A group of techniques

Today I have been...

Looking at the techniques block of T889.

It offers various problem analysis tools....



Pareto analysis

Cause-and-effect diagrams

Stratification

Tally cards

Histograms

Scatterdiagrams

Shewhart control charts



It calls these the 7 old tools.

It then discusses 7 new tools

Affinity diagrams
Relational diagrams
Tree diagrams
Matrix diagrams
Program decision process charts
Arrowdiagrams
Matrix diagram analysis


It then covers questioning techniques - is/is not, 5 whys, 5 w+h, and more specific question sets.

Next, diagramming techniques are covered

Systems diagrams
Input-output diagrams
Systems maps
Influence diagrams
Richpictures
Other diagramming techniques
Activity sequence diagrams
Flow-block diagrams
Flow-process diagrams
Spaghetti charts
SIPOC charts
Multiple-cause diagrams
Force field analysis
Cognitive mapping

There is some discussion then around FMEA and Fault Tree Analyses.

There is a section on Creativity and idea generation which is similar to block 2 of B822
This covers Brainstorming, Brainwriting, Nominal group techniques, SCAMPER,Creativeproblem solving and finally De Bono's Six hats and lateral thinking.

There is information on techniques used for examining context such as environmental scanning, stakeholder analysis, SWOT, benchmarking and gap analysis. Berry et al is cited regarding gap analysis.

It then covers design techniques...
The first of these is the interestingly-named poka-yoka (avoiding inadvertant errors) - this could maybe used in conjunction with FMEA.It also covers quality function deployment (the house of quality - a conceptual framework that can be used to guide teams through the transformation process that converts customer requirements into successful products).

B3P78 shows this concept and the elements of the QFD process
1. Customer Requirements
2. Importance Weighting
3. Design requirements
4. Relationship matrix
5. Correlation matrix
6 & 7 Competitive Assessments or benchmarking
8. Objective measures

The output of the house of quality is a set of objective measures that relate to the substitute quality characteristics. The next "house" is parts deployment, which takes these design requirements and produces parts characteristics. The Process Planning house then takes the parts characteristics and produces key manufacturing operations. The final Production Planning house takes the key manufacturing operations and produces production requirements. There are four houses/phases in all. I wonder about the applicability of QFD to software solution design, particularly where there is a desire to be agile.

The section then goes on to discuss TRIZ. It is argued that there are few real-life examples of finished products where it has been used as part of the design process. The author, despite this, thinks it has two valuable and insightful concepts, "ideality" and "contradictions". Martin G Moehrle's paper on TRIZ "What is TRIZ? From Conceptual Basics to a Framework for Research" is given as an source of further information.

The conceptual approach of TRIZ is

Concrete Problem -> Abstract Problem -> Abstract Solution -> Concrete Solution

It provides a framework for moving through these steps to solve product and service problems.

(to be continued)



Why?

So What?

How will I use it?