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How to Enhance Quality in Your Business

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Every business must strive to provide quality products and services to customers. To achieve that objective the company must draw well thought out policies and procedures to ensure 100% achievement of the targets.

Here are some tips to ensure that your business attains and enhance quality:

Document Quality Objectives and Procedures

Quality management objectives, policies and guidelines must be set and published in manuals, in the business newsletter, on the notice board and wherever appropriate. This is to educate and remind employees and management and serve as guidelines. Even suppliers and customers should be informed on the company’s quality management policies and where appropriate be advised to adhere to them.

Educate Employees on Quality Requirements

For total quality management to work everyone in the business must be educated and trained in its principles. Everyone must be brought on board – from the cleaner, the gardener, the electrician, the clerk, and manager etc. Employees should be made to own the process and not to feel left out of the action. Employees should be organised in quality circles (groups) within departments to brainstorm and implement quality issues.

Foster a Policy of Zero Tolerance to Defects

One error could cause a thousand corresponding errors or negative consequences. Let’s take a typical example of a car. A loose nut on the tyre can cause the tyre to run inappropriately and cause an accident. The accident may affect you and whoever you are carrying in the vehicle and probably passers by and other vehicles. It may lead to deaths and injury. The multiplier effect may affect your life and other people’s lives without your knowledge just from a single defect. This is therefore to show every aspect of your business must be taken seriously.

All products and services must be checked for compliance to specifications and procedures. The business must foster a policy of zero tolerance to defects and all efforts should be made towards that end.

Use TQM Tools and Statistical Techniques to Measure Quality

Total Quality Management Tools (TQM) tools are a necessary component if you want to measure and enhance quality. Tools such as checklists, flowcharts, Gantt charts, Ishikawa diagrams and the like are important in the quality management process. Statistical techniques help to measure quality levels. By applying such techniques you would have set your business on the quality path. Ensure that you have minimum and quality levels for your products and services. You can use industry, national or international quality standards. If your business attains such standards, inform your customers by publishing your attainment or displaying the quality mark appropriately.

BRAINSTORM PROBLEMS AND SOLUTIONS

A good approach to solving problems and technical challenges is to form quality circles, which will brainstorm problems and solutions and forward to management for approval. Root problems should be brainstormed, key solutions to them proposed and forwarded to management for approval.

REDUCE WASTAGE

Research has shown that most businesses have a 20% wastage rate. Check your dustbin. What do you see? What about the stores? How many goods have been returned because of defects in the past three months? You should work to attain zero defect in your products or services. Ensure that goods are made to specifications. Use statistical techniques to measure quality. Reduce paperwork. Improve the design and substance of your goods and services. Tighten controls. Reduce pilferage.

DELIGHT THE CUSTOMER

Quality management is not static but is a continuous process with the aim of ever delighting the customer. Remember that your competitors are working overtime to get your customers and stay on top. You should work ever harder to get their customers and delight your customers often. You can do that by anticipating customers’ needs. Do surveys and research on customers’ needs and expectations. Check what competitors are offering. Take action to continuously improve your goods and services.

LEARN FROM THE GURUS

Total quality management embodies a set of rules, policies and guidelines which are best learned from the pioneers. Get yourself books and manual quality management especially from the gurus such as Deming, Juran Crosby, Ishikawa, Fergenbaum and the like to learn more. Most of their ideas may be about manufacturing or not directly relevant to your business but they could be adapted to your business needs and requirements.

BE ACTION ORIENTED

A problem plaguing many people and businesses is their failure to take positive action and be mired by rhetoric and apathy. Management is tied down in endless meetings, conferences ad seminars whose recommendations are never implemented.

Prepare an action plan of your recommendations and solutions with set time frames and review periods. Check what makes action impossible to implement or bottlenecks to implementation.

Your action plan should be divided into short term, medium term and long-term activities. It should be backed by a budget for financing it.

Quality management or TQM is a broad subject and you require to learn more than what is provided briefly here. TQM is not the panacea for all business problems but they can be reduced by 50% if you adopt it appropriately.

