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CHAPTER 1
Introduction
This is about understandingâwhy and applicationâhow.
The aim is to provide guidance and introduction to both.
The book is in two volumes, with the first ending with Chapter 12, Quality Management.
What Is Quality and What Does It Entail?
Consistency and Variation
Quality is the consistent achievement of the userâs expectations of a product or service. The achievement needs to be âThe right thing, right first time, every time, in time.â1 We begin by looking at manufacturing and service industry and we wrap up by looking at the professions.
Immediately we can see that variation is not going to sit happily with consistency and that we must consider risk, and its converseâopportunity, likelihood, and probability and understand and use statistics. There are common and special causes of variability and with each we need to apply the related statistical techniques.
Products, even if produced by robotic machines, still involve human agency individually and in teams at key points throughout production and then in the use and service phases even more so. We need to be confident that we can deliver to the standards required and this needs to be established by a whole range of means.
Processes, Procedures, Best Practice, and Their Expression
The creation and delivery of products and services depends on processes, and more detailed procedures when necessary, within and across organizations of all kinds. Processes are assembled, established, and maintained in management systems inside and across organizational boundaries. We are going to need to describe these processes and communicate them within and across organizational boundaries.
Best practice that is known to enable and assure consistent achievement of userâs expectations must be captured and shared and leads to standards, specifications, and many related documents, which increasingly are created and shared, sometimes exclusively, within virtual information technology environments. There is a natural flow from statements of objectives, with their associated measures of achievements, through policies on how they will be achieved in different areas, to the enabling processes and procedures for the use of those individuals responsible for their operation.
A record of how processes and procedures are operated, and the outcomes are documented also needs to be captured, stored, and shared.
Scope and Boundaries
There is no clear boundary to the applicability of quality and the related processes and procedures expressed in management systems, and this is the main reason for this work and its stated aim to show âhow it applies in diverse business and social environments.â Increasingly the acceptability of boundaries that are drawn depends on their effect on the user and the achievement of quality, and the latest standard on quality management is explicit on this key point.2
Quality is everyoneâs business and there is no one professional discipline that can properly express this. Insights, knowledge, experience, best practice, tools, and techniques need to be shared across all kinds of organizational and professional boundaries, and there is no departmental boundary that can stand apart from the organization wide commitment to quality achievement.
Foundations of Society
In early society, weights and measures were the basis of trade and international collaboration, and the ethics of honest accurate traceable measures is reflected in their reference in the law codes and spiritual reference works of the day.
Modern science is based on the higher and higher discriminations and the lower and lower uncertainty in measurements that permit testing of the most revealing, and often counterintuitive and disturbing hypotheses and current findings of modern science.3
Health and Safety
Quality failures have consequences, and these can be extreme, so this topic has traction well outside the immediately obvious scope.
Improvement and PDCA
Quality is a journey and continual improvement is a driver and motivation, goal, objective, aim, and expression and will be central to everything we say about achievement of quality. Not only is this a truism we used heavily in the 1970s and 1980s, but it reflects the widely accepted belief that achievement and maintenance of quality is central to business and organizational success.
Continual or Continuous Improvement is a process with four very well-established steps PLAN, DO, CHECK or STUDY, and ACT (PDC[S]A), that have clear links to the scientific method (Figure 1.1) which it probably even predates.4
Figure 1.1 Evolution of the scientific method5
The very largely accepted standard for management systemsâISO 9001 (now version 2015)âhas this statement âThe PDCA cycle enables an organization to ensure that its processes are adequately resourced and managed, and that opportunities for improvement are determined and acted on.â The open source Management System Standard6 describes it as âPlanâDoâCheckâActâ (PDCA) is a cycle that individual people naturally follow to varying degrees of competence. PLAN is the preparation for doing something. DO is the execution of the PLAN. CHECK is monitoring to confirm the PLAN is being properly followed during DO and that nothing unexpected occurs. Finally during ACT, a review of PLAN, DO, and CHECK processes is conducted to see if the approach used can be improved the next time around plus agreeing actions to make it happen.
PDCA is therefore a natural potentially universal cycle of continual learning and continual improvement applicable to organization strategy, tactics, and operations. The fourth element ACT can also be conducted proactively to ensure that the organization remains aligned with future stakeholder needs and expectations by trying to anticipate future likely innovation and change.â7
âCheckâ is sometimes replaced with âStudyâ for non-native English speakers if âCheckâ has negative connotations of âholding back.â It is also conceived as applying more explicitly to improvement.8 This gives rise to the equivalent PDSA cycle.
Excellence, the Destination
The journey has a goal, and this is explored in several ways. Excellence is a common aim. It is expressed in many ways as follows:
⢠Customer delightâsee âGoing the extra mile and the importance of familyâ
⢠Total Quality Managementâsee âTotal Quality Management, Company Wide Quality Controlâ
⢠Personal Mastery9âSee âPersonal Quality and Masteryâ
Touching Lives
Quality is all about relationships and the motivation and values expressed. It is concerned with building values and community and expressing the highest idealsâsee Quality, Life, and Service and the concluding Chapter 24âQuality, Faith, and Transcendent Values.
Who Is the Publication Aimed at an...
