The Quality Improvement Handbook: Team Guide to Tools and Techniques

By Roger Swanson

This valuable new book provides quality improvement teams, and their leaders, with a comprehensive set of tools and techniques to solve problems and improve processes in their organizations. The book offers experienced teams instruction on more advanced, less frequently used tools as well as provides detailed guidelines on the basic tools for newly formed teams. The seven quality tools, seven management tools, and an additional 20 tools and techniques have also been incorporated into this title. Both the service and manufacturing industries and environments will find the applications useful. Each tool and technique includes sections that describe the tool, key points in using it, typical applications, an example, and steps in using the tool.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 188401559X
• ISBN13: 9781884015595
• Release Date: May 1995
• Publisher: CRC Press
• Length: 284 Pages
• Weight: 1.67 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.9" x 7.3" x 10.3"

Customer Reviews

Good Methods Review

This book is good point to start but not really deep and does not have good case studies.

brief, good coverage of graphing and statistics

Swanson gives practical guidelines to anyone interested in running a quality improvement program. Many checklists are supplied. Often accompanied by top-down flowcharts. Jargon is explained. And for those people without a strong maths background, there is an entire chapter on how to analyse and display data. It describes the most basic display graph types, like bar, pie, histogram, scatterplot and control charts. Along with the specialised but important Gantt chart for coordinating a project. There is also a short discussion of statistical techniques. But if you find this useful, I would encourage you to then consult a fully fledged book dedicated to statistics. Swanson's coverage is necessarily miminal.

Practical and Useful

This textbook was required reading for a Masters Program. Consequently, I didn't purchase because I wanted to, I purchased because I had too. With that in mind, I found this to be probably the most useful textbook I purchased during my entire course of study. The writing was clear and easy to understand and the practical applications were limitless. I highly recommend this book to anyone attempting to "run" a quality improvement program effectively and efficiently.