Thinking Quality

Ask anyone about a public service, and they will give you their free and incisive opinion about it. For example, ask them about the status of the roads. You will have to run away because they just will not stop complaining. They will condemn everything from the potholes, patchy repairs, the pollution and traffic jam caused by dug up roads, the condition during monsoon, and a hundred other things.

Let’s analyze this sample list of complaints:
- The potholes: caused by low quality material
- Patchy repaid work: leaving behind unwanted scraps, just addressing the specific part of the road with the pothole
- Pollution and traffic jam, dug up roads: carelessness about the people using the road, bad planning, closing off alternate roads at the same time
- Condition during monsoon: again to do with usage of low quality material that is unable to take the load.

Every one of these complaints is rooted in lack of two basic things:

- Quality focus
- Customer focus

The people who lay the roads are not bothered about quality or proper planning, because they are not bothered about how much the customers suffer because of their careless or money pinching attitude. They are laying the road, because they get paid money to do so.

It is easy to find fault with the public works department. That is because it is a problem visible to all and so easy to pinpoint. What about your customers? Are they complaining the same about the work that you deliver?

Now, think back to the work you do: whatever it is, running an organization or managing a team or driving a car. Think over the work your people do. Does this same attitudinal problem affect you or your team?

Here are some questions you can use to test yourself/ your team

1. When you deliver your product/service do you
a) wait till the customer tells you about a problem to fix it
b) do you take steps to fix any potential problems in advance

2. When the customer reports a problem, do you
a) Do whatever is required to make the customer happy
b) Address the customer’s problem, and put process in place so that it never occurs again. See if there are other related problems likely to occur.

3. When you offer more than 1 product or service, you
a) Leave it to your customer to figure out how to make these work together
b) You have done everything possible to be sure that they are complementary

4. When someone takes more time than the others to finish a project, or task,
a) He gets laughed at, because he is obsessive about being correct
b) Others are required to be as careful and obsessive about output

If you are answering with more A’s then you have the same problem as the Indian roads. If you have answered with more B’s, then you are on the right track. You are thinking Quality.
You are putting in proper process to reduce customer problems. You are encouraging people who are focused on doing quality work - less errors and less patchy fixes that come apart.

Do we really want to uphold the example set by bad road conditions? Are you or your organization still in that mode- the poor customer has to take whatever the organization chooses to give? He may not take it for very long, because, as we have seen before, without quality, there are complaints. Quality is in your attitude – see question 4 above. It reflects in everything you do.

There can be far more said on quality. But I will stop here for now.