Qualityworld

What is quality?

How do businesses work? What is the role of the quality profession in business? These questions have probably challenged many of us in different ways throughout our working lives. Unlike most other professions, those of us with 'quality' in our job titles have changed direction and scope many different times. In the second part of his article, David Straker describes a simple model of the way that businesses work and the changing role of the quality professional.

Understanding our external business environment, internal capabilities and desires leads to changes that enable us to sustain and grow our businesses (see figure 1). This system is discussed in further detail below, along with consideration of its impact on the quality profession.

Figure 1: Understanding our business environment
Figure 1 Understanding our business environment

Understanding

The first stage of any business is understanding, including understanding what is needed and how to satisfy these needs. A sound understanding will lead to sound decisions, whereas decisions based on assumptions and guesswork will lead to surprises and fire-fighting, which is not a winning strategy

Understanding needs (and attendant expectations) is about all the players in the game. It means knowing who they are, what value they bring, and what they want to take out of the pot in return for continued patronage. Stakeholder needs are met by a complex system involving many other stakeholders. Just as traditional quality uses tools like Cpk, the classic measure of manufacturing capability, so we must understand the entire delivery engine.

Understanding includes present and future needs and capabilities, with a consideration of external forces, such as competition and legislation. Imagination, based on knowledge, is an important factor here: when customers change their goals and competitors change strategy, we still want to stay ahead of the game.

Real-world understanding includes awareness of the limits of your knowledge. When this is openly accepted, associated risks can be identified and actively managed. Much of the work involved in business is about managing surprises. Quality should include reducing surprises by highlighting realities in time to prepare for possibilities. With an improved understanding, we can make decisions that will lead to better chances of staying in business. This means balancing stakeholder value needs with current and future capabilities of both internal and external systems. It means saying no and focusing resources to retain key stakeholders and to increase targeted value flows (such as more lucrative customers and growing markets).

Improvement

In one sense, decisions are promises: they commit resources to objectives. They are investing value now to achieve value later. At a strategic level, most decisions to achieve new business goals lead to necessary changes in the business system. Serious business improvement is undertaken to meet the promises, explicit or implicit, in these decisions.

Improvements in practice have not always been successful in helping to meet promises. A classic failure has been to target improvements off the business line. Practicing in safe areas is one thing, but as Wallace Andrews said: 'You can learn all you want about Freud, but sooner or later you have to go out with the girls.'

Understanding is the foundation of improvement. Attempting to improve systems with intuition and pseudo-brainstorming can be a dangerous game. Systems are interconnected wholes: changing one element can have a significant impact on other, often distant, parts of the system. Improvement without true understanding is easy Improperly fixing one problem just causes another to pop up somewhere else.

As well as working on meeting today's promises, improvements can target the longer-term. In Competing for the Future; Gary Hamel and CK Prahalad showed that competencies can take years to develop and that tomorrow's competitions are won or lost in improvements we make today

Assurance

When needs and capabilities are understood and the system improved, all we need to do is make sure that it works. Ideally there would be no need for assurance but it is part of the system where specifications are important. The previous stages ensured that definitions of what was to be done were optimal and clear - this stage is about ensuring that things happen on time, every time.

Basis for survival

The three pillars fit together to form the basis for survival of all businesses and organisations. The job of the quality professional is to understand, improve and assure the operation of the whole business system within which he or she works (see figure 2).

Assurance: keeping promises

The modern concept of quality started on the manufacturing line, where quality professionals worked to ensure that products met specifications. This is the domain of quality control and assurance, in which we are the clear masters of documented systems and audited processes. The quality of assurance is, at its most fundamental, about meeting stated or implied promises (for example, as defined in product specifications). This quality is about consistency

Improvement: the ability to keep promises

Improvement has gradually merged into quality, and with the dawning of the TQM era1, quality professionals became involved in the improvement of the broad business system. Improvement requires new levels of knowledge and skill, such as an understanding of the way to design processes and business systems. Products are designed by people with professional qualifications in the subject; the design of processes and broader organisational systems deserves equal rigour.

Improvement is the quality of change. Initially about changing processes, it has evolved into changing organisational systems. It requires analysis, innovation and serious interpersonal skills. If QA means keeping promises, then quality improvement involves building a system to do so.

Understanding: the quality of making the right promises

The final domain that requires our attention is that of understanding. As Deming suggested, understanding is both the philosopher's stone and the critical challenge for quality in the new millennium. Quality of information, quality of understanding and quality of decisions are as critical as the quality of products and services that flow from them.

We must not only understand machines and processes, but people and complex systems. Only then can we make the right promises and ensure that we keep them.

Understanding requires a constant quest for deeper knowledge and alternative meaning. It is not an end in itself, but requires patience and passion to keep on digging and refining, since the knowledge gained today may not be of value until some time later. Learning is a lifetime's occupation, so you might as well enjoy it. Understanding is the underpinning that enables both improvement and assurance.

The domain of the quality professional is significant, and just as business systems are interlocked, so are these areas necessary to ensure we make and keep wise promises. If QA and improvement are about keeping promises, then understanding is about ensuring that the right promises are made.