To succeed in business you need the right business plan backed by adequate capital, the right product or service, the right marketing strategy, the right location and the right implementation strategy.

Quality management if well implemented could set your business on the path to profitability and success.

Guest post written by Stuart Ngai, Director of Technology Solutions, VERAX

Having worked in software development in the engineering and financial sectors through several technology eras, one thing strikes me the most is how often top notch IT professionals just get burned out by the fast pace of technology advances. As an educator, development manager, and technology driver for many years, it has been my passion to help our IT staff to keep up in light of global competition. On the previous episode of the AlignIT Manager Tech Talk, I shared with the audience my advice on how IT managers can play an important role in their team’s training. I would like to summarize a few important aspects to keep in mind when it comes to planning and managing training for your staff.

Continued from last Monday. Read Part 1 >>

Enforce a checkpoint schedule

Now that you’ve worked out a set of goals with your staff. Who’s responsible to make sure things are on track? My experience tells me that it’s both of you: your staff needs to take ownership to keep up with skills and you, as their manager, need to be the measuring stick. And if you fail to plan, then you plan to fail. So it needs to be instilled as a routine in order to keep the momentum going. By measuring training progress on a periodic basis like once every 3 to 4 months , you’ll know whether your staff is progressing as expected or perhaps he or she is being overloaded. With such a feedback loop, you’ll be able to fine tune the training plan and keep things in focus.

Not one size fits all

Everyone’s different. Some of your IT staff might be more comfortable with structured classroom learning while others prefer to be given time and web resources so they can learn at their own pace. And one of the techniques we have done successfully at VERAX is to provide some of the technology savvy staff with resources and allocated time so that they can put together lunch and learn seminars for their peers. And there are many benefits for that: opportunity to showcase what they’ve learned, efficiency in cross training each other, a chance for the team to gel and discuss innovative ideas for your workplace, and virtually no loss of productivity at a minimal cost to the company. It’s been a win-win training mechanism that has been working well for us. So be creative in your approach to training.

Make use of web resources

With advances in webcasting and e-learning tools, many companies are no longer constrained to sending their staff on expensive offsite training. Virtual training along with virtual machine images would be a great way to learn. And there are tons of resources on the web for that purpose that you should look into (some free resources - Developer Connection, Channel 9)

Make it fun

Be aware of e-learning trends and listen to your staff for innovative and fun ideas to learn. As an example, one thing we have done is to provide tablets to loan to our staff along with e-book subscriptions so that they can read at their own pace anywhere anytime. Our staff love such innovative approaches to learning and they appreciate our willingness to invest in them. So not only did we generated excitement and high level of staff engagement, we know our staff will be able to learn throughout the year on their own pace instead of the standard one to two weeks training for most companies. So make it fun and engaging. After all, it’s a small investment that pays back many folds.

To finish off - You are not alone

Just remember that you are not an island on your own. The best way to avoid missteps is to learn from the lessons and best practices of other managers. And guess what? There are already great resources freely available for you, such as the AlignIT portal and LinkedIn group. They are great places where you can read and interact with other IT practitioners for advice.

Stuart Ngai

Stuart Ngai, Director of Technology Solutions at VERAX, is an IT professional with over 25 years of experience. As a development manager, lead enterprise architect, and a Senior Leadership Member, Stuart has led the delivery of many leading edge systems through several technology eras and guided many IT professionals in enriching and re-energizing their careers. With 7 years teaching software courses at Seneca College of Applied Sciences followed by another 7 years teaching software engineering courses for the Faculty of Applied Science and Engineering at the University of Toronto, personal development through perpetual training has been a theme in which Stuart helped many IT professionals to achieve and sustain their career growth. Stuart is a certified P. Eng. and PMP with a Masters degree in Engineering from McGill University and a management degree from McGill's School of Management. He has been with the software consulting firm VERAX Solutions Corporation in Toronto since 1993 focusing on building strong delivery teams and delivering results to their customers in the financial sector.

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