DocQment

On November 20, the United States President and Department of Commerce announced the Baldrige Award winners for 2007.

This is the first year that nonprofit organizations have had a specific award category, and two nonprofit organizations won an award.

The 2007 Baldrige Award recipients (and their categories) are:

• PRO-TEC Coating Co., Leipsic, OH (small business)
• Mercy Health System, Janesville, WI (healthcare)
• Sharp HealthCare, San Diego, CA (healthcare)
• City of Coral Springs, Coral Springs, FL (nonprofit)
• U.S. Army Armament Research, Development and Engineering Center (ARDEC), Picatinny Arsenal, NJ (nonprofit)

For more information about these organizations, please visit the NIST Badrige Award site: http://www.quality.nist.gov/Contacts_Profiles.htm

In September we posted an article about this year’s Nonprofit Quality Forum.

The ISO 9001 and 9004 quality standards are scheduled to be released one month apart, in 2009. The ISO 9001 standard has is expected to be published in July 2009, with publication of the the updated ISO 9004 standard in August 2009.

“Chopping the errors” in The Business Journal of the Triad (North Carolina) area reports work at the NC Baptist Hpsital to use Six Sigma methods to expand treatment without adding staff.

Quality Expo is a major quality conference for the manufacturing sector. It is one of four held during National Manufacturing Week (http://www.devicelink.com/expo/nmw07/index.html); the others are Assembly Technology Expo, Electronics Assembly Show, and PLASTEC Midwest. Quality Expo took place September 24-27 in Rosemont, IL and is scheduled again for September 23-25, 2008, in Rosemont, IL.

The American Society for Quality (ASQ) has partnered with ASAE and The Center for Association Leadership, and the Association Forum of Chicago to convene the first Nonprofit Quality Forum. Leaders from across the association community will take part in the event, Wednesday, September 19, in Chicago, from 9 a.m. to 4 p.m.

 “A key to organizational performance excellence in the nonprofit and association sector lies in an systematic approach to enterprise management,” said Paul Borawski, executive director and chief strategic officer of ASQ. “This meeting provides the chance for nonprofits and associations to look at the Baldrige model of excellence and the phenomenal results other organizations are getting by using enterprise management and then explore ways to start their own journey to excellence.” (more…)

WritersUA has published its 2006 Skills and Technologies Survey results. For the first time, quality assurance is in the top ten skills.

According to Managed Care Weekly Digest, August 14, 2006, the AQA alliance (formerly Ambulatory Care Quality Alliance) and the Hospital Quality Alliance (HQA), have formed a new national Quality Alliance Steering Committee to improve measurement of quality in health care. (more…)

Business Week Online has published a list of the best product ideas of 2006, with a slide show of 108 of the these designated best ideas.

Highlights include Sun Microsystems User Centered Design Group’s Design Strategy for the the x4100 family of rack-mounted servers, and a small tent that opens in two seconds–someone throws it in the air and it lands ready to use. Tear down takes 15 seconds.

There are innovative products for people who are blind, and many other designs as well.

Fixed documents, blogs, and wikis have limitations for management of policy documents in organizations, says Jon Garfunkel of Boston, http://civilities.net/.

Garfunkel has worked to develop the next generation system for documentation that changes continually and is updated collaboratively. He calls the website for this work a “civ,” and has been using Drupal as the basis.

Garfunkel calls the overall project Constructive Media and reports how to apply the method to management of policies in the enterprise.

A total of 86 applications were filed for the 2006 US Malcolm Baldrige National Quality Awards. This is an increase over last year’s 64 applications.

This year the new nonprofit category has 10 applications. There are also:

• three manufacturing applications
• four service applications
• eight small business applications
• 45 healthcare applications
• 16 education applications

The SIG has a list of related organizations, presently on our static site. We are also adding posts in the category of Related Organizations.

The QPI SIG has a Conferences and courses page with ongoing educational opportunities listed and an archival listing of events. If you wish to announce a quality-related event, please send the information to the SIG Manager (contact information). Please provide the month, day, and year; name of the event; location; and URL for more information in that order.

The Online SIG has an extensive events calendar related to all areas of technical communication and is posting more events on http://stc-on.org/online. If you wish to announce a technical communication event, please post there.

In the current posted issue of the The Rockley Bulletin, Ann Rockley reviews Document Engineering: Analyzing and Designing Documents for Business Informatics and Web Services (ISBN-10:0-262-07261-0; The MIT Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts), by Robert Glushko and Tim McGrath. The summary states that the authors “explore the document as an interface to business and provide a common sense approach to modeling both documents and services for information exchange.

“Their message is clear: To succeed in the 21st century global economy, companies need to ‘fundamentally rethink what they do and how they do it.’ And what better place to start than with the document?”"

Visit the The Rockley Bulletin to read the whole article.

On June 26, 2006, the Times of Oman reported on a recent workshop that was held on quality documentation to examine developing, documenting and managing policies, and procedural manuals and guidelines. (more…)

The following are organizations outside the US that focus on quality, with their web addresses:

National Quality Institute (NQI), Canada, http://www.nqi.ca

European Organization for Quality (EOQ), http://www.eoq.org

Hungarian Quality Database of the Hungarian Society for Quality, http://www.ezaz.hu/quality

Pakistan Institue of Quality Control, http://www.piqc.com.pk

Saudi National Quality Committee, http://www.snqc.org

Business Excellence Australia (BEA), a division of Standards Australia International (SAI), formerly Australian Quality Council, http://www.sai-global.com/professionalservices