Impassable Quality - Your Company's IQ

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Summary: Not your typical article on quality! Practical analysis of what causes poor quality and how to ensure quality. Checklist included!

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You've experienced the frustration. So has every professional who has led a complex, high-output environment.

Quality standards were once given highest priority. Thousands of man-hours were spent developing, perfecting, and implementing them. But that was during "slow season." Now - with business booming - soaring claims suggest those quality measures have been pushed aside.

Why does this happen? Because it can.

What I want you discover is that it doesn't have to be this way. With the right planning up-front, you can infuse your organization with Impassable Quality.

"Impassable" has two meanings. I'll call them Roadblock and Control Gate.

A roadblock is impassable because it prevents you from proceeding. You have to turn around and go another way.

A control gate is impassable because it cannot be bypassed. It's the only way to get from here to there.

This last sense is what I want you to build into your quality initiatives. Quality that cannot (not should not) be bypassed any more than you can start your car without the correct key.

I've provided a helpful checklist to use in your planning, below. But permit me a brief digression, please, as I provide a context for quality.

Every highly successful organization today has, to some degree, realized that managing the flow of corporate knowledge is imperative to success. Simply stated, the goal of managing knowledge is transforming knowledge into profit. And the only way to do that is to transform knowledge into operational requirements.

These aren't just nice goals; they are exactly what you tried to accomplish when you implemented quality controls.

"Impassable Quality" is just a shorthand way of saying "knowledge that has been transformed into operational requirements." If what you produce matches your operational requirements, it will be of good quality. If it doesn't match your operational requirements, it will be of poor quality.

Logically, then, the only way to ensure that your knowledge matches your organizational requirements – that it increases profit in every case – is to make sure quality can't be circumvented; to make it impassable.

Let me say it once more: If quality controls can be bypassed, they will be. Who has the time to do things they don't have to do when business is booming?

To understand what is required to make Quality the only possible way to complete a process, we need to understand why quality slips. Human processes are much more challenging to design and enforce than automated processes. Following are some primary reasons we end up with poor quality output from human processes.

1. People Don't Know – People don't know what they need to know or what they are supposed to do. They end up either making their best guess or improvising
2. People Don't Understand – Information is available but is too complex. People either don't understand it, misinterpret it, or ignore it. Again, they end up either making their best guess or improvising
3. People Don't Care – People may not care about quality because they have bad attitudes, because they don't realize why quality matters in a given task, or because their work is evaluated by a goal that competes with quality
4. People Don't Need To – There are no significant consequences to poor quality, or at least the consequences aren't visible to the person who allowed/caused the quality to suffer

Below, I have taken those causes of poor quality, broken them down, and created a checklist of questions you may use to evaluate your solutions. I've provided examples for each question.

1. People Don't Know

1. Is information immediately available when it is needed?
   Ex. – The user receives instructions at the very moment s/he needs them (not before and not after) and doesn't have to waste time finding them
2. Is only necessary information presented – no clutter, not buried in a bunch of irrelevant information?
   Ex. – A document only contains what is needed at the moment, not surrounded by extra information, lines, checkboxes, etc.
3. Is what to do with information clearly stated?
   Ex. – The next steps in the process are clearly stated along with the information being used
4. Is "quality output" clearly defined, agreed upon, and communicated for this context?
   Ex. – People know exactly what standards they should shoot for. Maybe they are posted on a nearby wall, written into a quality checklist, incorporated into a form, etc.

2. People Don't Understand

1. Is information simplified – for example, summarized in a way that requires less thought/time for interpretation?
   Ex. – Specifications are laid out in checklists and also summarized in a concise paragraph
2. Is information clear – without unnecessary jargon or unfamiliar abbreviations?
   Ex. – Words and phrases are fully spelled out and the document consistently uses a set of standard terms. A corporate thesaurus or dictionary is available for definitions when needed
3. Do people know how to use it?
   Ex. – Training, clear process definitions, and reference material are made available when needed
4. Do Quality Controls allow for exceptional situations so that people know what to do when they encounter exceptions?
   Ex. – Quality Controls are developed for "standard" process iterations, but rules are also built in for "non-standard" situations, such as when non-standard add-ons are required

3. People Don't Care

1. Is an accountability system in place?
   Ex. – Regular reports are used by management to reward employees who give the greatest attention to quality, and to correct problems quickly when quality begins to decline
2. Is the responsible person evaluated by a goal that conflicts with quality?
   Ex. – Employees are rewarded based on volume output alone with no regard to quality output. Naturally, they become more concerned with more about volume than quality

4. People Don't Need To

1. Do we measure quality and communicate how we're doing to everyone involved?
   Ex. –Corporate reports include quality numbers along with other numerical data; internal and/or external newsletters provide everyone with a view of the quality of our output, etc.

And this is the big one…

1. Is there an exact fit between quality output and the next task in the process?
   Ex. –It is impossible to begin the next task in a process without a quality product from the previous task, just as it is impossible to drive the car with the wrong set of keys

Use these questions to guide your planning as you develop improvements. Build Impassable – unavoidable, permanent – Quality into your solutions.

If you would like to discuss Impassable Quality, please contact me.

Comments

[Fred]

Somebody get's it.... Especially, Impassable - Roadblock/Control Gate solutions

[Joe Lawrence]

This article really opened my eyes. In my book I talk about the same thing but I only utilize the don't know and don't care categories. I like the fresh perspective.

I look forward to reading even more.