Over the years working across different teams, I have come to realize some common misconceptions that we hold regarding quality systems and teams. These are the invisible barriers that limit an organization to fully immerse into the quality journey. We may not be overtly sharing these thoughts but with the way we prioritize related activities and interact with people facilitating the whole process may bring out these ‘not-so-productive’ feelers. Just a check once in a while will help us support ourselves and the organization to define the best version of quality that works for us and our customers. Here goes
- Quality is?the responsibility of the quality team - The minute we outsource the onus of delivering quality to ‘a team’ we have already taken a false step. The quality teams are important in handholding and facilitating the ease of the whole quality journey but they are not the sole custodian. They are the ones bringing a specific and specialized?viewpoint to facilitate teams identify waste, reduce rework and find the most optimal way to streamline processes while delivering consistent value to customers.
- Quality systems bring in bureaucracy - This I think comes from interacting with ineffective quality systems where processes are defined in silos without keeping customers at the center. But having a quality coach or a quality team engaging with multiple teams to build seamless, lean and integrated systems will ensure there are fewer to no pain points in getting things done efficiently.
- Quality audits are policing in nature - If audits are seen as a tool to identify areas of improvement than an exercise in finding faults then we can have more takeaways with every session. It is not so much as looking for non-conformity as about looking for why and what can be done to prevent recurrence. The conversations can also lead to identifying new and more efficient ways of doing things.
- Quality systems are created to meet industry standards - A partial truth since to deliver our products and services we may need this as a requirement. But if we just focus on compliance without interpreting it to our specific way of working and how we add value to our customers then it would create a parallel imaginary world sucking in our time and resources.
- Lastly, my favourite - Quality systems are about creating and maintaining documentation - I agree that documentation is key in communicating what we do and how but the point is not to just create them but to use them real time. If the documents and records are not serving any purpose then the system needs an overhaul.
In what light do you see your company’s quality system and the facilitating quality teams?
