Introduction to Team Dynamics

If there is one thought that I can hope to impress upon your mind, let it be the importance of teamwork! I am reminded of an old Japanese proverb, "A single arrow is easily broken, but not ten in a bundle". One person alone may feel overwhelmed, or lack the confidence and skills to accomplish the task. However, what one man does not know, someone else might! Remember the expression, "Two Heads are Better than One"? One single thought provokes another, and yet another, until we have a flow of massive input that often helps the problem to become obvious, and thus, it becomes resolved. There is also an old Chinese proverb, "One man is not an army, but many men are a force." The importance of teamwork cannot be emphasized enough. Together, a group of people can solve just about any problem out there.

There is an acronym floating around that I would like to share with you. Perhaps you have seen it? 

    
   T ogether

    
   E veryone

    
   A ccomplishes

    
   M ore

You have come to this web site because you want to learn about the basic Quality Tools. The entire point of utilizing Quality Tools is to produce a Quality product or service. If every business produced a Quality product or service every moment of the day, then there would be no need for these Quality Tools; however, that only exists in the perfect world!

Producing scrap and defects is inevitable because there are so many variables within any production process?..man, method, machine, environment, all have interactions that prevent you from producing the perfect solution everytime. It is the variations in the process that produce your product problems. To solve these day-to-day problems, we have Statistical Process Control and Quality Tools.

Statistical Process Control is a method of controlling your "process" in producing goods and services; that is, keeping it within certain boundaries that have been determined to produce a Quality product or service. However, that is not the reason for this project or this web site.

My purpose is to offer a methodology of problem solving to help locate, identify and solve whatever problems may occur that cause your company to produce anything other than a Quality product. The BEST way to accomplish this and solve your process problems, is by FIRST IMPLEMENTING A TEAMWORK STRATEGY!!!

"TEAMWORK"

The Quality world refers to teamwork as a cross-functional team gathered together with a common goal or purpose. By cross-functional, we mean a group of people from different departments within the company. A "cross-functional" team can be a powerful organizational vehicle that brings together diverse talents to solve a business problem. This cross-functional team should consist of members from management, workers on the floor who actually perform the task, engineering, quality people, and any other relevant department that has input into the product.

The Ford Motor Company developed a problem solving process for cross-functional teams and called it an "8D TEAM". Ford Motor Company also developed the process for the team to follow, which they termed the "8D Problem-Solving Process" (Click HERE for an Adobe/.pdf version). If you click on the "8D Problem-Solving Process" link, you will find a copy of the 8D process that I revised for generic usage. The purpose is to provide company-wide accountability and participation, to gain the various expertise and experience within a company, and to educate everyone involved about the project and its goals. This team works together to"brain-storm" their ideas and recommendations to solve the problem at hand. To facilitate this problem solving session, or to solve any production problems, you first need to have data, or collect some data.


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Click Here to Continue For the Data Lesson