Fishbone Diagram: A Supertool to Understand Problems, Potential Solutions, and Goals

A Fishbone Diagram is named for its looks because it resembles the bones of a fish drawn on paper. Its less creative names are Cause-and-Effect Diagram and Ishikawa Diagram. It’s popularly known to help with root cause analysis. But, we can also use it to help with goals and to evaluate a potential solution.

Why is it a Supertool? Just creating its headings helps us to better define our question. Writing it out as a graphical organizer helps organize jumbled thoughts. And, when paired with a 5W2H approach and the 5-whys, it can help us dig to the root causes.

I’ve included some abbreviated examples of fishbone diagrams; click the thumbnail for a larger version (notice that my root causes follow the 5-whys). And, listen to the podcast (or read the transcript) to learn more about Fishbones and their construction and uses.

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What is ‘Production Equivalent’ and Why Does it Matter?

We’re in the middle of our design process and we’re getting some of the first parts in hand, from prototyping or benchtops or our manufacturing cell. Let’s test them and finish our verification testing! Maybe we shouldn’t.

We talk about the concept of production equivalent: what it means and when it’s important to consider.

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About Visual Quality Standards

“A picture is worth a thousand words” is an old saying, and it holds true! Visual standards, visual aids, and quality standards are a great tool, especially in design when communicating the limits of acceptability. This episode explores areas to capture this type of information and how it can be used not just for Quality Assurance and Production, but also for design verification protocols, FMEA, root cause analysis, and future field defect investigations (to name a few).

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Using the Pareto Principle and Avoiding Common Pitfalls

The likeness of the Pareto Principle can be compared to Murphy’s Law and the Peter Principle: it’s a curious phenomenon. So, how did it make its way into quality? If using it to make decisions, there are some common pitfalls which can lead to delays in fixing a problem or even misdirect our efforts. So, what is it, and how can we use it for design?

Get to know the Pareto Chart. If it’s built and applied properly, it can help us prioritize: root cause analysis, new design features based on user input, or to help us tackle a problem that just seems too big to even start (just to name a few examples).

We review the Pareto Principle, what a Pareto Chart is, what we need to consider when building one, and how we need to be careful when interpreting its results.

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The Who’s Who of your Quality Team

I’m a fan of cross-functional teams. My main reason is that the different perspectives that each person brings from their respective areas of the business helps create a more complete vision of product and performance risk. Part of quality (and design!) means assessing and managing risk, and I’ve seen time and again the power of bringing people together: better understanding, greater alignment, and improved designs (to name just a few).

Part of being an effective team member is knowing what the other teammates are responsible for doing. It’s important because we need to know who to ask or interface with at certain points in our design process.

This podcast is about Who’s Who of your Quality Team. A Quality Engineer or Reliability Engineer may be part of a cross-functional team for a project. A Supplier Quality Professional, Calibration Technician, Quality Technician, and Quality Inspector may not be, but they are performing functions and duties that have an effect on the success of a product design. The podcast gets into who does what in these Quality roles, and why designers should involve them during the design process.

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When it’s Not Normal: How to Choose from a Library of Distributions

When trying to fit a probability distribution to quantitative results, sometimes the normal probability doesn’t fit. Minitab has a wealth of distributions to pick from. Do you just pick whichever one Minitab tells you fits the best? Maybe not. Just because the distribution fits your data doesn’t mean it’s a good one to use. We review my top 3 distributions for product testing and some other ones that come up but may not be appropriate to use.

We’ll also share what you need to think about when picking a distribution:

1. think about your purpose of test
2. consider your failure mode and how you’re expecting your product to perform – does the typical use case of a distribution fit?
3. when you have options, the simpler the distribution the  better (i.e. choose a 2-parameter over a 3-parameter)

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What are TQM, QFD, Six Sigma, and Lean?

You may have heard of QMS but are not sure how your activities fit in. Or, you’ve heard of QFD, ISO 9000, Six Sigma, Lean…these cryptic names that you’re not sure what they’re about. You may be doing activities under one of your company’s procedures and asking, “Why am I spending time on this?”  Sometimes it’s good to re-orient to the big picture. That’s what we’ll be doing in this episode: reorienting to the QMS.

