The Structure of Quality

Quality should not be constrained by or held within a structure.

What I mean by that is that, within an organisation, there should be no petty domain that controls quality in & of itself, & it should not manage all of the people involved in quality (control, assurance, etc). This is guaranteed to work against the basic premise that quality is everyone's responsibility. Quality should not be "someone else's problem", which is invariably what happens when one group within an organisation is labeled as the Quality Team (caps intentional).

In the same way that de Bono suggests that there should be a Chief Innovation Officer whose sole responsibility is to ensure that innovation across the organisation is encouraged & supported, a Quality Manager (it doesn't need to be an executive, but with executive sponsorship) should have organisation oversight (that is, be independent) to ensure that quality processes exist & are understood. Their role is to be the guardian of the quality aspect, covering the development of quality within each business unit (not imposing it on a unit), assisting with reviews (again, the reviews themselves happen within the unit) & review processes, education & culture (with input into how HR spread, or represent, the quality ethos), & the application of quality outcomes into modelling & budgeting (checking that quality is meaningful to the business success).
There will need to be people called in to help with the implementation - process re-engineering, change management, business analysis, etc. These people do not need to be a part of a quality structure. They should be either a floating group of company innovators, or else can be consultants. They could be a project team put together from elements of the organisation with a mission & a desire to work across teams, bringing together their expertise for a short burst of effectiveness - kind of like an agile scrum.

In a way, agile methodologies work very well with regards quality, &, even though it's usually a software development model, an appropriate business model can easily be defined with short-term goals, agreed-on outcomes, close stakeholder links, & process ownership. These are amongst the chief goals for applying agile, & amongst the chief benefits of a good quality process.

Quality is a whole-of-organisation approach to business improvement. Agile is a whole-of-team approach to project delivery. The two happily co-exist. The two complement. The two are flat in structure - there should be no egos, no ownership in one person. Everyone brings their experience & expertise in to the benefit of the team, with the hope that sharing same will also benefit everyone else in the team. Everyone grows as a consequnce of their involvement in the process.
Does it sound too idealistic? Perhaps. Maybe that's why very few are willing to take the risk to try something so radically different. So different that it might succeed.

Meta-Quality & the Onion

Hewitt-Gleeson talks of metacognition - thinking about thinking - as the start point for getting better at thinking. In the same way, applying quality to (proposed) quality procedures makes them better - more useful, more effective, more likely to be supported & implemented.

When the assessment of quality is applied to the concept of quality, you get a reviewable process, which is the basis for reviewing all process. This is not circular. To believe so is simplistic.

Like many things, quality has to be self-referential (note also Bertrand Russell's set of all sets). The quality of the quality initiative is more important than the output of the initiative, on the basis that if the initiative fails, then it has a direct (potentially negative) impact on all activity. As it is, the reason for applying a quality process is to have a positive effect (only). You have to be able to measure that effect before you can blithely apply it - thus, meta-quality.

Thinking about quality, & applying a critical quality eye on the initiative, is also a way of focusing attention & energy inwardly (on the process of setting up quality) before doing so outwardly (applying the quality initiative), before extending the effects to outside of the quality system (improving the quality of deliverables). This is an onion approach - building on the innermost layers.

If the core of the onion is rotten, then the outer-most layer will be tainted. That's the point where the organisation touches the customer, & is therefore where the organisation's key outcome lies. Any cosmetic change to the skin of the onion is a temporary mask of the fundamental problems in the organisation that need to be addressed first.

Like a real onion, the edible part is hidden behind a thin veneer that needs to be immediately peeled back before use - after purchase. It may be too late to realise that the onion won't deliver the expected flavour once you've bought it, but you'll know better than to return to that greengrocer next time.

That's metaphor stinks.

OPV & the Project kick-off

I had a lot of help with this one ...

I gave an introductory seminar on thinking, an introduction to de Bono's CoRT methodology. The object of doing so is usually to get people to start using the techniques in their daily lives - preferably after the seminar. However, one bright spark immediately came up with a suggestion that I felt was worthy of stealing - using an OPV in a project kick-off meeting.

