Why Quality Improvement Efforts Huff and Puff...

Rant for the day - Quality Improvement.

The success stories are phenomenal. Everyone jumps on the greatest saviour our economy has ever seen. Especially in health care - Quality Improvement/Assurance efforts are essential elements of any organization seeking to deliver services to the market - for obvious and valuable reasons.

Consultants abound selling Quality Programs and mechanisms - most of which provide a false sense of well-being - allowing a CEO to say - "Yeah, we do QA..." but very few efforts provide any real return on investment and are viewed as just another program by the majority of the organization. Why? What separates the efforts that provide substantial value added - from those that offer bluster and B.S.?

Very Simply - Effective Quality Efforts are CUSTOMER CENTRIC!

They have, as their reason for being, satisfaction and Wow! factors from the perspective of the customer. If you view your quality efforts through this prism - it is easy to see that the primary shortcoming of contemporary Quality efforts is the fact that they attempt to deal with quality through mechanisms that fall nicely into the neat functional silos that we create in our organizations.

Customers don't care about functions or functional expertise, and they certainly don't care about the protection of those silos in internal battles for power and perceived control. As such - Quality Programs - or Quality Departments - or Quality Inspectors - or Quality anything -contributes only to the expansion of functional mindset.

Beware consultants selling you quality efforts, no matter how complex the algorithms or how convincing the Process Control Charts. Be especially cautious of being sold programs or efforts which don't recognize the cross-functional imperative of meeting customer needs - i.e. delivering your product or service as promised, when promised and at the price promised.

If your Quality gurus are still talking "Quality Improvement" instead of "Process Improvement" - Beware. You are spending money on a failed paradigm and your ability to achieve success in the marketplace (or any return on your investment)... is more than at risk!