Qualityworld
Future perfect?
John Oakland
Oakland Consulting
Quality has a great future. It'll never go out of fashion because it is about meeting customer needs. It has to be integrated into the strategy of any organisation if they want to survive, let alone be successful, including public sector and voluntary organisations.
Quality went into a bit of the doldrums a few years ago, but recently it's had something of a revival because organisations seeking cost reductions through off-shoring and outsourcing without attention to quality have experienced massive market problems. We see it in the news in everything from toys to foods, aerospace to oil.
I think there's a great future for quality and for quality professionals. They will, if they're not already doing so, come back into the 'room'. This is because for many organisations the need for quality and those people with the right understanding of how to integrate quality strategies into the business strategies are going to be in tremendous demand.
This time, however, quality professionals will have to deliver differently than in the past, where they suddenly found themselves very important and became somewhat arrogant about it. In the future they will have to recognise that organisations have moved on, that quality has become a very important area, and that they will have to do a better job of getting it integrated into the strategy of the organisation.
The general public need help in understanding that a lot of what they read about in the newspapers is concerned with quality issues, such as lead in toy paint. There are still a lot of people who use the term in a Rolls Royce way, instead of the management of the supply chain.
Achieving quality and operational excellence has never been more important than it is now, and will continue to be important, and we'll see demand for people with the right skills. Sometimes those skills are somewhat fashion-driven, as is the case at the moment, with a very strong focus on lean and six sigma. However, quality professionals will have to help organisations understand what tools to use and what value they will give to customers.
How to do that successfully, though, requires you to have charisma and the ability to communicate with senior management – the capability of delivering what you might call director-level contribution to the business.
You've got to be reporting to the right people, and you've got to have a strategic brain that can make this part of the strategy. This will be key for quality professionals – but this is where they have failed in the past. Most just don't have the strategic capability – they're into systems or ISO 9001. They have been quality nerds.
They perhaps need to recognise that they're limited in what their capabilities are and the organisation needs to find someone who's capable of operating at this level. Because if they're not then quality will not engage with that company, or public sector organisation.