We’ll also talk about some of the standard QMS (Quality Management System) philosophies:

• TQM (Total Quality Management)
• ISO 9000
• QFD (Quality Function Deployment)
• Six Sigma
• Lean
• Malcolm Baldrige National Quality Award

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The Designer’s Important Influence on Monitoring After Launch

Because of your role as a designer in product development, you have great input into the planning for what field (or real-use) data should be monitored for your product. We talk about this as post market surveillance, which is a typical term used for medical devices. This episode talks about how the post market surveillance engine follows the PDSA (plan-do-study-act) continuous improvement cycle, some expectations of post market surveillance systems, and what inputs designers have in its planning.

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How to Handle Competing Failure Modes

If we’re not careful with or ignore failure modes, we can choose the wrong reliability model or statistical distribution. If our product performance is close to the required limits and/or we need a very accurate model, this could be a big problem.

We talk about the importance of failure modes and step-through a tensile-test example to explore these other topics:

• competing failure modes
• suspensions
• independent vs. dependent
• reliability block diagrams

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About Using Slide Decks for Technical Design Reviews

A danger of using slide decks for technical design reviews is loss of important technical information. In order to summarize something in a slide or slide deck, the presenter thins-out information without its raw data and divorces it from the plots, graphs, and other technical analyses.

Slide decks are useful to the presenter to pull together a meeting. Slide decks are terrible for the reviewers who need to review technical information and make decisions from it.

In this episode, I review some alternatives:

• eliminating slide decks all together; use the technical report with executive summary and a 10 minute study hall at the top of the meeting
• very sparse slide deck content, instead referencing the completed technical report
• a report formatted with all the details like Nancy Duarte’s Slidedocs®, a hybrid between a technical document and a slide

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Remaking Risk-Based Decisions: Allowing Ourselves to Change our Minds.

Recent news highlights an accident involving a product with tragic results. This podcast explores this as cautionary tale and example outside of our own design house. The goal is to shift our perspectives to let us gain a better understanding of risk-based decisions.

We also talk about allowing ourselves room to change our minds about risk acceptability when we learn new information, both during the design process and from the field.

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Need to innovate? Stop brainstorming and try a systematic approach.

When we’re trying to innovate, we can get trapped into the old thinking that the solution has to be out there somewhere. We need to think outside the box to find the solution to a problem.

We should stop brainstorming and, instead, think inside the box with Systematic Inventive Thinking. We use systematic approaches to do lots of things, and being innovative can be one of them, too.

This podcast blog talks about the shortcomings of group brainstorming sessions and a different approach to innovation.

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HALT! Watch out for that weakest link

HALT (Highly Accelerated Life Test) uses the weakest link mentality. We apply stresses beyond what our designs would normally see in the environment to make something fail. It’s meant to be an iterative test program where you are testing, analyzing the results, determining the root cause, fixing the design, and then testing it, again.

Listen-in to the podcast or read the transcript to find out more about its roots, why you should perform HALT (or not), when in the design process it’s best (hint: really early), and who likely needs to be involved.

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The Designer’s Risk Analysis affects Business, Projects, and Suppliers

It takes a village to produce a design from concept to realization. Everyone along the way seems to think of risk a little bit differently. Designers are both directly and indirectly involved with all these risk management methods, but it’s important to understand who is looking at what type of information. Why? Because of communication. One group might think that risk management is covered in the way they’re thinking it should be, when in actuality it’s not.

This podcast will review risk management of other functional groups and how a designer’s risk affects them.

• Business/Marketing risk management
• Project Manager risk management
• Supplier Management

As a designer you have an important job and a unique perspective to analyze risk of your design and a responsibility to communicate it so everyone can help reduce risks.

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A big failure and too many causes? Try this analysis.

We have identified a failure of our design. It’s a complicated failure that has multiple potential root causes, and some that are conditional. Is there a tool that can capture it all and help us prioritize our reactions to get rid of this problem? Yes, there is: Fault Tree Analysis!

Learn what it is and how it can help us get a handle on that big failure:

• all of our causes are mapped out in a visual diagram
• we can identify cut sets
• we can see where to prioritize resources where its best to eliminate or reduce causes

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