Yesterday morning, Manufacturing Tomorrow published my article, "What is the process approach?" It's their article now so I won't post the text of it here, but you can find it by following the link. I hope you find it useful!
For those keeping track, this is the article I promised you back in the beginning of April. The publishing process has its own timelines that aren't always obvious to the rest of us. 😀
I disagree with your sequencing. Don't leave risk-based thinking until last. Risk-based thinking (or risk management/risk assessment as everyone outside ISO know it) should be step four in the bullet list:
ReplyDelete1) Determine your inputs
2) Determine your outputs (I'd do these the other way around too, but personal preference)
3) Determine what the activities are in the middle bit
4) STOP AND DO RISK MANAGEMENT NOW. It could be a full-blown FMEA, or it could be an informal team brainstorm on 'what could go wrong'.
If you don't do risk management at this juncture, how will you KNOW what resources you need? How will you know how many people and their competence? How will you determine success criteria and inspection requirements? How will you know what your documentation is going to look like?
Risk-based thinking is a crappy concept, we all know that. But risk consideration, regardless of what you call it, is vital to good process design and creation.
Also, if you produce some form of risk documentation (again, could be an FMEA, could just be a photo of a bunch of post-its, doesn't matter much to me) you've put a big tick in the box against planning clauses, which are sometimes a struggle to find objective evidence for.