Quality and High Performance

In recent years, the focus of quality has made some significant shifts from the traditional view of defect discovery, defect prevention, meeting customer requirements etc., to a more contemporary and comprehensive view which is about the collective delivery of experiences to stakeholders (which can include internal and external customers). Alongside this shift, there is a growing recognition and incremental adoption of the mindset that quality is a shared responsibility even in organizations which have a team or department that includes the word ‘quality’ as a prefix to their identifying name.
The popular phrase ‘acceptable quality’ is no longer constrained to products and processes and now includes security, compliance, user experience and non-functional aspects which for some odd reason are decoupled from quality. As cloud computing, internet of things, and mobile technologies become the norm and pervasive, there could not be better time for the morphing of quality to mean a collection of experiences. We can no longer imagine delivering a product or service which meets the traditional expectations for acceptable quality, but exposes weaknesses in security, mobile support or ability to scale across devices and environments. All this plus a highly competitive environment that demands the right blend of velocity and quality.
Just five years ago, when building a new system, I recall organizations asking questions about regions from users will access and issuing release notes requiring users to stay with a single browser (and preferably constrained to a specific version of that browser).

So what does this shift mean for quality and does it matter? The simple answer is it does matter and its impact is significant.
The reason why this matters is the increasing attention that this shift is bringing to the people side of quality. While most of us would agree that quality can stick only when it s about people and culture, there are still organizations who have not entirely bought into that paradigm. Many organizations struggle to buy into that view because to implement that mindset requires significant and relentless effort from senior leaders and managers. There are no silver bullets and leaders cannot delegate this entirely to consultants or hope to solve the problem by investing in expensive tools.
Among the key indicators required for enabling a performance driven culture cited in ASQ’s 2014 ‘Culture of Quality’ report was the role of leadership in enabling their people to clearly a sense of purpose and meaning for what they do and reiterate how their organization’s values are integrated into every action, deliverable and decision. This way, people are focused on approaching performance that is real and sustainable which can lead to organically delivering efficiency and effectiveness. Taking an approach to implement a culture of quality and high performance by instilling a deep sense of purpose, meaning of core values and ownership is the only means to sustain and scale performance. Implementing this approach also gives people to experiment and take risks within a well understood framework of values and expectations, whereby agility and discipline can coexist and lead to great outcomes. Learning from failure and continuous improvement will also become an acceptable element of this culture with no room for fear of retribution.

So, let us move our organizations to accepting that Quality is set of Collective Experiences and work to enable this change by focusing on the people and culture components. Let us make Quality stick.

“I’m part of the ASQ Influential Voices program. While I receive an honorarium from ASQ for my commitment, the thoughts and opinions expressed on this blog are my own.”