Principle six is evidence based decision making decisions based on the analysis and evaluation of data
and information are more likely to produce desired results.
Your decisions are going to be as good as the information you based them on.
So if you base your decisions on incomplete information or irrelevant information is going to result
in poor decision making.
So your decision making should be based upon evidence evidence that is reliable, that is relevant,
that is up to date, and they can help you make an informed decision.
Decision making can be a complex process.
You have different kinds of decisions, long term decisions, short term decisions, decisions about
strategic goals, decisions about the day to day operations of the organization.
In any case, you have to base your decisions on evidence.
So this could be a statistic, something like the number of sales, the number of incidents.
It can be some data analysis, maybe some tests, some anniversaries, some regressions that can shed
some more light on some information.
Or it can even be qualitative data like pictures or some surveys and some comments.
The point is that you have to make your decisions based on some evidence and when you make some decisions,
you should rely on this evidence to help you understand the situation better.
Sometimes you might be involved in making very difficult decisions about the future, maybe about the
next quarter or about the next three quarters, or about the next year or two years.
This comes along with a lot of uncertainty.
There might be a lot of factors that are out of your control.
Therefore, in order to make the best decision, it's important to have a good data and good information
to base those decisions on.
When you base your decisions on evidence is going to improve.
The decision making process is going to enhance your ability to assess the impact of your actions and
your procedures.
You're going to be able to better assess whether or not you're meeting a specific objective.
If you translated an objective to some type of criteria that you can collect the evidence for, then
you can be you can be sure of whether or not you've achieved it.
It's also going to help you have more effective discussions and communication surrounding issues.
Rather than just sharing your opinion, you can share your evidence based opinion, and this is going
to shed more light on different issues and help create a better understanding of them.
You're also going to be able to assess your past decisions more effectively.
You're going to be able to collect the evidence about whether or not you met your objective when whenever
you design some procedures, you have to make sure that they belong with some type of an indicator.
So that indicator is something that can be monitored and measured.
You can collect evidence about how well that particular procedure is doing.
So, for example, you have a school and they've developed a procedures for collecting the test papers
at the end of the exam, counting them and collecting them at a single place.
So one of the problems that occurs is lost papers.
Oftentimes, papers get lost.
So you can see how many papers have been lost before implementing this new procedure and how many papers
have been lost after implementing this new procedure.
So that's going to be the indicator used the number of lost papers so you can measure and monitor this
indicator to see how effective your procedures are.
And if they're not effective, you can look for improvements, you can develop additional procedures.
You make sure that all data is available to the relevant people.
Now, if someone has some important information that can help their manager in making better decisions,
there should be a procedure in place for them to regularly at a specified interval.
Report this information to them.
So this should be communicated to that employee so that they're able to do this.
Furthermore, there should be procedures in place to protect that information and to handle that information
properly so that information is properly kept.
There are procedures in place for it to be analyzed and for it to be reported on and so on.
So there has to be a structure, a structure for collecting this information and for analyzing it and
for communicating it.
Gathering evidence can be.
Very useful if you want to gain deeper insights into the data, you have to use different analysis techniques.
Maybe you can use visualization techniques.
Maybe there are some ratios you can perform and different types of analysis.
So there should be procedures and processes in place that collect this data and converts this data into
a more meaningful form that you can use to base your decisions on.
Furthermore, you should ensure that the people who are receiving this analysis have some information
about what they're looking at so that they fully understand and comprehend the different analysis and
the different information that is being presented to them.
So, for example, maybe a data analyst uses machine learning to come up with some conclusions.
The person they're presenting this to might not necessarily be an expert in machine learning, and they
might not necessarily understand the results.
So there should be some type of a presentation where the data analyst can explain to their manager what
the information is telling them.
This was previously called having a factual approach to decision making, and it is now called evidence
based decision making.
The fifth principle of the eight quality principle system approach to management no longer exists in
the seven principles of quality management.
The previous definition was effective.
Decisions are based on the analysis of data and information.
The current definition is decisions based on the analysis and evaluation of data and information are
more likely to produce desired results.
The purpose of a quality management system is to enhance customer satisfaction and help the organization
meet all its compliance obligations.
In order to make good, effective decisions, they have to be based on a reliable, relevant information,
and they have to be based on evidence.
This is going to help you gain a clear understanding of the current situation and the current status
of your policies.
Your procedures is going to help you understand where improvements can be made, and you're going to
then be able to understand if you've actually made an improvement once you've implemented some new procedures.
Therefore, in order to verify that your actions are being effective and in order to understand the
current status of the organization, you have to collect the evidence.
You have to get some reliable information on which you can base your decisions on.
Furthermore, you also have various ways of looking at your data through different kinds of analysis
and statistical tools.
Depending on the applicability of various tools, you can see what makes sense for your business and
for your organization, and then base your decisions on the facts rather than hearsay or rather than
a gut feeling.
This way, when you make a decision, you're going to have some evidence on which you've based that
decision.