Insightful Quality, Second Edition


Book Description

In order to survive and attain market leadership, organizations must engage in longer-term strategic quality activities to address radical, paradigm-shifting improvements that affect the organization and its competitive position. This requires a different way of thinking and acting by leaders and managers that is known as insightful thinking. This book can show you how to achieve this kind of success. It is about how to think insightfully about quality and to increase the creativity, innovation, and agility of an organization and its employees. Quality must be addressed in strategic as well as operational terms in order for organizations to compete effectively over the long term. Strategic quality management requires insightful leadership.The second edition updates the case discussions about real organizations that illustrate the main points of the book. It challenges leaders and managers to adopt a new way of thinking and presents thought-provoking ideas about how organizations can begin the process of charting their own paths to insight and lasting success.




How To Be Insightful


Book Description

How do we advance? As individuals, families, and businesses? As societies, nations, and a species? In a world where it’s said there is nothing new under the sun, we humans are remarkably resourceful at creating new things. The key to innovation is understanding, but not just by using facts, data, and casual observations. Progress demands the profound and useful understanding of a person or a thing, a situation or an issue. And profound and useful understanding that truly effects change is that most elusive of phenomena: insight. How To Be Insightful provides a novel and deeply practical framework that anyone can use to generate more powerful and impactful insights from the increasing volumes of data we all face every day, whatever we do. The framework – the STEP Prism of Insight – has been developed through decades of both practice and training, and the book includes many exercises designed to help strengthen and develop readers’ insight muscles. The book explains the history, psychology, and neuroscience of insight and includes snapshots of insight from international experts in many different fields – psychology and neuroscience, music and acting, forensic science and market research.







Intervention Research and Evidence-Based Quality Improvement, Second Edition


Book Description

First Edition received 2012 First Place AJN Book of the Year Award in Nursing Research! “This is a resource for success and should be a part of any researcher's library." --Doody's Medical Reviews (Praise for the First Edition) Written for researchers, clinicians and doctoral students, the newly revised edition of this comprehensive reference continues to deliver the essentials of intervention research with added content on evidence-based quality improvement, a must for improving healthcare quality, safety and population health outcomes. Although typically it takes years for research-based interventions to make their way to real world clinical settings, this “prolonged time for translation” frustrates researchers and their interprofessional teams. This second edition now delves even deeper into key strategies for rapidly moving research-based interventions into real world settings in the form of evidence-based quality improvement as well as the challenges of working in an increasingly diverse professional research environment. Intervention Research and Evidence-Based Quality Improvement, Second Edition begins at the pilot study phase for intervention research and highlights every step of the way through to full-scale randomized controlled trials. Written in user-friendly format, content covers designing, conducting, analyzing, and funding intervention studies that improve healthcare quality and people’s health outcomes. Chapters cover writing grant applications and show examples of actual applications that have been funded by NIH and other organizations. These real-life samples are available online, alongside additional progress reports and final reports. Real-world examples of evidence-based quality improvement projects that have improved outcomes also are highlighted in this second edition. New to the Second Edition: Describes evidence-based quality improvement and specific steps in conducting EBQI projects, which are essential for enhancing healthcare quality, safety and costs along with enhancing population health outcomes. Emphasizes the importance of interprofessional teams Focuses on using research-based interventions in real-world settings Six new chapters o Generating Versus Using Evidence to Guide Best Practice o Setting the Stage for Intervention Research and Evidence-based Quality Improvement o Evidence-based Quality Improvement o Translational Research: Why and How o Factors Influencing Successful Uptake of Evidence-Based Interventions in Clinical Practice o Using Social Media to Enhance Uptake of Research-Based Interventions into Real World Clinical Settings Key Features: Provides a practical, comprehensive resource for designing, conducting, analyzing, and funding intervention studies Outlines the specific steps in designing, conducting and evaluating outcomes of evidence-based quality improvement projects Includes examples of funding research grants, progress reports, and final reports Serves as a core text for students in doctoral nursing and other health sciences programs




Cancer: New Insights for the Healthcare Professional: 2011 Edition


Book Description

Cancer: New Insights for the Healthcare Professional: 2011 Edition is a ScholarlyEditions™ eBook that delivers timely, authoritative, and comprehensive information about Cancer. The editors have built Cancer: New Insights for the Healthcare Professional: 2011 Edition on the vast information databases of ScholarlyNews.™ You can expect the information about Cancer in this eBook to be deeper than what you can access anywhere else, as well as consistently reliable, authoritative, informed, and relevant. The content of Cancer: New Insights for the Healthcare Professional: 2011 Edition has been produced by the world’s leading scientists, engineers, analysts, research institutions, and companies. All of the content is from peer-reviewed sources, and all of it is written, assembled, and edited by the editors at ScholarlyEditions™ and available exclusively from us. You now have a source you can cite with authority, confidence, and credibility. More information is available at http://www.ScholarlyEditions.com/.




