When Chemonics received ISO 9001 certification in September 2010, it sent them down a path of honing those values and realizing their full potential. The implementation of a quality management system afforded them the opportunity to look at their business practices in totality, and to set a standard of excellence for their core services. It has connected them around the concept of continuous improvement and pushed each employee to think about what exceptional looks like for those services, and then to set even higher goals for what they could achieve. It laid the groundwork for creating global operations systems that support their technical and operational work in the field and that build the capacity of their staff and partners worldwide. And it is broadening their understanding of what continuous improvement can mean if we apply it in targeted ways for greater operational efficiency and development impact. What can we learn from this example?

In this simple example, a manager is having problems with an uncooperative branch office. To determine what his next steps should be, he does a cause-and-effect analysis.

After identifying his problem, he next identifies the factors that may be part of the problem. He then identified factors for possible causes of the problem that may be related to the factor.

He created the following diagram and finished his analysis.

If he hadn’t looked at the problem this way, he might have dealt with it by assuming that people in the branch office were “being difficult.”

What should this manager’s best approach be to start to solve the problem?

Answer rating: 100% (QA)

The managers best approach would be to address the root caus... View the full answer