"What is an OPV?" I hear you ask, because you know nothing about de Bono's work. Simply put, it's applying a focus of Other People's Views to the problem at hand. That is, think of things from the viewpoint of someone else, rather than limiting your thinking to your own perspective. In the kick-off meeting, with all of the project team gathered for the first time, everyone has to work out, collectively, each person's priorities & expectations.

This is not just an interesting intellectual exercise, this is a fantastic approach to getting the project off on the right foot. If the client or their liaison doesn't hear that the project team understands them, then they will assume that they are already understood, & blithely go away until the delivery, when they get upset at just how wrong everyone's interpretation was. Similarly, if the technical solution & functional priorities aren't understood (correctly), then the project will very quickly go off the rails (& this may not be noticed early enough).

Here's the approach. The client (or representative) sits back & listens while everyone tries to see the project from their perspective - outcomes, priorities, deliverables, cost, etc. The client then gets the chance to clarify - not correct - the possible misunderstandings. It has to be done right there in front of everyone, & it has to be documented, as each point of difference is effectively a point of interpretation in the project scope that was not obvious. That is, it depended on someone's perspective.

This process then goes on through the other key perspectives - project manager, analyst, solution architect, developer, deployer, tester, documenter. As a final check, you can simply each take a role & feed back to the group that person's perspective as understood after clarification. This is now an approach with its own level of quality, review, etc, that starts the project off with as much accuracy as is conceivable. What happens after everything gets underway is another problem.

This can also be done in post-mortem - each person's perspective on the success of the project needs to be understood & communicated. It makes sense for everyone to get that understanding through putting themselves in other people's shoes.

Through time, the habit of using OPV will cover the whole project, & every decision made will automatically make reference to a broader perspective than simply one person's - even without needing to refer to everyone. This is more efficient, & more effective from a management perspective, & more efficacious from a project perspective, leading to a higher likelihood of project success & fewer surprises.

Measured Quality

Many people take a manufacturing approach to quality - that is, measure the defects, identify the key areas that need improvement, fix & track the changes. Mathematically, even scientifically, this experimental approach works in large-scale production environments.

It breaks down when you don't have scale (lots of things to measure) & you don't have a repeated process or output (measuring the same thing). Even worse, you're not measuring good quality, you're measuring poor quality.

If the focus is on making things less badly than you do now, then there is a limit to what can be improved, & most of the steps are incremental.

If you want to measure good quality, & improve it, then you have to take an entirely different approach - you have to measure something that is good, & achieve a higher measure over time.

When producing goods & services, then customer satisfaction is often the best measure. This is, of course, also the most dangerous, because it's subjective & dependent on who your customers are at that point in time, the last job you did for them, etc.

But, & this is important, if your customers are regular & keep coming back, & every job is to the same exacting standards of high quality, then the customer will consistently see your goods & services as being of high quality, & will continue to be good customers.

Somewhere down the line, if your customer is not an end user, they also do customer surveys that show them how their products & services are working in the marketplace.

The next problem with measuring customer satisfaction is that you generally can't do it yourself - it requires some arm's-length work by another organisation or individual, which costs a lot more to implement than sitting on your production line & counting the reworks or defects.

Nobody said that quality was going to be an easy thing to implement.

It definitely doesn't have to be easy to measure.

The question really is, how meaningful is anything but the subjective response of your customers? You can have the highest auditability of product, with zero defects, & still be commercially in the red because your potential customers don't trust you or your ability.

You won't know that unless you survey them.

No measures of improved processes & lower defects will change their opinion - or affect their satisfaction level.

Quality Moments

Quality awareness links with Agile - as a business model or a methodology. Quality is all about being in the moment, being aware of the current state & what it should be, & knowing how to get from one to the other. Agility is about being able to move quickly & decisively under changing circumstances.

Thus, the best kind of Quality comes when you are Agile.

More to the point, if you don't have Agility, then your Quality is simply assurance, not management. By that, I mean that you can check the quality after the fact, then you have to rework or throw out defects. That's inefficient. That's costly.

Agility means changing things at the point where they happen. It means reacting to the problem. It leads to being able to see the problems that might occur as the environment changes - predicting likely outcomes with experience (rather than prescience).

Agility is being in the moment. Quality is the essence of the moment.

