Folks,
Has anyone any quick interesting training exercises to share? I have to do "Quality" training with a mixed induction group. Kind of thing I'm after is the exercise where we all "inspect" for the amounts of letter f's in a sentence and we all fail because no-one counts the if's and of's - Illustrating that 100% inspection doesn't work too well. This is the only one I have, I'm sure there's some more around.
Thanks

Brian

I would also find this useful if anybody comes up with anything. I have recently started a series of monthly articles linked to a ISO project, and i am also trying to introduce some light hearted humour into the process. (BTW this has back-fired on me somewhat because i introduced it in into a humourless environment).

I remember once seeing an article detailing what 99% quality is, something like;
16 Crash-Landings der day at Heathrow Airport.
28 Babies dropped on their heads in a London hospital every day and so on.

I have mercilessly stole 'quotes' from a website called 'communicationbriefings', or something like that, not actually quality related, but useful none-the-less.

I also once remember seeing a website that could have been based on Deming or Juran which flashed some of their words of wisdom at you, could also be useful.

Lastly somewhere on this site is a supposed list of quotes from Aircraft Engineers relating to Corrective Actions, which does clarify this subject very well.

Now - Its 35C here in Hannover, and the beer gardens are hooching, so you dont have a chance of me finding the correct web-stie names tonight.

Regards


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Andy B

Hi Brian,
If you can give me some idea of the sort of topics you'll be covering with your induction group, I may be able to pull some bits & pieces out of my training archives. (Basically from a general training / HR background before I got into all this quality stuff!)

Example of a simple exercise to demonstrate why we use documented procedures in manufacturing to minimise variation in methods/results would be along the lines of making a paper aeroplane and seeing the different results that emerge!

Another good one based on communication is passing round the group, getting each person to give you an instruction in turn on lighting up a cigarette, usine a full packet + a box of matches. (Don't worry if it's a no smoking area - I've not managed yet to get to the stage where I've actually lit the cigarette & I must have used this one something like 20 - 30 times)

Andy b,
Greetings from the South (if only from an ex pat from Essex)
I was looking through Don's site (see his reply to me) and there is a stack of stuff that meets your description. (I haven't found the stuff I want yet - but it's a big site)
Hope you enjoyed the beer,

Brian

Thanks Don,
You've pretty much guessed the subject matter. It's only a short section of a full induction day, but I know the other presenters will just be talking at (to) the people, so I like to break the monotony.
The basic thread is about minimising variation, benefits of working to procedures etc, need to complete route cards/log sheets accurately and the risks involved in relying on final inspection.
However I do carry out some deeper training with greenbelts, so if there's anything particularly effective on any quality/motivational subect I'd be interested.
Thanks once again.

Brian

Hi Brian,
I'll sort some fairly general "quality" training bits out - might take a few days to root out though.
I'm not entirely familiar with "green belts", am I correct in assuming that this would be at something like Team Leader / Engineer level.
Cheers,
Don

Keep working at this subject. It lies at my heart a little at the moment, because i very often find that i need exercises or presentation material to support the projects i work on, and i rarely have the time to produce them. Light hearted ones would be best.

Recently i contacted a large consulting company to see what they could offer, and they do indeed have a large range of CD's/Videos/Training Material etc, unfortunately i havent had the time to investigate them more closely.

Somehow i fell there is a market out their, what do you think Marc?

Regards

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Andy B

I don't doubt there is a market - reaching it is another thing. I typically try to think up things as I'm making up the base mnaterial. For variation an oldie is the pie slices and weight. Cut up the pie trying to make each piece the same size (pieces = class size) and then feed the class, too.

To simply keep people awake I prefer the old reliable cattle prod. http://www.16949.com/ubb/smile.gif

Thanks Don,
No doubt you've heard a bit about six sigma!
The greenbelts are usually as you describe - teamleaders, Engineers, who get a one week six sigma course leading to a project. We usually spend time playing with a catapult (Statapult)to maintain interest - but the cattle prod sounds good too!

Cheers

Brian

I remember once seeing an article detailing what 99% quality is, something like;
16 Crash-Landings der day at Heathrow Airport.
28 Babies dropped on their heads in a London hospital every day and so on.

I know this is very old, i am not sure if you did recieve help on this, but I do recognize the 99.9% means.
It comes from the Quality System Basics.
I'll have to look it up and post it. I use it in my training all the time.

Folks,
Has anyone any quick interesting training exercises to share? I have to do "Quality" training with a mixed induction group. Kind of thing I'm after is the exercise where we all "inspect" for the amounts of letter f's in a sentence and we all fail because no-one counts the if's and of's - Illustrating that 100% inspection doesn't work too well. This is the only one I have, I'm sure there's some more around.
Thanks

Brian

Hi, likewise I realise this was first raised a while ago and has been discussed in a few threads but I haven't seen anything that helps yet.