Sustainable Quality


Book Description

The book is based on a new quality model and explains why a positive culture is a prerequisite to sustainable quality improvement. Today, the concept of using quality as a competitive advantage has been diminished or even lost completely. It is not that there is a lack of quality improvement models, as there are many available. While each has had success, no one model that taken hold as the model. Why do improvement efforts seem to fizzle out? Why are they not sustainable? Something has been missing from the strategy, planning, and implementation of these quality efforts. That missing ingredient has been culture. This book provides the strategy, tools, and methods needed for sustainable quality. The book is based on a new quality model and explains why a positive culture is a prerequisite to sustainable quality improvement. Excellence is achieved through people, and it is this people-centric approach that should be the basis for success. By building a foundation based on inclusion, positive culture, and strong leadership, great achievements are possible. This inside-out approach creates a strong internal community which can be the catalyst for embracing change and sustainable improvement.




Why Quality is Important and How It Applies in Diverse Business and Social Environments, Volume II


Book Description

These two volumes are about understanding—why—and application—how—with the aim of providing guidance and introduction to both. Quality is the consistent achievement of the user’s expectations of a product or service. The achievement needs to be “The right thing, right first time, every time, in time.” Beginning with manufacturing and services, it also includes professional, personal, and spiritual dimensions. Variation does not sit happily with consistency and skill in handling risk and opportunity requires competence in the use of statistics, probability, and uncertainty; and needs to complement the critically essential soft dimensions of quality and the overarching and underpinning primacy of personal relationships. There are no clear boundaries to the applicability of quality and the related processes and procedures expressed in management systems, and this is why it matters so much to show “how it applies in diverse business and social environments.” Increasingly, the acceptability of boundaries that are drawn depends on their effect on the user and the achievement of quality, and the latest standards on quality management are explicit on this key point. Quality is everyone’s business, and there is no single professional discipline that can properly express this. Insights, knowledge, experience, best practice, tools, and techniques need to be shared across all kinds of organizational and professional boundaries, and there is no departmental boundary that can stand apart from the organization-wide commitment to quality achievement.




Statistical Process Control for Managers, Second Edition


Book Description

If you have been frustrated by very technical statistical process control (SPC) training materials, then this is the book for you. This book focuses on how SPC works and why managers should consider using it in their operations. It provides you with a conceptual understanding of SPC so that appropriate decisions can be made about the benefits of incorporating SPC into the process management and quality improvement processes. Today there is little need to make the necessary calculations by hand, so the author utilizes Minitab and NWA Quality Analyst—two of the most popular statistical analysis software packages on the market. Links are provided to the home pages of these software packages where trial versions may be downloaded for evaluation and trial use. The book also addresses the question of why SPC should be considered for use, the process of implementing SPC, how to incorporate SPC into problem identification, problem solving, and the management and improvement of processes, products, and services.




Supply Chain Planning


Book Description

Through this book, practitioners will obtain valuable new insights and examples of implementable frameworks and methods for managing their supply chain functions and organizations. The critical role that supply chain planning contributes to a firm’s financial well-being has never been greater. All too often, however, considerable managerial resources are directed toward planning activities with minimal results. In this book, we present proven, practical management frameworks used by the authors to support supply chain operations management and planning in private industry. These frameworks provide methodologies for managing critical activities such as supply chain strategic planning and project selection, manufacturing and distribution planning, performance measurement, supply chain risk management, and customer logistics and inventory deployment. This book is intended for supply chain professionals, as well as for graduate and advanced undergraduate students. Practitioners will obtain valuable new insights and examples of implementable frameworks and methods for managing their supply chain functions and organizations. Students will develop an understanding of real-world approaches for supply chain planning, decision support, and many other key activities.




Optimizing the Supply Chain


Book Description

Supply Chain Optimization Field Guide is an essential book to help readers understand the dynamics of how a global business operates. In a recent article about the death of supply chain management, it was stated that in this world, forecasts are perfect, machines have no operators, and block chain drives it all. Practitioners in the world of supply chain know that it is central to the management of cash and that systems are never the silver bullet as they do not foresee events; they only provide calculations from the data they are fed. Chapter by chapter, this book provides a comprehensive understanding of the core concepts of people, process, and tools; and how a supply chain should operate in today’s complex world. Readers will learn about how an ideal business maintains no unnecessary inventory, responds to changes, and delivers products on time or defect free—and how this ability is a competitive advantage for any business that can solve the equation. Key functional processes are explained in detail for practitioners to learn how to operate effectively in today’s arena.