We talk about numbers, metrics, & dashboards from time to time. One of the more difficult things to measure, much less manage, is quality.
Is there a single measure?
Some might suggest Net Promoter Score as an ideal single measure. NPS ranges from -100 to 100 & represents the willingness of a company’s customers to recommend their products & services to others.
If your business makes / sells cars, what single measure indicates your overall quality? Number of recalls per model year? Number of cars returned under lemon laws? Annual average cost of warranty repairs? Repeat sales?
Quality management is difficult
What makes it so hard to manage & measure quality?
Cost: Quality management systems are expensive, at least they feel that way. If you manufacture things (including software), the investment necessary to measure & report quality can easily approach the cost of producing the product. Finding the ROI is difficult at best, while the price sticks out of your P&L like an ingrown toenail.
Time: Quality control isn’t easy, fast, or simple. Measuring & reporting quality either during or immediately after the manufacturing process is a complex, incrementally-built thing. It takes time to build. If your team’s culture is focused on speed above all else, quality management may not make your “projects to implement” list.
Quarterly expectations: Time-to-return-on-investment compounds the difficulty. Quality control sticks out as an expensive, plodding animal, making it easy to see it as an extravagance rather than an investment.
Accountability: Quality measurement can feel like blame creation, rather than data collection. Accountability must extend beyond the head/hands of the worker to the team’s management, systems, and to the training & tools provided to that worker. Quality work is accountable by design, and rarely happens by accident. It’s resilient, running for days or weeks at a time without stopping. It’s ready for the edge cases that try to inject chaos into your customers’ world. Customers appreciate when the products they buy can take a punch.
Culture: Quality isn’t a job. It’s a value. If your team sees quality as an incumbent part of their job, it will change their work, how they work, & how they think about their work. If someone doesn’t see quality as part of their job, they may need training or they may fit in better elsewhere. People who value quality don’t want to work with those who don’t value it. Who would you rather lose?
Every job is a quality job
Years ago, a leadership instructor moped into the room after a break & started droning on in monotone. He sounded like he was having the worst day of his life. After a few minutes, he took a break. When he returned, his mood was positive & very happy to be there – despite being in the same room with the same people.
He stopped for a minute & asked if anyone wanted the old, depressing guy to return. No one did. His lesson from that little act was that “Every job is a sales job.” If you’ve ever been “greeted” by a sullen receptionist, the meaning of “every job is a sales job” is obvious.
The point? Every job is also a quality management job.
Like the sullen receptionist, it only takes one person, event or action to make us forget the good work a business has done. Similarly, when one department’s role in quality management fails, it devalues the work of the rest of the company.
Quality management systems help us monitor & correct these things before they cause reputation damage.
Forests, forest fires, and reputation
In a world dominated by short term views, quality management’s slow ROI & difficult to identify returns seem too expensive & time-consuming to invest in. Even for those who invest, a ROI search in their accounting system comes up empty.
As a result, a bad financial period makes it easy to cut what seems like an extravagance that isn’t contributing to the bottom line.
Think twice.
Quality & reputation can be both sturdy & fragile, like a forest. It takes decades to grow a healthy forest. Reputations grow similarly.
Like a random lightning strike, a carelessly discarded cigarette butt, or an abandoned campfire can destroy a decades-old forest in hours, a change in quality that goes undetected can cause reputation damage that takes months or years to recover.
Does your business have months or years of staying power?
In a pinch, you can borrow to bridge a short-term cash flow gap. You can’t borrow reputation.
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