Quality Is Everyone’s Business

Close your eyes and think about everything you know about quality. Just kidding–don’t. In many ways, we think about quality as checking boxes. It’s that annoying thing we have to do.

What happens when we stop thinking about quality this way and begin to consider it holistically?

Quality as a practice

Every company that delivers a product requires some level of tangible quality. In fact, most activities we associate to quality fall into two buckets:

1. Quality Control (QC): Defining and maintaining repeatable processes that reliably produce desired outcomes
2. Quality Assurance (QA): Executing processes and activities to ensure a product meets requirements

QC and QA are critical to product consistency and reliability but frequently exist as isolated steps in a supply chain.

Viewing quality as a practice introduces tools for achieving organizational success:

• Quality Planning: Establishing quality practices and goals to achieve strategic results
• Quality Improvement: Creating, measuring, and changing processes to meet goals

QC and QA provide ways to react to problems and create repeatable ways to detect and resolve them. Quality Planning and Improvement extend quality to all levels of the organization. It drives teamwork and continual improvement in processes, products, service work, and culture.

Adopting Organizational Quality

Organizational Quality requires the intentional use of communication, process, and goal-setting… with measurable outcomes. The chief goal is to delight customers and achieve long term organizational success. Quality is not equivalent to strategy.

Strategy asks: “What results do we care about?”
Quality asks: “What processes produce these results?”

Quality Leaders support processes that ensure the on-time delivery of high-quality products to customers. A Quality Leader will:

• Understand strategic priorities and their expected results
• Help other leaders build processes with established goals
• Define success indicators and measurement of goals
• Review processes and measure their success
• Identify problems and introduce changes to resolve them

We’re all in this together

Organizational Quality is a team sport. It is valuable to have a person or team owning quality, but it is everyone’s job to advocate for quality. Here are a few ways we do this at Tangram Flex:

Process Auditing

• What processes are we using every day? What are their goals?
• What work is important but tedious?
• What tools work for us? Which ones don’t?

Team Health

• How do the processes we use impact our performance?
• What gaps do we have when communicating with other teams?

Customer Satisfaction

• What do we need to do to meet the current needs of our customers?
• How will our processes need to change or extend to serve a changing market?

Conclusion

If you close your eyes to think about quality now, does it look different? Building Organizational Quality takes time, reflection, and intentional execution. We call it a practice for a reason- you show up every day and keep working on doing things well. The results are nearly always valuable learning, constant improvement, and happier customers.

Tangram Flex is a software company in Dayton, Ohio. Our team is a group of leaders from the DoD, private industry, and innovative startups committed to helping engineers build configurable systems for secure, rapid delivery of technology to the market. Have questions? Get in touch with our team.