Multi-part Question:

What problems occurred between the team & management; what caused them; what should be done to avoid this situation again?

Case 3: Credibility Gap The way the new business manager saw it, the newspaper's reputation was on the line. Too many errors were being caught in the final editing stages, where it was expensive to fix them. Although few slipped through and actually appeared in print, such errors hurt the credibility of a newspaper renowned for its accuracy. So, the business section manager commissioned an error team to study the problem and produce solutions. "Right now," he told the team,"we're catching about 20 to 30 errors per day in the final stages. I want that down to no more than 10." Team members began working right away. Each day they counted the number of errors and plotted the data on the chart. They talked with people in the department and discussed their own experiences, then created a Pareto chart of the most common types of errors. From this analysis they discovered a few simple changes that would correct the most common errors. It would take cooperation, however from everyone in the department to make the changes work. The team put a lot of effort into producing descriptions of how the key process should work and creating job aids to help people remember the new policies and procedures. With the manger's blessing, they introduced the changes at a department wide meeting called specifically for that purpose. The team kept plotting data, waiting for the level to drop. But nothing happened, the levels remained as high as ever. What was wrong? The team went back to the department and discovered that most employees simply had not bothered to make the changes. They did not see why it was important to change, so they kept doing things the same old way. Real change did not happen until line management took responsibility. "This is how we are going to do it from now on." Error rates dropped immediately and have stayed low ever since. Reference Case taken from the article: "Improving Team Effectiveness," Quality Progress, May 1998, by Ronald D. Snee, Kevin H. Kelleher, J. Gordon Myers, and Sue Reynard. Read "Case 3: Credibility Gap," answer the following