Success is bringing the two together to make better moments now & into the future.

Of course, this all ties in with the idea that quality management is not a slice of the project at some predefined point in the process, or a few key concepts tacked together & learned by rote. Quality, like Agility, is a mindset, & a way of doing business that doesn't come easily.

It's hard work, & it's a constant struggle.

Quality never rests.

Quality is never finalised - it is ongoing.

Quality is never successful - even if it is a continuing success.

Quality is a way of life.

Quality is approaching every moment as an opportunity to ensure that things are as good as they can get, & that things will continue to be good, if not better.

Live in the moment. Be aware of the moment. Prepare for the next moment.

Then, each moment can be a quality moment.

Where Outcomes Meet Expectations

Robert Pirsig, in his own twisted way (Zen & the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance) had it right - quality is the origin of the relationship between subject & object. Of course, he was nuts at the time, but the sentiment wasn't. Quality is a judgement, an impression, a feeling, a moment. You can't define it, but everyone knows what it is. It's an enigma.

That can never be an excuse for not dealing with it.

Practically, we all 'get' quality - we look at the result & give it a thumbs up or down dependent upon our own perception - how we form our relationship with the product. Just because you can't quantify it easily, can't replicate the perception, & can't audit or reproduce the actual quality essence does not invalidate the experience of quality, because the chances are that most people will experience it in the same 'way' (direction, not necessarily distance).

When you ask anyone "is this quality output", you will almost always get the same response from an homogeneous audience. This is important - homogeneity across professionalism, or professionals (not necessarily the same thing) should produce similar perceptions. Quality is not taste. It might be subjective, but it has indefinable (unquantifiable) absolutes.

Therein lies the reproducibility.

That which is poor quality to one person will always be poor quality to their peers.

That's where the outcome doesn't meet the expectations.

That's where the subject meets the object & turns up its nose.

That kind of judgement call is obvious, cannot be fudged or faked (if we are honest with ourselves), & is meaningful.

It does, however, need an awareness of the moment, the ability to perceive it, & the desire to understand the outcomes & the expectations.

Without that, there can be no quality.

Quality Starts Here & Now!

Someone asked me yesterday what my experience was with quality procedures - how to introduce them, etc. My answer came with one of those "Isn't it obvious?" looks down the nose - "quality" is an attitude, an education program, an acceptance of changing habits.

Thinking this over with regards an inaugural in-house quality management meeting, I thought that the first thing that should be done by such a group is to define quality relative to itself (the group), & then see how that can be applied outwardly, which is easier to foster than to come up with rules & procedures in isolation & try to apply them across the company.

The mantra becomes "Quality starts here & now!"

Get up & say it in the room. Get everyone to say it.

With that in your mind, in your heart, everything else follows. If you cannot embody quality, then you cannot instill it. If you do not lead, then no-one will follow. If you do not build it, then no-one will come ... one too many trite expressions.

You have the technology, the power, the impetus, the desire, to take quality to your organisation if you take that first step & open a window & shout into the street "I'm as mad as hell & I'm not going to take it any more!" Do something. Change. Make quality a priority in your life & it will become known to others.

Yes, this has a degree of religious fervor. This could also be seen as single-mindedness (or bloody-mindedness), but it is necessary to adopt that vision of the possibility of quality, & follow through by performing courageous acts of change in your life, your organisation, your every dealing with other people - not just your customers.

The next step is to communicate your revelations - evangelise. Yes, we're going to spread the word of our conversion & hope that others will be inspired by our story. You do not have to do a forced baptism (holding them underwater until their resistance is weakened). You have to appeal to their need for personal salvation. Let them see the light. Let them see the change in you that accepting quality has made.

Let them see your belief in the absolute goodness & rightness of being a contributor to a quality organisation.

A lot of people go to the church of quality because they want to conform or are frightened of the hell that otherwise awaits. Unfortunately, quality needs more than blind belief. It requires that you open your heart fully to changing your life & the way you do things.

It requires diligence to ensure that the darkness of poor workmanship does not return, that you don't slip from the golden path that leads directly to the nirvana of happy customers.

Quality is a movement. Get up & get on with it. Change. Repent. Believe. Tell everyone.