and assure the quality of products and services ?

I knew this could be contentious when I first asked the question on linkedin. This was borne out by the multitude of remarks received during the first few days.

Those for a dedicated quality function, talked of the dangers of not having someone to teach product development people and manufacturing people advanced quality techniques, analytics and up and coming quality tools and methodologies. Without a dedicated function there is no one to build passion and interest enterprise-wide by involving everyone in the ‘Quality’ mindset. There is no concerted effort to running improvement workshops with functional and cross-functional groups to identify and improve systems and sub-processes.

On the other hand I heard clearly through many remarks that the dangers of having a dedicated quality function is that it delegates quality assurance to a particular department, rather than assuring that it becomes part of the DNA of the company.  Enabling a culture of ‘I don’t have to check my work, someone else downstream will do that and take care of the problem’. Importantly the company loses its ability to learn from issues and problems, such knowledge is found among those with closest contact to the problem not in a dedicated quality function.  For smaller organizations it is often a financial consideration, a dedicated function adds an overhead and extra layer of bureaucracy they can ill afford or justify.

The responsibility for quality and productivity should be part of a company's DNA

So what do we take away from this discussion?

Having a ‘quality’ gatekeeper does not guarantee success and conversely having no dedicated function does not mean failure.  It is the company’s leader that makes the difference. They must believe in a total quality system and demand excellence everyday from subordinates to create a quality culture.

It takes years of training and development to create the habits associated with driving quality from within the workforce.  The company’s leader must be actively and consistently involved to ensure all are ‘bought-in’ and that the tools and philosophy are hammered home through ongoing workforce training and education.

Certain customers from regulated industries are likely to insist on a dedicated function, but use caution the quality function must be used as the catalyst for deploying techniques and knowledge transfer, not for checking and doing people’s work for them or for owning the quality management system, that must be decentralized.

Utopian in thinking, the aim of a quality professional should be ‘redundancy’, to leave behind an organization that collectively strives to maximize productivity and profitability through improved quality.  Like zero defects this may never be achieved, but the goal should be there.

What do you think?

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