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JAL 516 | PROCESS EXCELLENCE | PROJECT MANAGEMENT | AIR SAFETY
When Seconds Count: The Life-Saving Discipline on Flight JAL 516
Ever ignored the flight attendant’s safety spiel before takeoff?
Next time, you might want to listen more closely — it could save your life.
Consider the recent near-miss in Tokyo, where attentive listening to these procedures played a critical role in saving nearly 400 lives. This incident serves as a poignant reminder of the importance of process excellence, especially in high-stress, emergency situations where even the smallest deviation can lead to drastic outcomes.
This should make clear how much respect I have for process excellence. Having said this, it is upsetting to see how often process excellence is misunderstood as a project management methodology. A web search for “popular methodologies” will return lots of pages that list Lean and Six Sigma among popular project methodologies, but they serve a different purpose. These methodologies are instrumental in designing and refining processes to achieve optimal performance.
