How do you keep quality improvement on track?

In my experience, ensuring Quality Improvement is very important for any company focusing on enhancing product delivery, service offerings, and process compliance. Some of the key attributes are in articulating what is intended to be achieved through the improvement process after reviewing current baseline/existing processes, identifying pain points & target areas for improvement by involving pertinent stakeholders to ensure buy-in and collaboration. When we start to identify improvement opportunities where enhancements are needed, we need to also set clear, quantifiable goals to track periodic progress using appropriate methodologies (such as DMAIC/DMADV) & execute the planned improvements & undertaking course correction as needed.

We can do five-year planning and then we can evaluate if we have met our goals or not. Yes involving all stakeholders at every step is very much essential to achieve quality-oriented goals. There should be a roadmap to ensure that we are able to achieve our targets as they are defined. Someone has to keep check and balance on that.

I manage software products. I have to be flexible. At an initial project costing and timescales, I integrate the cost of quality intrinsically. When facing tight deadlines, I prioritise the bigger picture and may delay some quality items like coverage analysis and test harnesses, the benefits of which will not jeopardise the release when lost. I make it clear to stakeholders that this is a temporary saving, and the cost needs to be met at a later date.

In my experience, it is the end customer who defines the concept of quality for a given product or service. I believe that we have to establish a company culture in which every employee strives and genuinely cares to deliver the best possible experience for the end customer. Only at this organisational stage can we enact processes, standards and plans to define and ensure quality at every step of the process. In my view, ensuring that employees values are aligned with the value the company is providing to the end-customer reduces the costs associated with quality management. Clear roles and responsibilities in the company must be in place to provide sufficient clarity on who does what and how we ensure quality for the end customer.

Although setting up standards, metrics, and PKIs documentation is a necessary step in every process we tackle including quality improvement; it is so crucial to emphasize on verbally communicating the goal and objectives of any process being executed. The communication starts at the conception level where everybody within a project team, a department, or an organization should be verbally informed about the intent to present a new quality improvement standard while it is being cooked. It is a good idea to keep every body informed about the progress of setting the standard in an agile way where those who are responsible of drafting the documentation may review their milestone draft versions with the whole audience for immediate feedback.

Yes, audits by internal and external auditors are essential because after all, someone has to keep things on track. This helps ensure transparency and honesty, and people trust organizations that present clear reports to their clientele.

Instead of relying on formal quality audits that might feel as a threat to those subject to audits and may also be a bit decisive; I prefer applying a continuous measurement tool that assess quality PKIs measurements often and frequently. By applying the mathematics on collected measurements you can observe the curve of improvement along a time sequence. This should give you the ability to not only keep improvement process on track, but also to predict where is it heading in the future. By immediately interfering with the issues causing the process to get off track you can improve your process and procedures on the go.

Here we have used the word "plan". Which is a part of our improvement structure( PDCA). 1. Plan. – plan a change, and aimed at improvement 2. Do - Carry out and preferably at a small scale 3. Check - Study the result....What went wrong. Etc 4. Adopt the changes and run it again on small scale. Side by side you can perform more audits for better. Also, with those audits you will get findings and got to know the error/ opportunity areas.

Audits are a very powerful tool for improvement, monitoring, and control. However, just like being a powerful tool, they too should be subject to improvement, monitoring, and control. The ideal situation will never come, and audits cannot replace self-assessment. But with proper cross-planning, sufficient time allocated for auditing, and a correct qualification policy in the selection of auditors, quality audits will become a valuable management instrument. However, I will reiterate once again - the danger lies in the formality that rareness and sometimes excessive selectiveness create (often due to limited resources).

Quality audits are pivotal in identifying gaps and weaknesses in project or product quality. We can make practical improvements by analyzing these issues and understanding their root causes, impacts, and risks. Prioritizing these issues based on urgency, severity, and feasibility is a strategic approach. We can gain valuable insights and make informed decisions using tools and techniques like root cause analysis, Pareto analysis, risk matrix, and cost-benefit analysis. This process enables us to address the most critical and beneficial quality issues, ensuring we achieve the highest quality standards and deliver successful outcomes.

