The Seedbed of a Quality Revolution

A tester’s role is not only to do the testing but also to improve quality. I visited the site of the former Hawthorne Works during a recent trip to Chicago because so many innovations in quality started there.  The Hawthorne Works was the Bell Telephone Laboratories site that manufactured the hardware for the first national telephone system in the USA.[1] It was the “Silicon Valley of ”[2] the early twentieth century and was the “seedbed of a quality revolution.”[3].

The site of the Hawthorne Works is now a retail park; the only part of the works that still stands is the water tower. I have used photos I took while visiting the site to illustrate this blog post.

Significant people who worked at Hawthorne Works and created philosophies and practices that have become central to quality are:

• Dr Walter A. Shewhart. He started modern quality control[4], and his work included:
  • Statistical Process Control including Control Charts
  • The Shewhart Cycle, which came to be known as the Deming Cycle [5]
  • His memo of May 16 1924, which suggested using statistics to improve quality can be seen as the start of the quality movement[6] and the beginning of “shift-left”[7].
• Dr W. Edwards Deming. His philosophy influenced Toyota, Lean, Agile, DevOps [8] and the Theory of Jobs to be Done [9] and includes:
  • A System of Profound Knowledge
  • The Deming Cycle
  • 14 Points for Management
  • Statistical Quality Control including Control Charts
• Dr Joseph Juran. His work influenced Japanese quality management and included:
  • Popularising the use of the Pareto Principle
  • The Juran Trilogy
  • Quality by design

Deming referred to Shewhart as “the master”[1]. 

Deming’s philosophy is of great value as it helps me to work with development teams to improve the quality of work continually. I am enjoying reading John Willis’ new book “Deming’s Journey to Profound Knowledge, which shows how Deming’s life experiences, including those at the Hawthorne Works, influenced his philosophy.

That so many of the advances in quality made in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries are connected to the Hawthorne Works shows what a remarkable place it was.

References

[1] Architect of Quality : The Autobiography of Dr. Joseph M. Juran by Joseph M. Juran (2004, p91)

[2] Deming’s Journey to Profound Knowledge by John Willis and Derek Lewis (2023,  p46)

[3].Manufacturing the future. A History of Western Electric. by S.B. Adams and O.R. Butler (1999, p161)

[4] What is Total Quality Control? By Kaoru Ishikawa (1985, p14)

[5] Out of the Crisis by W. Edwards Deming (1986, p88)

[6] Quality or Else by Lloyd Dobyns and Clare Crawford-Mason (1991, p52)

[7] Deming’s Journey to Profound Knowledge by John Willis and Derek Lewis (2023, p79)

[8] “Deming to Devops: The Science Behind Devops” by John Willis (a five minute long video) 

[9] When Coffee and Kale Compete by Alan Klement (2018, p156)

[10] Out of the Crisis by W. Edwards Deming (1986, p168)

Further Reading

• Out of the Crisis by W. Edwards Deming
• The New Economics  by W. Edwards Deming
• Juran’s Quality Handbook 6th Edition
• The Hawthorne Plant Harvard Business School
• The History of the Western Electric Plant, Hawthorne Works, Cicero, Illinois.
• Deming’s Journey to Profound Knowledge by John Willis and Derek Lewis

eLearning:

• DemingNEXT from the Deming Institute