by Joseph Moses Juran (December 24, 1904 – February 28, 2008) was a Romanian-American engineer and management consultant. He was an evangelist for quality and quality management, having written several books on those subjects.
Pareto principle
In 1941, Juran stumbled across the work of Vilfredo Pareto and began to apply the Pareto principle to quality issues (for example, 80% of a problem is caused by 20% of the causes). This is also known as “the vital few and the trivial many.” In later years, Juran preferred “the vital few and the useful many” to signal that the remaining 80% of the causes should not be totally ignored.
For example, he argued that most defects are the result of a small percentage of the causes of all defects, according to the Economist. For another, 20% of a team’s members are going to make up 80% of a project’s successful results. And 20% of a businesses’ customers will create 80% of the profit.
Juran felt organizations, armed with that knowledge, would focus less on meaningless minutiae and more on identifying the 20%. That means eliminating the 20% of mistakes causing the majority of defects, rewarding the 20% of employees causing 80% of the success and serving the 20% of loyal customers that drive sales. In a way, Pareto’s Principle puts numbers to the idea that in business, as in life, things are not evenly distributed. Pareto was studying land ownership in Italy. But Juran saw that it applied to business, as well.
Juran Trilogy
“Goal setting has traditionally been based on past performance. This practice has tended to perpetuate the sins of the past.”
In his focus on people and how they work in processes, Juran took a different approach than others working in the growing quality improvement field. In doing so, he completely changed how companies looked at reducing inefficiencies.
Juran found the hidden costs in how companies tended to deal with defects. In the early 20th century, that often meant dealing with the issue after it had occurred rather than focusing time and money on making quality improvements to keep defects from happening.
He developed the Juran Trilogy, which involved three principal areas:
Quality planning: This involves identifying your customers, determining their needs and developing products that respond to their needs.
Quality improvement: Develop a process to create the product and then optimize that process.
Quality control: Create a process that can operate under minimal inspection.
Quality Planning
Quality Planning is the activity of developing the products and processes required to meet customer’s needs. It involves:
- Establish quality goals
- Identify the customers- those who will be impacted by the efforts to meet the goal.
- Determine the customers’ needs
- Develop product features that respond to customers’ needs
- Develop processes that can produce those product features
- Establish process controls, and transfer the resulting plans to the operating forces
Quality Improvement
This process is the means of raising quality performance to unprecedented levels (breakthrough). This involves:
- Establish the quality improvement infrastructure
- Identify the improvement projects
- For each project establish a project team with clear responsibility
- Provide the resource, motivation, and training needed by the team
Quality Control
This process consists of the following steps:
- Evaluate actual quality performance
- Compare actual performance to quality goals
- Act on the difference
Quality Improvement 10 Steps proposal
- Build awareness of the need and opportunity to improve
- Set goals for that improvement
- Create plans to reach the goals
- Provide training
- Conduct projects to solve problems
- Report on progress
- Give recognition for success
- Communicate results
- Keep score
- Maintain momentum
