Category: Education

Virtual Professional Development Meeting – 2020 December

Neil Desai

Presenter:  Michael Scofield, M.B.A.

Topic: Data Quality in Covid-19 Metrics.  A Case Study.

Date/Time: December 15, 2020 6p – 8p

Registration Link / Meeting Instructions:

https://attendee.gotowebinar.com/register/1163075905903964941

Michael Scofield, M.B.A. is an Assistant Clinical Professor at Loma Linda University.  He is a frequent speaker and author in topics of data management, data quality, data visualization, and data warehousing.  He has spoken in over 27 states, Canada, Australia, and the U.K.  Audiences have included 24 DAMA chapters, 5 TDWI chapters, 14 ASQ sections and many accounting professional organizations.  He also does guest lectures at several universities. 

His career experience includes some time with a CPA firm, developing an accounting and general ledger system for a major California bank, as well as experience in government, manufacturing, finance, and software development.  Now semi-retired, he still does pro bono data mining and data quality analysis for non-profit organizations.   His greatest interest currently is data visualization, data quality assessment, and using graphic techniques to reveal business and economic behavior.   He also has humor published in the Los Angeles Times, and other journals. 

He will be speaking about “Data Quality in Covid-19 Metrics.”  There is often a long path between the reality which raw data describes, and decision-maker understanding of what is going on (“big picture”).  This “data-to-understanding supply chain” has many steps, with potential for lapses in the quality of data and information.  This gap (with threats to quality) is particularly evident in the flow of Covid-19 data being passed around units of government in the U.S.   The state and county totals sometimes suffer from a variety of definitions, inconsistent processes, and various causes of delay in reporting.  This slide presentation provides simple explanations of what the virus is, how it replicates, the kinds of tests (antigen vs. antibody), and other issues of false negatives, comorbidity, positivity, and sampling techniques. 

Then, there are the vaccines. Designing and testing a vaccine under “Warp speed” has numerous dangers.  We will look at efficacy as well as measures of safety.  The distribution to the public has numerous potential points of failure.  Expectations of efficacy may not be realistic; we will show charts to explain how it works.  We shall also consider other new metrics which would be useful to understand this pandemic.  We shall also touch on best practices (or ineffective techniques) in data visualization with some excellent examples (of both) from government sources. 

Virtual Professional Development Meeting – 2020 October

Neil Desai

Date/Time: October 22, 2020 6p – 8p

Presenter:  Peter Merrill

Topic: “Innovation Imperative: The Great Eight Remembering The Fundamentals of the Innovation Management Principles”

Registration Link / Meeting Instructions:

https://attendee.gotowebinar.com/register/5305570624784758800

Peter Merrill is a global thought leader in both Innovation and Quality Management. He is a Keynote Speaker on Innovation and has keynoted at events such as the World Conference on Quality. 


As Chief Executive of one of the leading Design Brands in Europe. He has been an Innovator in one of the most demanding markets. He is an Engineer, an Artist and a Writer and has led Innovation in the fields of both Graphic Art and Engineering.

He is Head of Delegation for the Canadian Committee to ISO/TC279 on Innovation Management. He is also chair of the ASQ Innovation Think Tank. He led the International Working Group which developed the ISO Guideline on ‘People Involvement’ in Management Systems and sees the best Innovation coming from the ‘Collective Knowledge’ of an Organization.

He is one of North America’s foremost authorities on Management Systems which he has implemented in such innovative companies as IBM, A.I.G., R.I.M. and Solectron. He is author of the books “Innovation Generation”, “Do It Right the Second Time” and “Innovation Never Stops”.

As the CEO of Quest Management, Peter Merrill emphasizes the importance of developing an Innovative Culture which leads to innovation of both your practices and your business model as well as your products. His passion for Innovation comes from a lifelong practical experience.  He truly knows what innovation is about and how to achieve it.

He will speak to his article in the October Quality Progress.  “Innovation Imperative: The Great Eight Remembering The Fundamentals of the Innovation Management Principles”. We will receive a walkthrough of the fundamentals of the innovation management principles included in ISO 56002 Innovation management the Innovation management system. 

HUMAN PERFORMANCE IMPROVEMENT through HUMAN ERROR PREVENTION Course

Neil Desai

Date: October 20-22, 2020

Sponsored by ASQ, Energy & Environmental Division

Presented by BW (Ben) Marguglio

Course learning outcomes and outline: https://hpi-hep.com/human-error-prevention-seminar/ .

To register: Click on the “Registration” Page.

PROBLEM: Almost all operational loss of lives and money($) is attributable to error in process design and implementation, including design of hardware used in processes.

SOLUTION: In this course, you will learn how to improve performance by (1) improving process design and implementation, (2) counteracting process error traps, (3) improving process decision-making and (4) preventing the recurrence of error in process design and implementation.

“ASQ guidelines for COVID-19 will be implemented for the course.  If the guidelines require that the course not be held, it will be rescheduled to a later date.  If a registrant cannot attend on the rescheduled date, for any reason, the registrant will receive a full refund of the registration fee.”