Brian / anyone, do you know where I can get the "letter f" script. I used to have it years ago and believe it came from a book on quality tools but don't have a copy any more.

Does anyone have or know of any other fun / simple and pertinent introductory quality-related training exercises? I don't think my audience would be interested in anything statistically orientated.

Regards,
mld :frust:

Does anyone have or know of any other fun / simple and pertinent introductory quality-related training exercises? I don't think my audience would be interested in anything statistically orientated.

Regards,
mld :frust:

Here's a fun one. I run the Deming Red Bead experiment using bags of M&Ms. I usually have two teams and buy two large bags of the M&M's. This is an exercise on how to not run a company.

First, you have a team made up of a willing worker, an inspector, and a recorder. I'm the "boss". You also need an inventory control person to "deliver" the bags. This person is instructed by you to cut a small corner off the bag, just enough the allow one M&M to pass through.

Now you can imagine the set up. You are the "boss". You give a pep talk to the "team". The rules are that they can only produce 1 M&M at a time. The worker squeezes one from the bag. The inspector tells the color, and the recorder writes it down. Under NO circumstances are they to produce blue or green M&Ms. They cannot change the process. You produce 10 M&Ms each day. After day 2 and lots of pep talks from you, you tell them that they must do better. You've hired a supervisor, whose job is to move from team to team and play the "motivator". Pick someone from the audience. You interview the person to make sure he/she is a team player. You tell him what to do as the motivator. Tell him that he should increase productivity. Have them make 2 M&M's at a time.

As you can guess, the teams cannot meet the production quotas. You dismiss the teams. You can pass around the unused M&M's for the group to share.

You can then have a nice discussion about work processes and causes of variation. You can also then talk about process improvement techniques.

--QG

I was looking for good fun training ideas too, and found this thread.
I used to train a whole company of about 500 people every time we updated our QSR system, and was concerned that noone would show-up because it's pretty boring stuff from their perspective - but necessary none-the-less.
What I did was a sort of game, where the trainees had to find answers to the questions I wrote in the QA Manual (or procedures). This got them to actually use the QA Manual and it's index, and in the process they hopefully learned something about the procedures.

I also produced a Powerpoint presentation with a page per procedure update, and at the end had an automatic email sent to me showing that they had read the whole thing. At least they could do the traiing on their own time, and not listen to me read slides to them. This solved the problem of people coming to a 1 hour training update session and complaining that they had more important deadlines to meet. It also helped me because I would have had to schedule about 10 sessions to train all 500 people, and that takes a huge amount of logistics and time.

Hope this helps. I still think after all this time that the thread has been posted that very few ideas have been presented. Interesting!

Here's the F's exercise and what you get with 99% quality

We actually did a fun one today with a consultant to illustrate the importance of eliminating waste and establishing standard work instructions, etc….

Our plant manager played the operator, whose job it was to assemble pens (putting the tops on them). He had three different colors of pens and needed to make 15 of each. The consultant set everything up to be as difficult as possible for him (pens at one end of the room, caps at the other, parts sitting on the floor, colors all mixed together, you get the idea).

Then we got to do everything in our power to slow down his progress, all the while fussing at him to hurry up. He had no materials handler, so when he ran out of parts, he had to go looking for them himself. People interrupted him to ask questions, set up meetings, etc… Somebody even called his cell phone, which was funny because he actually thought he had an important call coming in. We took away some of his parts to measure because we “thought there might be a quality problem” with them, but when he said “maybe I should stop building until we’re sure they’re okay” we made him keep going. Then when we did find a “quality problem” he had to “rework” a bunch of the pens he had already made. One of our engineers even got up and dragged a table across his path, saying “we’re moving some equipment around, you’ll have to go the long way around.”

We measured his cycle time and downtime to calculate his utilization and man-hours per part. Of course, the key is the operator has to be someone relatively high up (otherwise, it seems mean-spirited to give them too hard a time) and has to have a good sense of humor. Our plant manager played along perfectly.

The obvious result was that we saw all the things that can hinder productivity, and we were able to see the equivalent issues in our own operation. But on top of that, I think people got to kind of voice their gripes to the plant manager about things that occasionally bug them (scheduling meetings at the last minute that interfere with people doing their jobs, building a ton of parts that end up being bad and needing rework, etc…). And third, we saw the plant manager in a different light, as a good-natured and funny guy who can take a little abuse.

All in all, the exercise was a little over-the-top, but it broke up what would have been an otherwise extremely boring class.