I'm sure that my readers would have thought that I have stopped writing blogs as this blog has certainly taken a lot of time to come out. It is the sheer complexity of the subject that I chose to write – Quality - which has taken time. The complexity lies in the way we all perceive things; especially how it relates to the service we provide to the customers and that regardless of how good you believe your offerings or projected solutions are, your clients and customer will be responding to their perception than fact.
But this ‘quality in perception’ can be very difficult to identify and address. A good service for one customer is not always good service to another. We have many different kinds of customers, often the ones forgotten are the internal customers, with different opinions and expectations. In the last few decades, Quality has become a key notion for trade of any good or service. All profit focused organizations want to increase their sales but most of them refuse to invest on the quality factors which are the customer determinants for the company's survivability in the market it is functioning in.
Quality can be based on customer satisfaction, requirement, product or value. Developing a list of quality dimensions for a specific service industry requires determining what is important to customers. Methodologies which are appropriate for this would include Standards, Processes, focus groups and surveys and are grouped into Quality Control and Quality Assurance
Quality control (QC) has a narrower focus than quality assurance. Quality control focuses on the process of producing the product or service with the intent of eliminating problems that might result in defects.
Quality assurance (QA) is a broad concept that focuses on the entire quality system including suppliers and ultimate consumers of the product or service. It includes all activities designed to produce products and services of appropriate quality.
We can have supervisors that are constantly monitoring the quality of the product and service, as well as a quality assurance group that does nothing but reviews to make sure the quality standards are maintained with an in-depth matrix of criteria. All of this should be reported back to the management teams so that good work can be rewarded and improvement plans can be created for deficiencies. This should be one of the key performance indicators that we look at daily, weekly and monthly and constantly work to improve.
Defining the term Quality itself is more complicated than understanding the concept. Every other individual defines quality in more than one way. For eg: It is typical that a developer will only look at the end product and its functionality and call it a high quality delivery when there is no bugs raised. But the fact is, there are other parameters in determining the quality levels of the developer and his delivery which includes and not limited to following coding standards, maintaining code reusability, minimum maintenance requirement for the code and ease of deployment. The most common definition I could derive for Quality is that Quality is an attribute which helps gauge customer satisfaction against the value for money and time spent for meeting their expectations.
I’m sure in this new year, we all will constantly work to maintain and improve quality. We will constantly look at our customer service offerings to see what we can do better. We will look at our competitors to make sure we are in-line or better, and we look at what we believe are the customer expectations to make sure we are in-line or better. At same time, I also recommend focusing on the following to improve the product / service quality:
But this ‘quality in perception’ can be very difficult to identify and address. A good service for one customer is not always good service to another. We have many different kinds of customers, often the ones forgotten are the internal customers, with different opinions and expectations. In the last few decades, Quality has become a key notion for trade of any good or service. All profit focused organizations want to increase their sales but most of them refuse to invest on the quality factors which are the customer determinants for the company's survivability in the market it is functioning in.
Quality can be based on customer satisfaction, requirement, product or value. Developing a list of quality dimensions for a specific service industry requires determining what is important to customers. Methodologies which are appropriate for this would include Standards, Processes, focus groups and surveys and are grouped into Quality Control and Quality Assurance
Quality control (QC) has a narrower focus than quality assurance. Quality control focuses on the process of producing the product or service with the intent of eliminating problems that might result in defects.
Quality assurance (QA) is a broad concept that focuses on the entire quality system including suppliers and ultimate consumers of the product or service. It includes all activities designed to produce products and services of appropriate quality.
We can have supervisors that are constantly monitoring the quality of the product and service, as well as a quality assurance group that does nothing but reviews to make sure the quality standards are maintained with an in-depth matrix of criteria. All of this should be reported back to the management teams so that good work can be rewarded and improvement plans can be created for deficiencies. This should be one of the key performance indicators that we look at daily, weekly and monthly and constantly work to improve.
Defining the term Quality itself is more complicated than understanding the concept. Every other individual defines quality in more than one way. For eg: It is typical that a developer will only look at the end product and its functionality and call it a high quality delivery when there is no bugs raised. But the fact is, there are other parameters in determining the quality levels of the developer and his delivery which includes and not limited to following coding standards, maintaining code reusability, minimum maintenance requirement for the code and ease of deployment. The most common definition I could derive for Quality is that Quality is an attribute which helps gauge customer satisfaction against the value for money and time spent for meeting their expectations.
I’m sure in this new year, we all will constantly work to maintain and improve quality. We will constantly look at our customer service offerings to see what we can do better. We will look at our competitors to make sure we are in-line or better, and we look at what we believe are the customer expectations to make sure we are in-line or better. At same time, I also recommend focusing on the following to improve the product / service quality:
- Business decisions must not be made purely on the basis of cost
- Regular inspection of quality controlling purposes
- Educate or train the team at work with the necessary tools to trade improving team morales
- Bring in continuous improvements
Wish you all a very happy, healthy, prosperous and QUALITY new year.
Thanks for the wonderful beginning to the new year!! :) Interesting as always
ReplyDeleteHope to read many more posts here this year...and a happy, healthy, prosperous, quality and self-satisfying new year to you too :)
Why does it say Unknown? Well its me...Akshaya :)
ReplyDeleteGood idea of having supervisor for ensuring quality of product to strenghten customer satisfaction .... thanks for good ideas for improvement :) Quality start of the year :)
ReplyDelete