What are the Tools and Principles of Quality Management?

There are many tools that quality professionals can use. Experience and practice can help professionals pick the right tool. Some of the tools used are: Affinity diagram Organizes a large number of ideas into natural relationships Fish bone diagrams Determines cause-and-effect relationships Tree diagram Breaks down broad categories into finer levels of detail Matrix diagram Organizes knowledge in a matrix format to show the relationship among groups of information Matrix data Analyzes matrices (often replaced in this analysis method list by the similar prioritization matrix) Pareto Diagrams: Helps focus on the vital ares of issues And many more... I can go on and list over 180 tools. What tools are you using today to help your organization jump start your improvement projects? In our offering Total Quality Management (TQM) Tool Box for Continual Improvement session we get to review many of these tools and the principles behind them. Good Luck!