Quality Improvement Questions Managers Need to Answer!

1. What are your products and services and who are your customers? Do you know the value proposition of each customer?
2. what perceptions do your customers have of your products and services? How do you know? Are you asking your customers the right questions?
3. Do you belive that waste and quality issues are important to your company? Why? Which ones?
4. What is your company's current share of the total market? Can improvement efforts assist you in increasing the market share and/or increasing profits? How?
5. Are you actively pursuing breakthough as well as continuous improvement in your areas of reponsability that lin to customer value? How?
6. How many hours per week have you actually spent over the last three months and how many hours per week do you currently have scheduled on your calendar that devoted strictly to the removal of waste and variation?
7. How often per week do you solicit feedback from the people you manage? What  kind of feedback do you solicit? What do you do with feedback?
8. What are the right knowledge-generating and improvement- oriented questions managers need to ask their people? What methods or tools can be used to answer them?
   
9. Have you deployed and implemented an improvement strategy with a disciplined methodology and toolset and associated infrastructure to predictably generate bottom-line results?
10. Are you poeple properly trained to successfully use the latest and best improvement methodologies and tools? What is your Return on Inverstment (ROI) from training? Do you have a standard procedure for documenting efforts and results? What is it?
11. What barriers do you people face when trying to improve the way your company does business? what are you doing to remove these barriers?
12. On what measures of performance that relate to these issues are you evaluated? Are you held accountable for these metrics? What are the specific improvement goals for them?
13. How much waste does your company leave? That is, what is the company's cost of waste of poor quality, both in raw currency amounts and also in percent of revenue? Is it getting better, staying the same, or getting worse? how much of that waste exist or originates in your area of responsability?
14. Do you have a plan that will, one year from now, show evidence that you made a difference? And what do you predict that evidence will show?