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Quality Management
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Climbing the Quality Mountain There was a time when all that was considered necessary to be a quality professional was being able to apply and audit management system standards and use tools such as statistical process control, six sigma and process mapping. For others, concentrating on the purely technical aspect was not enough and quality has since been extended to include leadership, culture and the application of the principles of quality management rather than concentrating solely on the clauses of management systems standards. Institutes such as the CQI were created to support and promote the profession, taking the lead in ensuring that the quality profession continued to flourish and develop.In days gone by, to be at the top of the quality profession meant being suitably qualified in ever increasing amounts of detail. Whole careers were based on this premise, adopting tools and techniques that polarised our industry into the tactical climbing the quality mountain Professional education and training support embedded this narrow polarised definition and we are still suffering the consequences today.For instance, the Institute of Directors runs courses covering business planning; corporate governance, marketing, sales, finance and IT, but courses with quality in the title attract little attention.It could be telling us that other subjects are seen as more strategic and therefore more important to senior business leaders – quality has become a tactical rather than a strategic issue.What is really happening around us? As quality professionals our careers and status are important and we need to ask ourselves what understanding, education and experience we will really need in the future. What is the quality mountain? Training and education is the domain of our HR colleagues and much research has been carried out as to how people learn and change to the benefit of both themselves and their organisation. What can we learn from HR?One concept is the ‘world-view’. We need to understand how this concept affects us as quality professionals.Think of yourself as a quality mountain. As we learn about quality, we climb this mountain of understanding. We may start from different points, as an auditor, six sigma expert or consultant but we all learn, and hopefully progress, at our own speed, gradually absorbing some of the other quality tools, techniques and knowledge, to climb the quality mountain and become true quality professionals.As we climb the mountain we gain more personal experience, competence, maturity and success.As we get towards the top, we start to realise that we are not alone and we start to understand that there are other mountains such as the HR mountain, the purchasing mountain and the IT mountain. In fact there is a whole range of other management discipline ‘mountains’ with people climbing them. We are not a solitary mountain: we are part of a mountain range.This analogy allows us to appreciate and understand the part other professions also play in delivering business objectives, how what they do affects us and how our discipline, quality, is involved in managing process performance. Process performance is affected by all management disciplines, each enabling or constraining performance, so what happens on one mountain affects what happens on the others.The real question as we climb our mountain, is how do we reach out to other mountains so that we can help each other see how what we do collectively, affects us all and therefore our cross-functional business process performance?We could just tell them: shouting louder than they do. In some organisations this is exactly what happens, and we all have experience of he or she who shouts loudest getting the attention of senior management and therefore their issue onto the agenda! However, this strategy seldom works in the longer term.So what is to be done? We could try to influence the other institutes and the organisations that supply professional training and education services but experience shows that this is an uphill struggle. How do we learn to put business into quality and engage others on a common path towards business/organisational excellence? Selling quality The best salespeople can sell anything. To do so they follow a process with the following stages. Their competence is such that this process is automatic and usually consists of the following key steps: 1. Understand your product and the market driver it is seeking to meet. Why does the product exist in the first place? 2. Identify what the customer really needs (i.e. what are they struggling with) – not just what they say they need 3. Be able to describe the benefits, not the features, that the customer will derive from using the product or service (i.e. how will it meet the need) and close the dealWe need to see the sale from the customer’s perspective.Salespeople know that once a potential customer can see what’s in it for them; they are more likely to buy. On our quality mountain thismight mean not mentioning technically detailed terminology such as quality, ISO 9000, audit, standards, management systems and other language which does not belong to other business worlds, but focusing on the results the customer wants to achieve for their business. ‘How do we learn to put business into quality?’ To build our bridge to the other professional mountains, perhaps we should learn from the salesperson.We need to better understand the product we are selling or the service we are providing and what benefits others will derive from using it. To understand where we now sit, we all need some background in what makes a business tick, just as much as quality tools and techniques. We would then be better able to engage with our colleagues from other professions, sell quality to them and contribute at a strategic level. What Next? What you do will depend upon where you are on the quality mountain. If you have many years of experience, certain actions may be appropriate which would be unsuitable for others. Here are some examples.
Do not adopt typical auditor questioning mode. Relax, put them at ease – you just want to spend 15 minutes finding out something about sales. Take this information and ask yourself what you have learned that you didn’t know before. Are these activities reflected in the management system, if not why not? 2. Talk to a senior manager and ask him/her about your stakeholder engagement process and how this information affects business planning and policy formulation 3. Spend a day work-shadowing a colleague from another function. Ask lots of questions! 4. Spend a day with a manager from another department.Go with them to meetings and sit at the back of the room. Listen not to the detail but the business level of the conversation. Pick out how the different people represented work together to deliver what is required 5. Attend a senior management meeting or even a board meeting, where different managers are clearly representing different functions. How do they work together? Do they understand that what one does will affect others and therefore the result? How many mountains are represented? What is the role of the person running the meeting? What are they really trying to achieve? 6. Put a search into Google. For example, if you type in ‘business planning process’, you will find lists of parts of a planning process. Compare it with your own defined planning process: what are the gaps? Compare with clause 5 of ISO 9001. What have you learned?
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