Seven New Management and Planning
Tools
In 1976, the Union of Japanese Scientists and
Engineers (JUSE) saw the need for tools to promote innovation, communicate information and successfully plan major
projects. A team researched and developed the seven new quality control tools, often called the seven management
and planning (MP) tools, or simply the seven management tools. Not all the tools were new, but their collection and
promotion were.
The seven MP tools, listed in an order that moves from abstract analysis to detailed
planning, are:
- Affinity Diagram:
organizes a large number of ideas into their natural relationships.
- Relations Diagram: shows cause-and-effect
relationships and helps you analyze the natural links between different aspects of a complex
situation.
- Tree Diagram: breaks down broad categories into finer
and finer levels of detail, helping you move your thinking step by step from generalities to
specifics.
- Matrix Diagram: shows the relationship between two,
three or four groups of information and can give information about the relationship, such as its
strength, the roles played by various individuals, or measurements.
- Matrix Data Aanalysis: a complex
mathematical technique for analyzing matrices, often replaced in this list by the similar prioritization
matrix. One of the most rigorous, careful and time-consuming of decision-making tools, a prioritization matrix
is an L-shaped matrix that uses pairwise comparisons of a list of
options to a set of criteria in order to choose the best option(s).
- Arrow Diagram: shows the required order of tasks in a
project or process, the best schedule for the entire project, and potential scheduling and resource
problems and their solutions.
-
Process Decision Program Chart (PDPC): systematically
identifies what might go wrong in a plan under development.
Excerpted from Nancy R. Tague’s The Quality Toolbox, Second Edition, ASQ
Quality Press, 2004.
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