Where Has All The Quality Gone? And how you can take advantage of it
October 10th 2008 12:00 am
A waitress takes the order, delivers a few items and disappears for an hour while a group waits at the table with hungry kids.
A handyman installs a bathroom mirror so high that only a 6 foot 2 person (which he was) can see his face.
A programmer makes the same mistake again and again and doesn’t do rudimentary testing before showing it to his boss.
A customer buys a piece of furniture that needs to be touched up. A month later the customer doesn’t hear back on it. A message is left and finally returned. The saleswoman says “Call me back on Monday to make sure I remember about this.” Since when are customers reminder services?
Unfortunately all these are real stories. Worse still there are many more worse ones.
The lesson: Commit to quality.
You’ll see the more you commit to doing everything with quality the better you’ll get.
The Upside
Word Spreads. People do say nice things, not just negative. This can lead to referrals.
No reworks. By doing it right the first time it saves time on fixing it later.
The Downside
The downside is that as you look around and see people neglecting quality you’ll get more annoyed. You may also become people’s reminder service. People will rely on your perfect quality even when you aren’t. Quality can take time. That’s why it’s important to set up a system.
Martin Wildam responded on 10 Oct 2008 at 3:38 am #
Oh, how true! – I also see quality reduced very much on every “level” and in every branch.
Some reason is that bosses or customers always seek to get the most by paying less or in other words: Less people should achieve more. They forget that Quality costs money.
Parkinson’s law is very related to this problem. If you get a certain amount of time and a certain amount of money to achieve some goal then you define the quality.
I have written already several posts on quality and also about my opinion of the Parkinson’s law on my blog.
Troy Malone responded on 10 Oct 2008 at 11:46 am #
I love this article. It articulates exactly what I have been trying to help my team understand. We are committed to quality with regard to anything that gets out the door. We are finding that many times we are 70% committed to quality the FIRST time we do something and then in QC, we have to go address the remaining 30% to be able to push it out the door to our users. It is obvious, but so true that if you do something right the first time, it takes much less time and attention to get it TRULY done.
Martin Wildam responded on 10 Oct 2008 at 12:36 pm #
You are already the lucky one – many just do one quick and dirty shot after the other.
Heshy responded on 12 Oct 2008 at 10:47 am #
Martin, money does have something to do with quality. The most important thing is caring/ engagement
Troy, this is a problem we all face. I would suggest tying the defect rate into their evaluation so that they do it right the first time.
Jenay responded on 07 Jul 2011 at 12:25 pm #
These topics are so counfisng but this helped me get the job done.