improving work 
• How the CQI process effects work group motivation and morale
•  Tips for effective team CQI meetings
•  Steps for empowering everyone on your CQI team to make continuous improvement in quality

Taking Your CQI Skills to a Higher Level

• Additional data collecting and analysis tools  Measuring the hard-to-measure
•  Using CQI to remove bottlenecks and improve flow of work
•  Finding external benchmarks and best practices
•  Transitioning to a proactive and preventive approach to CQI

Examples of short presentations on CQI principles and techniques:

• Focusing on customer expectations, asking inquiry-based questions, improving team meetings, planning a CQI project, critical thinking skills, Deming’s 14 Points and PDSA cycle, identifying constraints to improvement, measures for outcomes and processes

Examples of CQI tools for understanding a problem: charting data over time, checklists, flowcharts, Gantt chart, “fishbone” diagram, affinity diagram, nominal group technique, force field, process map, brainstorming, storyboarding, concept map
Examples of CQI tools for measuring and analyzing data over time: check sheets, run chart, simple statistical tools for analyzing results, scatter diagram, control chart, histogram, Pareto diagram,