Auditors use various assessment techniques and project management tools to evaluate the needs that are being met and those that need to be met. Experience of auditors to assess and tackle risks is mandatory to prevent any troubles in ongoing projects.

During the audit process, paying attention to significant factors is the highest art of an auditor. One can spend hours scrutinizing details that may only lead to human minor errors or simple typos in the documents. However, a true achievement for an auditor is not only recognizing the systematic errors but also identifying their potential impact on quality and the important criteria established by the client or consumer.

Audit target should be focused on finding issues within the process itself rather than how is it being applied. One tool that can be used to figure out if the audience of a process are violating it or is it the process that requires to be improved is to measure the gap between stakeholders satisfaction with the outcomes of a project against that of the perspective of the project team. Sometimes, project team perspective and understanding of stakeholders needs lead to a better improvement on the go than a rigidly applied process, specially speaking in an agile project environment.

In my view, experts who know the essential techniques should be on board. The reason is that a layman may not handle situations the way an expert does. Here I remember an example that a ship engineer who had years of experience, so he was called to identify an issue in the ship which could be dangerous for the ship crew as well as the people in it. He charged $10000 for the 30-minute job. When he was asked, why he charged too much, he said, $2 is for just fixing the fault, and the rest of the money is for identifying where the fault was. My job does not define that I deserved less money because I have been doing this work for many years. So I charge for my experience of doing something within 30 minutes instead of doing it in hours.

As we are applying an agile project management process, we focus on continuous feedback and continuous improvement. The retrospect session includes what went right and what went wrong where we can tell areas of improvement comparing those to our quality improvement target for a sprint.

The most important thing one has to face in the process of improvement is the postulate that what works must continue to work. If the majority of the system's participants adhere to this principle, no PDCA (Plan-Do-Check-Act) processes will help. The key in a quality improvement system should be an evidence base, not a base of discrepancies, though that is important too, but an evidence base of cause-and-effect relationships. It should be literally an ironclad logic capable of overcoming any skepticism inherent in those who adhere to the "religion" of "do no harm".

How often have I heard arguments against continuous improvement, which boiled down to the question of what we will do when everything is improved. And like fanatics, critics respond that achieving perfection is impossible. Perhaps all of this lacks an understanding that continuous improvement does not mean a continuous issuance of a new level of quality once a day or once a month. Continuous improvement is a process that involves reflection and analysis, as well as planning, prioritization, making intermediate decisions, and other sometimes very lengthy and painstaking processes

Quality improvement should be treated as a lifestyle more than an obligated management process. Thinking of a point where improvement is saturated and no more need for any further is effort to improve is a decisive attitude. As far as the project is running, you should continue applying whatever process you adopt for improvement. This leads to the lessons learned session being set to address a final potential of improvement when a project is concludes and closed. While projects to come to an end as a temporary endeavor, quality improvement is an operational process that applies to the whole organization and should never stop improving. Even sometimes it requires a whole revision based on potential environmental changes.

One prospective strategy that I find useful is to perform a high level stakeholder assessment (I say high-level because we want to avoid a cumbersome scenario of "analysis paralysis") in determining who the most material and critical user groups are prior to the quality management plan being shared. Once there is a clearer consensus on what business/corporate entities should be involved in the plan review process, this will help ensure that these quality improvement best practices do not just lose traction. Thereby, ensuring that the lessons learned trickle down to the right stakeholder groups on a more conscientous basis. Critical ownership and accountability is paramount to ensuring that these quality assurance practices remain embedded.

If you aren't measuring it you can not control it. Further you will not even realize you have an issue besides flack from or loss of client base. Once you implement a proper measurement system some steps and decisions are obvious and controls become automatic for low hanging fruit. Other more invested quality issues will also arise via awareness due to measurement and affect on processes or bottom line. These may arise to team addressing how their cost of elimination vs. cost of ignoring or planned attrition balances toward corporate goals. Moral is if you want to manage quality you must first implement, control and manage your measurement system. This is another quality control and management burden as a good measurement system is measured