Figure 2 Understanding, improving and assuring the operation of the whole business system

Large and small pillars - where do you fit in?

Not everyone in the profession does or should work at the business level, but everyone needs to work at the three levels of assurance, improvement and understanding; for example, even a limited domain, such as the quality of electronic resistors, understanding of materials, improvement of processes and assurance of deliveries. An understanding of the broader context into which your work fits is also increasingly important.

Because quality covers all areas of the business, it is not reasonable for everyone in the profession to be expected to understand everything. As the domain grows, there is room for both generalists and specialists, as in the medical profession, where GPs are able to deal with common conditions and are also able to diagnose and refer unusual cases to specialists.

The work continues

For some, my contentions will be heretical, yet in some organisations much of this is already happening, though the quality job may be defined in other terms. The primary objective here has been to highlight what already exists, to make implicit knowledge explicit, and to suggest a future. The work goes on. There is much to do and we are the only people who can do it. Below are three suggestions for our profession's next steps.

Understand people

Though TQM catapulted many quality professionals into the company limelight, it failed to cushion the blow of 'limited success'. If a lack of management commitment was and is a key reason for failure, we are also responsible for failing to create and assure that commitment. A lack of understanding of people and psychology is probably our biggest weakness as a profession. We understand the problems of the organisation, yet we fail to communicate and persuade. A deeper understanding of psychology may be a small step for us, but may lead to giant leaps for our companies.

Improve processes

Processes are not as well-understood as they should be. They are still often designed on the back of the proverbial fag-packet. The user-unfriendliness of documentation systems is legendary. Even in our best companies, process scores in business excellence applications tend not to be the highest. We must improve the design and management of all sorts of processes, including the complex management and support processes that do not lend themselves to the procedural techniques used with manual manufacturing processes.

Assure the quality professional

For a profession in which there is little academic education, professional certification is woefully inadequate. Many professionals have no professional qualification and no professional affiliation. They may be wonderful at their jobs, but we just don't know! This is not exactly a quality situation. When employers recruit quality professionals and look at the ones they already employ they should have confidence in what they are getting - they have every right to look to the national institute to provide that assurance. Quality professionals should be the most valuable people in every company ensuring, on a day-today basis, that the company survives and thrives well into the new millennium.

A brief bibliography for a new understanding

Required reading

Those who would change the world must first understand it. This is a very short reading list in some topics of interest, many of which influenced the ideas in this paper. You will not find any books on statistics or traditional quality tools here: these are a given and assumed to have a place in your library already. These books are inteded to help you push the envelope of your understanding. Click on any highlighted title to buy direct from Amazon.co.uk

Change

Peggy Holman and Tom Devane (eds), The Change Handbook, Berrett-Koehler, 1999 - a marvellous set of summaries of all the major big-systems change methodologies, all by the original proponents
Everett Rogers. Diffusion of Innovations (3rd Edition), Free Press, 1983 - the original work on the way ideas spread through groups. This is where the term 'early adopter' originated

Chaos and complexity

John L Casti, Complexification, Abacus, 1994 - a good 'popular science' book that covers the various areas of complexity, catastrophe, emergence (not currently available)
Shona L Brown and Kathleen M Eisenhardt, Competing on the Edge, Harvard Business School Press, 1998 - a very practical application of chaos principles to business strategy

Customers

Paco Underhill, Why we buy, Touchstone, 1999 - a finely-observed book, ostensibly about how people shop in retail environments, but really about observing what is actually happening
Frederick F Reichheld, The Loyalty Effect, Harvard Business School Press, 1996 - a view of the whole system of loyalty, including customer, employee and shareholder loyalty

Decision-making

Scott Plous, The Psychology of Judgement and Decision-making, McGraw-Hill, 1993 - a concise set of descriptions of most of the patters of (largely dysfunctional) behaviour we use when making decisions
Gary Klein, Sources of Power, MIT Press, 1999 - the result of a long study of rapid life-and-death decisions made under pressure, as with fire-fighters, where 'intuition' is a vital tool

Negotiation

Roger Fisher and William Ury, Getting to Yes, Business Books, 1981 - the original and still the best book on collaborative negotiation
G Richard Shell, Bargaining for Advantage, Penguin Books, 1999 - the best of the modern books from the director of the modern books from the director of the 'Wharton executive negotiation workshop'

Patterns

IF Price and Ray Shaw, Shifting the Patterns, Management Books 2000, 1998 - a serious look at patterns in organisations
Christopher Alexander, The Timeless Way of Building, Oxford University Press, 1979, this describes the development of the pattern language for buildings through penetrating observation of what really does and does not work in practice

Systems

John Sterman, Business Dynamics, McGraw-Hill, 2000 - the definitive work on systems thinking, causal loops and modelling. Big, but readable and essential.
Russell Ackoff, Recreating the Corporation, Oxford University Press, 1999 - the latest from the old master. Includes many of his principles about systems, along with applications in organisation design

References

1 TQM actually started in 1951, with the publication of Armand Feigenbaum's Total Quality Control