Personal and Professional Quality Project

Personal and Professional Quality Project

By

Adrienne Williams

GM588 Managing Quality

Thomas Waite

Keller Graduate School of Management

December 13, 2003

Background

The three areas of improvement that I identified in my personal life were areas that I should have started doing something about a few years ago. I should have addressed these issues of personals goals a long time ago. But a visit to the doctor's office changes all of that. I can no long put this off. I am glad I am doing this assignment. It gave me the motivation I needed to just get started. I did have some problem a little problem with my professional goals (staying at work on Fridays) but I was able to get it back on track and maintain them better. I expanded my workload instead of Monday --Thursday it changed to Monday Ð'- Friday. I like doing this assignment because it gets down to making a lifestyle change that I are trying to improve or willing to commit to.

Personal Goals:

1. Physical (Weight lose)

My goal was to lose 20- 25 pounds. We all know that weight loss...I.e. losing weight can be quite a challenge. After I had my first child I gain 60 pounds and lost all of it but 10 pounds. With my second child I gain 50 pounds and lost all but 20 pounds. That was 5 years ago and I am still fighting trying to loss it. I have started going to Research Metabolic center to help me monitor and track my weight. I went to the doctor a few weeks ago and he encouraged me to try to lose some weight. My pressure was going up and down and he could not figure it out. It was either loss weight or start taking blood pressure medicine. I am 36 years old and I will not take a pill. With this goal I also have to started a fitness program and I will have to watch/measure food intake while watch the amount of carbohydrates I intake daily.

2. Fitness

My goal was to achieve my fitness increase I plan to wake each morning to start my day off by walking the treadmill for 30 minutes and in the evening 30 minutes more. Participate in yoga and aerobics class at the locate gym 3 to 5 times a week. I realize exercise is essential to the success of weight loss. I know I will strengthen my body and help burn fat. After gain weight with my last child, I just did not have much motivation to do anything. I realize exercise doesn't take much time. The doctor said that it would make my body become more efficient, I will have a peaceful sleep, have more energy, have more confidence in the way I look & feel, and best of all I would enjoy the benefit of feeling better. By doing exercise I can incorporate it into a family activity.

3. Family interaction

My goal was to spend time in the morning with children before leaving for school and work. We have time in the evening and every other weekend (my children go to their father's house). We spent time reading and doing fitness activity to keep in shape. When we spend time together I will focus all of my energy on them and nothing else. This goal is important to me and I will achieve it.

Professional Improvement Goals:

1. Improve tracking employee time

During each workday my goal was to track the time of the vendor employees. I have 3 projects going on that I am responsible for. Each project is located in a different area with the City. One is within Information Technology department, City Hall, and at the University Towers. I try to monitor it throughout the day but with so many meetings I forget to check to see what time each person arrived and left for the day. I needed to come up with a way to track employee time without having to visit the areas everyday to make sure people were there. I figured by keeping a log/spreadsheet and having people within those areas email the information to me then I could better track time.

2. Staying at work for a full day on Fridays

In the past I did real well by staying every Friday at work but due to so much additional work, I really need to start coming in to work on Fridays. I put in a lot of time Monday Ð'- Thursday and feel like Fridays are my down time to regroup. But that is not the case all the time and I have meetings schedule and a lot of planning I could get done for the next week. My supervisor does not make me stay but I need to. I decided that I would not push hard on this but start tracking each week that I make it through a full week. I do not feel I will make every Friday so I will measure performance in this area by rating it from 0 to 5. A 5 will be succeeding for the whole day 8 hours, 4 will be 6 hours, 3 will be 4 hours, 2 will be 2 hours, and 1 will be no show.

3. Respond back to all emails and voice messages

The difficulty associated with this goal is Stretch goal. Because I have so many meetings and trying to balance things out I listing to my messages and look at emails but I do not response back in 24 hours. It is usually 2 to3 days after that. I need to set my goal to do this within 24 hours. I will base this goal on the number of emails and voice messages at the end of each day.

Data Collection and Analysis

I decided that I would use an excel spreadsheet to track the data collected for my eight week improvement goals. I also have a journal log that I can put things down in if I do not have access to my spreadsheet and then go back and update it. Each of the personal/professional goals all were track together as you will see from the spreadsheets included at the end of this document.

Achievements

I have to say I can not believe what I have done. I showed improvement in all of the goals I set out to do. I did not give up but starting out was a little rough. I have family and friends that I shared this assignment with and they made sure that I kept up on my goals. I was very happy with my personal goals that I can see the results and now that I have made a difference. The next step will be to continue meeting these goals after this class.

1. Weight loss :

I