Customer Reviews

The Quality Improvement Handbook: Team Guide to Tools and Techniques

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4 star:		(2)
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This textbook was required reading for a Masters Program. Consequently, I didn't purchase because I wanted to, I purchased because I had too. With that in mind, I found this to be probably the most useful textbook I purchased during my entire course of study. The writing was clear and easy to understand and the practical applications were limitless. I highly recommend this book to anyone attempting to "run" a quality improvement program effectively and efficiently.

This book is good point to start but not really deep and does not have good case studies.

Swanson gives practical guidelines to anyone interested in running a quality improvement program. Many checklists are supplied. Often accompanied by top-down flowcharts. Jargon is explained.

And for those people without a strong maths background, there is an entire chapter on how to analyse and display data. It describes the most basic display graph types, like bar, pie, histogram, scatterplot and control charts. Along with the specialised but important Gantt chart for coordinating a project.

There is also a short discussion of statistical techniques. But if you find this useful, I would encourage you to then consult a fully fledged book dedicated to statistics. Swanson's coverage is necessarily miminal.