Survival of the fittest

Individual performance is often a relative term.  Much depends on the type of the group an individual belongs to at work.  If the group has lot of intelligent and competent fellows, then competition to stay ahead is intense.  Else, luck will be in an individual's favor.  All this also applies to a Quality Professional as an individual.  Work life of a quality professional is challenging as he/she plays a very responsible role for the organization.  To ensure their role is aligned to the organizational growth, they go through performance appraisals every year.

Some organizations have multiple annual appraisal cycles (for example: half-yearly, quarterly etc). Normally, Balance Score Card (BSC) for the organization is the baseline document used in the appraisal process.  Most of the individual goals are derived from the BSC to ensure alignment to organizational goals.  Individuals strive to work hard to meet the set goals.  Along with goals, an individual's attributes are also measured.

To stay ahead in the appraisal game, it is very important to at least meet the goals.   But meeting the goals exceedingly well will ensure the individual to be at the top-spot.  Thus, this individual will be able to draw a higher salary, in the performance-linked pay component.

In the appraisal system, there is always a goal linked to Learning and Growth.  Achieving a certification is the best way to prove that this goal is met exceedingly well.  For a quality professional, achieving the most relevant ASQ certification is one of the best ways to convey his/her achievement from a learning perspective.

Successful companies understand the value of professional certifications, such as the ones provided by ASQ, as the certification body of knowledge is aligned well to the industry needs.  Getting certified and keeping it alive is not a simple task for any quality professional.  A lot of preparation and practice goes behind the successful completion of the certification.  A nice blend of theoretical and practical knowledge is essential to clear the ASQ certification examinations.

While the individual contributes towards the quantitative goals such as higher revenue growth, improved profit margins etc., and the qualitative goals say, higher customer satisfaction, the quality certification comes as a very helpful element for the quality professional to stay at the top and take home a relatively higher salary.

Agility is the key for an organization's success.  Thus, the quality professional also has to be dynamic and agile to meet the business needs of the organization.  During the end of the year, if the company does well, it pays the employees well.  Most importantly, to stay in top amongst the group, the quality professional has to meet the defined goals and attributes exceedingly well.

Power of Quality

November is celebrated as the World Quality Month.   Paul, in his recent blog post, has provoked the quality community to rise up and spread the importance of quality awareness and practice. 

It is sometimes disheartening to see when the "Quality Department" is looked at as a pure overhead.  By overhead, it is meant that, Quality department and its employees do not contribute directly to the revenue growth of a company.  Thus, during tougher economies, one of the first to being laid off from their jobs is the Quality Professionals. I have seen this happening in certain service-based industries, especially Information Technology (IT).  Many a times, these cost cutting efforts result in the complete death of that company.  Here, the Senior Management lacks commitment towards quality and they underestimate the power of "quality assurance".   They compromise "long-term" benefits for achieving "short-term" needs.

You might have heard of some companies telling customers to just look at the end product and not to worry about the quality processes used during production.   They claim and believe that quality is built into each product and not in the processes.  They offer products at a much lower cost compared to other similar products.  Ultimately, the customers suffer; the products they bought from these companies fail much earlier than the expected life.  These companies and their Senior Management do not care about process improvements or ISO certifications.  They focus completely on "quality control" and repeat mistakes.  Probably, this is a scenario of complete ignorance and underestimation of the power of quality.  These companies, one day, will be on their way to the Intensive Care Unit. 

To understand the real power of quality, one must know what will happen if quality is absent.  I would like to site an example. In India, when people buy pressure cookers, they specifically look for the ISI mark provided by Bureau of Indian Standards.  The confidence about the safety perceived and the same realized by customers buying ISI certified products is immense.  A non-ISI mark product is much cheaper, but is ignored by most Indian customers.  They don't want to take a chance by buying a product where presence of quality cannot be judged.  It is to be noted that there were few accidents reported in India, where the poor quality pressure cookers burst while cooking. 

Today's market is flooded with lots of low quality and fake products.  There are lots of service providers failing due to their poor quality services.  Many companies fail to maintain revenue growth or make profits.  Bottom-line, they all compromised or ignored quality. 

Look at those companies that are successful.  See those companies that always make good profits.  Customers worship products and services from these companies.  There are many examples - Toyota (Lean), GE (Six Sigma), Maruti (ISO), TCS (CMMI) etc., are those companies that are successful due to their sound quality practices.  Successful companies preach and practice quality.  They focus on continuous improvement and robust processes.  They consider 'Quality Assurance' as superior over 'Quality Control'.  

Let us breath quality, talk quality, spread its importance and celebrate the World Quality Month during the month of November.

Evolution of Traditional Quality

Cloud is the one of the prominent buzzwords in today's fast moving world.  Using cloud computing, companies are trying to optimize the Information Technology (IT) resources they use and make attempts move away from cost centers.  During the past decade, the IT world has seen leaps and bounds of changes and improvements.

Manufacturing is no exception.  Similar to Cloud in IT, Smart manufacturing may be the future for tomorrow's successful manufacturing companies.  This is what Paul took as the base theme for this month's discussion.  While 'traditional' stuff is changing so much, how is the quality function evolving accordingly?  This is the topic for our discussion.

Quality is an inevitable component for any product or service.  Quality function has evolved along to support the changes in technology, processes and other business functions.  Traditionally, Quality Control lost its prominence to Quality Assurance.  In the modern world, Quality Assurance has been taken over by Customer Delight.  Quality practitioners of today's world strive to deliver the "Delight" and the "WoW" factor.   The Apple (iPhone, iPad, iPod etc) and the Samsung (Note, Note2, SII, SIII etc) of the world is delivering delight through their best of the class innovative products.   Their Quality function is responsible for studying the relevant customer preferences, bring in necessary differentiators, and hence deliver the right products and services which, in turn, delights customers. 

So, over the years, Quality has changed.  That does not mean that we can undermine the importance of traditional quality function.  Quality fundamentals need to be strong and repeatable for any successful company.  Those which fail to understand the basics of quality fail miserably in business.  The Nokia and Motorola of today's world are behind their competition - Samsung and Apple in sales of mobile devices.  Microsoft also seems to be struggling to meet the consistent growth delivered by Apple and the Google. Quality function will widen further to embrace the innovation, smart, delight and the wow factor requirements of tomorrow's world.