Agility and Quality

Today, agility is perceived as an important quality attribute by the customer community.  Due to this, companies strive to demonstrate their agility through various ways.

Let us look at some industry segments and their focus on agility:

Telecom

• Provide real-time bill (online) to its customer
• Healthcare via smartphone (Mobile Health) - Patient-Payer-Payee-Pharmacy-Provider sync-up
• Variety of Services over a cloud

Retail

• Real-time offers and discounts
• Quicker product delivery options - 24 hour delivery
• Omni-channel customer experience

Entertainment

• Real-time Pay-per-view shows in HD format via variety of devices
• Streaming of a new movie releases, NFL matches live through mobile devices

Banking

• Mobile banking and up-to-date account management
• Quicker financial transactions - application, sanctions via smartphone and other mobile devices

Agility is thus very important today as it is looked by customers as a very important quality attribute, than ever before.

Improve Quality through use of Gamification

Gamification is the concept of applying game concepts and game elements (Points, Leaderboards, Badges etc) to non-game scenarios. Now a days, gamification is used as a tool to improve quality. Let us look at an example here.

Stackoverflow.com is a website that simply deals with questions and answers.  It is a good site meant for collaboration.  Users of this website ask questions on a range of topics and other users come and provide answers to these questions.  It is as simple as this.

But stackoverflow.com has effectively used gamification as a tool to improve the quality of questions, answers posted, participation, collaboration etc.  Let us look at some features of this site that use gamification to improve quality:

1. Post a question - A user posts a new question.  Another user come and edits the question to improve the quality of the question posted by the other user.  Stackoverflow.com has provided a feature to "Improve the question" posted by other users.  This is a great feature that improves the quality of a question posted.  This is a very unique and powerful feature.

2. Post an answer - Another user (very often an expert) can answer to a question.  Many other users can either post a "new answer" or "improve an existing answer (posted by another user)".  This is another practical scenario of a collaboration process that focuses on continuous improvement of quality of question and answers posted.

3.  Users are seen passionate with their participation and they earn "reputation points" and a variety of "badges" based on their effective participation.  Reputation points and the type of badges they have earned convey the quality of users of this site.    

4. Each question and answer gets a vote based on the usefulness perceived by each user.  Each vote carry 1 point.  The more the number of votes, the more valuable the question and answers are.

5. Questions can be marked as "favorite" question.  A little star icon displays "the total number of users" that have favorited the question.

We have to admit that stackoverflow.com has brilliantly used gamification to track and improve the quality of collaboration and learning.  It has used the right mix of qualitative and quantitative measures to "continuously" improve quality.

Remembering the Great Leaders of Quality

This article is a tribute to the 10 greatest leaders of quality and a brief snapshot of their key contribution towards quality.     

1. Edward Deming (1900 to 1993)

• Best known for the P-D-C-A cycle (Plan-Do-Check-Act)
• Brought significant improvements to Japanese manufacturing
• Other quality and management philosophies and thoughts from him were - i) The Deming System of Profound Knowledge, ii) The 14 points for Transformation of Management, iii) Seven Deadly Diseases, iv) The PDSA cycle, v) The Red Bead Experiment, and, vi) The Funnel Experiment.

2. Joseph Moses Juran (1904 to 2008)

• First to apply Pareto principle to Quality Management
• First to add Human Dimension to Quality Management
• First to write about Cost of Poor Quality (later popularized by James Harrington of IBM)
• The Juran Trilogy, an approach to cross-functional management - The three managerial processes: quality planning, quality control and quality improvement
• Brought various Japanese quality principles (example: Quality Circles) to the US

3. Frederick Winslow Taylor (1856 to 1915)

• Father of Scientific Management and Efficiency Movement
• Early proponent of benchmarking and business process re-design
• Scientific management theory helped the upcoming of Total Quality Control and Re-engineering

4.  Shigeo Shingo (1909 to 1990)

• Contributor of the famous TPS - Toyota Production System, that focused on reducing over-burden,  inconsistency,  and to eliminate waste
• Creator of concepts such as Poka-yoke or mistake-proofing, Zero Quality Control, The SMED system etc

5. Taiichi Ohno (1912 to 1990)

• Father of TPS - Toyota Production System which later became Lean Manufacturing
• Devised the 7 wastes (muda in Japanese) in Lean
• Proponent of JIT - Just-In-Time system
• Developed the Kanban concept

6.  Sakichi Toyoda (1867 to 1930)

• Implemented automation (Jidoka in Japanese)
• Developed the root cause analysis technique, 5-Whys

7. Kaoru Ishikawa (1915 to 1989)

• Introduced the concept of Quality Circles
• Developed the statistical tool - Fishbone Cause and Effect Diagram
• Stressed the importance of an internal customer

8. Armand V. Feigenbaum (1920)

• Devised the Total Quality Control concept
• Innovator in the area of the Quality Cost Management - Costs of prevention, appraisal, and internal and external failure 

9. Genichi Taguchi (1924 to 2012)

• Applied statistics to improve the quality of manufactured good - through famous Taguchi Methods
• Researched further on design of experiments
• Contributed towards fields such as product design and manufacturing, such as sales process engineering

10.  Philip B Crosby (1926 to 2001)

• Initiated the Zero Defects concept
• Conceptualized Quality Management Maturity Grid

I believe that these godfathers of quality have provided significant contributions for the mankind to live a high-quality life. 

Remembering them and sharing their key contributions, I trust, is a great way to celebrate the World Quality Month.