Quality Management is the capacity to improve business systems or processes consistently and inspire a culture of improvement to achieve business milestones and goals across the organization. Quality is defined by a number of factors, such as reliability, reusability, precision, proficiency, effectiveness, or efficiency, etc. In essence, quality is about meeting the needs and expectations of customers with consistency. To systematically lead an organization into good practices to focus on quality attributes takes hard work, soft touch, and a level of credibility within the organization. The first thing first, you need to gain different perspectives and world-class insight into quality.
In the US, quality is about innovation: In order to get quality out of anything whether it is people, process, or technology, organizations need to cultivate a climate that is conducive to growth rather than using catch-phrases that make things look good. Nowadays quality and creativity are interconnected. Because quality without creativity is a commodity and creativity without quality cannot create high-end commercial value. As a degree of quality is in everything people do and experience. People are always the weakest link in organizations. Quality ideas are often created by high-quality professionals who are self-motivated to think, learn, innovate or invent. From an innovation management perspective, without human interactions, quality is not possible. It’s about putting profound knowledge, effective processes, and efficient tools actually used into actions and deliver quality results.
In Asia, quality is about simplification: If complication often means redundancy, duplication or outdated burdens, and then, the ability to simplify means to eliminate unnecessarily structural layers, or redundant processes or features, so that the necessary may speak. When pioneering and solving problems, initial solutions are often more complex than required, and then, adoption and progress come with simplification. In the very rare case, we find people with a simple mind, simple thought and who gets on to simplifying everything. They are passionate for simplicity, be it thought, procedures, systems, life, or nature. Progress is in simplification. Simplification is quality. With simplicity, what we add are clarity and purpose. Simplicity means or is related to too many things such as manageability, availability, scalability, flexibility, reliability, robustness, comprehensiveness, or responsiveness, etc. “Any intelligent fool can make things bigger, more complex and violent. It takes a touch of genius and a lot of courage to move in the opposite direction.” - Albert Einstein.
In Germany, quality means precision and perfection: The intention and journey of pursuing quality are not about discovering perfect solutions but making progressive problem resolution. It's important to explore better solutions and pursue "perfecting" by making a continuous adjustment, perfecting people’s skills and capability in reaching the business goals and visions continuously. But there is no need to be perfect if it stifles innovation and avoids risk-taking. This often means taking holistic thinking and customized approaches that may apply differently to each problem, and it involves people, process, and technology. Quality is about both doing the right things and doing them right. Precision is about the quality, condition, or fact of being exact and accurate. Doing the wrong things well won’t improve business effectiveness. Quality is doing the right thing right, the first time. There is never "enough" effort to improve efficiency, optimize operations, continue perfecting, and fine-tune business capacity.
In Italy, quality means technology: The emergent technology trends are where the opportunity located for real competitive advantage from investments in digital into the future. Organizations rely more and more on technology, and the information is the lifeblood of the digital business. Information Technology needs will only expand. Information technology should be seen by any business as the growth engine as well as the business optimizer which continues trimming the wastes and tuning the cost to achieve a high-quality business result by improving process efficiency and enabling workflow optimizations. These high-performance organizations keep identifying additional revenue opportunities for the entire company to improve business competency. Although digital transformation is not just about applying some fancy technology gadgets, the digital transformation definitely needs information technology to make it happen as today all forward-looking organizations across vertical sectors claim they are in the information management business. Thus, it does make sense to believe information technology is the key attribute of organizational quality.
In France, quality is a luxury: The charm of the luxury goods is not just about the style, but more importantly, it’s about substance quality or elegant design. Elegance is such a word to convey simplicity, and aesthetics is one of the important characteristics of quality. From the problem-solving perspective, you know an elegant solution when you see it. We have all seen tough problems solved elegantly while at the same time admitting that depending on our perspective, it may have been very complex for someone to implement. Simplicity and elegance mutually reinforce each other. Like all things in architecture, simplicity has always been one of the goals. When you get it "just right," it's called elegance, and it’s a luxury. Simplicity is the design of looking for what is common for maximum reuse. Simplicity is the building block of high quality. There is a relationship between simplicity and clarity. Simplicity can be expressed via a comprehensive abstract. The masters decode complexity, make it simple, elegant, purposeful, and crafts a luxury.
Digital organizations arise when the scale of the interrelations, interactions, or inter-relational interactions surpasses the silo-based organizational capacity. Quality management ensures that in an organization, products or services are consistent to meet customers’ satisfaction. Digital Quality management needs to take an overarching approach with multidisciplinary practices. Quality is everyone’s business.
This book “Quality Master: The World Class Insight about Quality” is not about discussing specific quality standards or techniques well adopted in different industries, but for sharing some insight on how to understand the multitude of quality attributes from different perspectives, recognize quality champions to inspire quality culture, set digital principles and develop the best and next digital quality management practices.
Chapter 1 Digital Quality Management Attributes: Quality Management is not one department’s work, as a degree of quality is in everything people do and experience. It requires engaging all the people involved in working together as a team to excel in quality products or services deliveries. Quality is defined by a number of factors, and quality management is a multidisciplinary approach. Make sure systems run according to plans, schedules, cost, and performance standards.
Chapter 2 Digital Quality Principles: The speed of change requires the business adapting to the dynamic business new normal, and the fiery business competitions push organizations to deliver qualified products or services to woo customers and gain the market share. It’s important to set digital principles for enforcing quality and building a coherent, effective, and dynamic digital organization.
Chapter 3 Digital Quality Champions: Quality management ensures that in an organization, products or services delivered are consistent, in order to get quality out of anything whether it is people, process, or technology. Quality masters are digital leaders and employees who can work independently and collaboratively, have excellent problem-solving skills, well disciplined, make continuous improvement, bring positivity, quality thoughts, behavior, and quality control and management techniques to the workplace.
Chapter 4 Holistic Quality Management: Digitalization implies the “always on and hyper-connected” business with "VUCA" (Velocity, Uncertainty, Complexity, and Ambiguity) characteristics. In addressing varying business circumstances and working with their relevant systems, business leaders and managers have learned to recognize the limitations of perspectives, methodologies, and tools of the traditional scientific orientation and management approach, and learn how to embrace the holistic management discipline. Thus, quality management needs to go head to head with many other management disciplines and become everyone’s business.
Chapter 5 Digital Quality Management Practices: Quality is defined as being suitable for its intended purpose and satisfying customer expectations. High-quality enterprise is comprised of high-quality people, high-quality products or services, and high-quality business processes or capabilities, etc. Many say quality attracts quality, but to effectively lead an organization into good practices to focus on quality attributes takes work and a level of credibility within the organization.
The most important thing is that we need to define the quality as leadership and quality as management. Without human interactions, quality is not possible. It’s about putting profound knowledge, proficient skills, effective processes, and efficient tools actually used into actions to deliver it.
