What subjects about quality are of the greatest interest to you...

Influence of internal culture on quality initiatives?
Lean enterprise systems? Six-sigma?
Quality in news... which subjects?

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Topic of the Week: What is QA?

When I first started working in Quality Assurance, what seems like a hundred years ago to me now, I was asked what quality meant. Seems like an easy question. Especially when it's posed to a new Quality Manager. While I stumbled around the definition and managed to mumble my way past a definition of sorts, the truth is, I really had a tough time with that question.

That was 20 years ago. Since then I've found that most people have a tough time with that question. But, the good news is, I have learned a lot. Mostly I've learned that there's a lot to this subject. Good quality or bad quality, be it in the process or in the product, can mean life or death to an organization. The trick is to quantify what it specifically means to your organization at the onset and then again in the planning stages of each and every initiative.

That starts with first asking the organization what it really wants to do. What exactly is the business strategy? It's surprisingly how many CEOs falter when you ask them to nail down a specific strategy beyond the obvious: make money. It's not all that uncommon for them to defer to a yellow'd paper up on the wall entitled, "mission statement", mutter something about being late to a meeting, defer you to the Quality Manager (if there is one) and dash swiftly out the door. As if a statement alone could truly serve as a means to answer the big "what is quality" question. If that's what you're getting then basic education is in order. That CEO needs to understand that quality is not a function. It's a way of doing business. And you need to know where the business is headed.

From there it's establishing measures for quantifying quality based on the stategy. Once established measures become self-sustaining - you just have to use them and be sure to adjust them as business needs change. Make sure that perfomance is routinely measured and that when the targets aren't met there is action to address them.

So, that my friend, in it's most diluted form, is basic quality 101. But is that really it? I think not. I'm sure we could all agree that this blog could go on adnosium about the subject. Many people have attempted to do just that. The thing is, there hasn't been a new idea out of quality in 50 years or more. It's simply been a repackaging of the same old - same old. Call it TQM, call it 6-sigma, call it Lean. It's simply about making a product the customer wants at a price they can afford through effective and efficient processes. More basic than that is the question: What does quality mean to business excellence?

I plan on using this blog to share my thoughts on that and I invite you to do the same. Where is quality in relation to business excellence today? What is your latest challenge?

More to come...