Is Quality real or is it just a perception

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:

• 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.

Social responsibility - Give it a human touch

Recently, while I was sucked deep into the team management activities I did miss one of my favorite pass times – speaking my mind out through blogging. Such are the occasions when some light is thrown on things like job satisfaction. Most motivation factors for a job leads to monetary benefits through various means such as salary fitment, role change, promotion, recognition and awards. But for me, it was to reach a healthy state of affairs. Health, as defined by WHO, is a state of complete physical, mental and social well-being and not merely the absence of disease or infirmity. Similarly in the corporate world, healthy work can be defined as one that gives physical (title change with remuneration, added responsibilities and authority) growth in the company, mental satisfaction for your daily chores and that also provides opportunities to contribute to a better cause for the society. The latter is what I would stress in this blog.

Corporate Social Responsibility, CSR in short, in these days is a very integral part of the business model and a responsibility recognized for acting in a socially responsible manner. However, the question still lies whether these responsibilities are merely window-dressing and whether it reaches the public sphere or is it an attempt to pre-empt the watch dogs over the corporate. I say this because many companies compete within their respective industries in the implementation and effectiveness of CSR policy but most often forget the objective - the impact of those policies on society and the environment, and how customers perceive, in this run. A decade ago, a global survey by Ernst & Young, revealed that 94 percent of companies believed in the development of a CSR strategy to deliver real business benefits. However, ‘m not sure how many corporates would have made significant progress in implementing the strategy since then.

Most companies define their CSR activities by linking their ethical values, legal compliance, and respect for people, community, and environment. A more common approach of CSR is philanthropy, monetary donations and aid given to local organizations and impoverished communities. I personally do not vouch for this approach since it lacks the human touch as it does not help build on the skills of the corporate. For eg: The IT industry should put its knowledge wealth to supplement the formal education and technological advancement for improving interactive teaching tools to the best use. Use of such skills along with people interaction in a community-based development generally leads to more sustainable development.

Through CSR companies can move closer towards people by treating employees fairly, operate in ethical manner in all its business dealings with customers, suppliers, lenders, and others, respect human beings and sustain the environment for future generations. It also urges its employees to be a responsible neighbor in the community and a good ‘corporate citizen’.

But is this urge heard by us? How can we be responsible corporate citizens? What is our contribution to the social cause? These are the thoughts that are currently ringing in my mind. I have decided to contribute to this cause by volunteering for a programme for the under privileged children in the age group of 10 to 12 years currently run by the company I work for. The programme is to educate kids on English through non curricular subjects that emphasize on appreciating nature, health, culture, patriotism, the well being of the community and understanding the fundamental rights while stressing the importance on their curriculum.

It is my wish that my family, friends and colleagues will stand up along with me and help me with their support as they always have. Together let us add the human touch!

Whose Line is it Anyway – PM Vs HRM in organizational initiatives

Accountabilities and responsibilities go hand in hand. However, I think that there is a fine line of distinction between the two. Accountabilities are the tasks performed by a person out of his job profile, and responsibilities are obligations for which he is accountable. This distinct line of difference is experienced between Project Management and Human Resource Management roles too.

Project Management includes developing a vision, taking proactive decisions and understanding the diversity in training. Project management is a discipline of planning, organizing, securing and managing resources for a specific task and brings about its completion with Excellency, while human resources management concentrates on integrating decisions about people with decisions about the results an organization is trying to obtain. HR’s primary roles have been to ensure compliance with laws, rules, and regulations. Although this is still, and will always be, a necessary function, many recent developments have led to a strong emphasis on results. Even the organizational initiatives these days demonstrate the value of human resources management

With the trend of more and more HR executives beginning to earn a seat at the management table, HR is becoming more of counseling and involved in day-to-day management activities. Nevertheless, there is still a long way to go if HR is to become a strategic partner at all levels.

Lack of strategic partnerships is one of the reasons why so many organizational development initiatives fail. Through organizational initiatives, HR tries building its own internal competencies to deal with organizational issues, educate itself on program missions, and find ways to offer creative and innovative solutions to organization wide issues, than going on a standard approach of executing their responsibilities.

In the rush for creativity and innovation, the most critical piece, to take into account how change affects the organization's people, is often forgotten. Studies show that nearly 75 percent of all organizational change programmes fail because they don't create the necessary grounds well of support among employees.

Most often, the change brought in by the initiatives, is not welcomed immediately. Processes, Technology and People are the 3 key elements which drive and are affected by the initiatives. People are the most important of these elements, as change distracts and disturbs the balance of human brains. From the outset of any initiative, people must recognise and buy into the need for change. This is where HRM should take help of the Project Management Leaders and recognize that an organization cannot successfully adopt change unless these leaders understand, support the reasons for creating the change, align their people to create a compelling vision of the future state and continually communicate it.

While implementing the changes, HRM can also borrow a leaf from Project management, to identify and engage the resources for executing the change. A strategy should be developed in conjunction with the people who are impacted and the ones who will be executing it. This will enable the work force to be well prepared to participate in the development and implementation of new processes and technology, and the implementation should essentially be a monitoring activity for leaders.

However, most organizations spend the majority of their time in mandating the implementation of the change and don't adequately address their people's role in change. In such instances, successful change adoption rarely occurs. Project managers, functional and non-functional should be held responsible for reiterating the change mission through ongoing communications. Management should also use E-mails, project milestone commemorations, conversations and other channels consistently to remind people why they are expending their hard work on implementing a change.