About The Quality Geek

Biography
My name is Cass Pursell, and I’m a Quality Geek.

I have worked professionally in the Personal Finance, New Home Construction, Manufacturing, Software Development, and Business Process Outsourcing (BPO) industries. I’ve worked in Chicago, in Michigan, in South Carolina, and in Virginia. I recently left my job as Director of Quality and Process Improvement for OSI, one of the largest strategic receivables management companies in the US, to take a similar position with Sherman Financial Group, a larger and financially stronger organization with an outstanding management team.

I earned my Masters of Fine Arts degree in creative writing from the Warren Wilson MFA Program for Writers, where I worked with some of the best contemporary fiction writers in the country and where I met my wife, a fiction writer. We lived together in Charleston, SC, since 1995 before moving to Charlottesville, VA, most happily, in September 2006.

My personal life has been dominated for the past two years by my wife’s devastating illness, from which she’s recently recovered. After years of visits to Mayo, meeting and leaving dozens of doctors and specialists, observing the medical industry from the inside out, I’ve developed a hard perspective on the health of our healthcare system. But I’ve also been given a fresh appreciation for each pain-free breath I take. Being a quality geek, I translated the experience through my Input/Process/Output lens, and have since become a food quality advocate. Eat organic food and be conscious of what you put into your body – I’ll leave it at that for now.

Quality
I make my living as a Quality professional. I am certified via the American Society for Quality (ASQ) as a Quality Manager (CQM). I received my Black Belt training in Six Sigma from the fine folks at Pivotal Resources, and have managed and participated in many Six Sigma projects over the years. I designed and implemented my organization’s first Six Sigma project nearly five years ago, a $2.2 million repeatable proof of concept that launched our involvement in the discipline.

Other projects have ranged from fundamental change-the-business recommendations to support departments, such as the Human Resources Self Services project in which I acted as a Lean Six Sigma Black Belt and which carried average annual projected savings of more than $1 million, to smaller-scale modifications in operations, such as the Automated Letters project, in which I acted as a facilitator and Lean Six Sigma Black Belt subject matter expert and which carried projected savings of $250,000 annually.

Accomplishments
I’ve been an advocate of the use of quality management principles throughout my career. A few highlights over the past few years include:

• Spent one year as Advisory Board member recommending improvements for Charleston, SC Big Brothers/Big Sisters organization
• Devised a system for implementing cost of quality accounting at an organizational level
• Managed the development of enterprise-wide and industry/client-specific critical business practices.
• Developed blueprint for implementation of comprehensive, enterprise-wide auditing program.
• Developed system for centrally housing business practices documents and a strategy for implementing broader Knowledge Management concepts and processes.
• Oversaw the development of comprehensive auditing and reporting program in support of the organization’s two critical processes.
• Worked with internal solutions team to assist in the design and development of automated solutions in support of the organization’s two critical processes.
• Conducted large-scale RFP process for a call recording vendor, resulting in the development of a strategic relationship between the organization and Witness Systems.
• Developed call quality improvement process based on the use of sigma calculations to correlate call quality performance with Liquidation and Customer Experience performance.

This Blog
I’m new to the blogoshpere, and decided to begin this blog as a way to focus my thinking on quality-related issues. I’ve always used writing as a way to organize my thoughts, and keeping this blog is a good writing discipline. I’m interested in seeing where it takes me.

Links Policy
As you can no doubt tell, I have not created a blogroll. As a marketing tactic, that’s not very smart — link exchanges are a great way to promote one’s site. However, the unwillingness to discern is a pet issue of mine, and an endless list of names on a blogroll typifies for me an undiscerning approach to sharing links. There is no way anyone can regularly read dozens of content-rich blogs every day, and to provide links to blogs I don’t actually read on a regular basis feels dishonest.

I do believe in being a good blogosphere citizen, however, and so I will link to any site or blog that catches my attention and is organically part of one of my posts.

I earned my undergraduate degree in Business Administration and Finance (Central Michigan University). I’m in the middle of an MBA program at Auburn University, and should be finished up with that sometime in 2007.

Other Endeavors
I fly fish when I can, write fiction and non-fiction, take long walks with my wife, and read a lot of books. I also love a good movie.