Challenges to the Quality Professional in the 21st Century

[qualitygoddess]

So begins the subtitle of the last chapter in a book by James Lamprecht. I bring it up for discussion now, because in 9 weeks I will be discussing this chapter with an undergrad class of business students. I think fellow Covers will have an interest in commenting. I will introduce several subsets of dicussion points from this last chapter over the next few weeks.

To summarize from the book, Quality and Power in the Supply Chain, What Industry Does for the Sake of Quality (Butterworth and Heinmann, 2000):

Since quality professionals have been working so hard the past 20 years to get "quality" out of their departments, and into the company "at large", these same quality professionals will most likely find themselves out of a job within 5 years. The quality profession will no longer exist as a separate entity, but will have been absorbed and shared througout the organization. These people had better find something else to do, a.k.a, re-invent themselves.

So what do you think? Big companies and small companies -- any differences? This brings to mind an interesting article from ASQ Quality Management Division's last newsletter about quality managers taking on roles as risk managers. Time to discuss -- thanks in advance for your input!

--Jodi

[Randy]

You're trying to plow the same ground twice Jodi. This subject has been beat up on in quite a few other threads (I'm one of the beaters)...Before we answer your question tell us something...other than your 18 years of work, your college work and passing a Lead Auditor course what do you bring to the table to help provide the answer?

Do you have a diversified background in manufacturing and service industries? Have you got experience in both the private and government sector? What about direct management experience, budgeting, human resources, occupational safety, engineering and so on? Can you talk to CEO's, CFO's and other members of senior management and maybe even the owners themselves in such a way that they actually listen, or are your conversations devoid of the information they truly want to hear? Do you know the language of business and can you speak it?

When you speak to your undergrads can you provide them with an understanding of how one goes about selling themselves as a viable member of the team and not as an afterthought of the business process?

What is "Risk"?

I've found that most Quality Professionals, like many EHS, HR and other functional specific professionals completely fail to gain access to the "Boardroom" because of their lack of understanding and actually a lack to try to understand how their organization really works. They have a tendency to cloister themselves and not "mix". These "professionals" choose not to expand their horizons when it comes to developing themselves into more rounded business professionals...They won't go out on a limb!

The newsletter your speaking of is a day late and a dollar short. I've been preaching the risk management approach you speak of for years, as have many others...is anyone listening? Not hardly!

Like I said...this fats already been chewed more than once.

[Jennifer Kirley]

I agree with Randy except for one critical difference.

While, like Randy, I agree that the subject has been covered, I don't remember reading much about how to go about making Quality into a basic element of business. My impressions, especially through this Cove forum, are that Quality is still a rather complex discipline that is unnatually occuring outside of manufacturing.

In rural regions I am noticing a declining demand for quality professionals due to manufacturing shrinkage and a low awareness among the vast non-manufacturing small business sectors.

I did a federally funded research project on the subject of boosting the state's economic health through a network of small business performance advisors (like Manufacturing Enterprise Partnership for non-manufacturers) and found a great need though little demand. Here's what I found:

Need is subject to point of view. Those who think it's normal to have a 75% employee turnover rate each year won't create a demand for services that help them change policies and practices that contribute to such high turnover. I perceive a lot of that in small business sectors, which are being essentially overlooked in most national reporting although they contribute more than half the GDP.

Most small business owners are too small, or too strung out to consider learning and implementing a QMS, even though it may help them grow. Indeed, a large portion of these are not interested in growing, being self employed or "lifestyle business" owners.

When manufacturing declines, quality professionals (such as in Maine) are struggling or changing careers because the discipline is viewed as a set of skills that are unique to each industry: manufacturing, banking, hospitals and nursing homes, software development, etc. Each industry insists that quality professionals come from within those industries. For example, I have never seen an ad for a quality professional in a medical organization that didn't require the candidate to be a registered nurse. I asked one organization why--was it a state requirement? No, they just wanted the insider's expertise. During my years as examiner for Maine's version of the Baldrige Award I could see why: these businesses often still use their Quality Managers as problem solvers, not problem avoiders through system planning and continous improvement.

That shouldn't be the case. Quality tools and knowledge are supposed to be transferrable, and as a group of experts we should be working to see that our skills are not squandered through the belief that only a banker could understand process improvement in banking.

I'm willing to concede, however, that the bankers and medical people are right--their systems are too unique, and their regulations too exacting, for an "outsider" to succeed. What, then, about the rest of the small business sectors?

If the members of this discipline are to answer the question of our own relevancy, perhaps we should be doing a better job of making Quality work for the masses. Simplify it, tone it down, make it easy to understand and follow: how to make good decisions and checking up to see if they helped the business owners get what they want.

So, my point is that if you are going to explore the morphing relevancy of the quality discipline, I hope you do so in a wide enough view to project where it is going in the New Economy context.

[Randy]

Thanks for the nice comment JK The guist of what I was trying to say is along the lines of what you have stated...Quality has to be identified and embraced as a "Core" process of the business function, something the quality profession has failed to do because of the fixation that "Q" is about making sure things are right instead of identifying and managing the "risk" associated with poor or deficient Quality. Quality folks aren't the only ones failing in this respect, it carries over to Environmental & Safety folks, HR and many of the other functional specific sectors as well. I recently attended the ASSE's (American Society of Safety Engineers) annual hoop-dee-doo in Las Vegas and you'd have thought I was bound for the Inquisition because of my telling people to forget about talking regulations, programs and all that safety crap and concern themselves with the total risk aspect of the trade.

The only people that have their s-it together in the business world and acceptance of their trade craft on a universal basis are the finance folks....I wonder why? DUH!!

[Jennifer Kirley]

I think you're right Randy, after all the talk about why Quality is so important--some are quite blue in the face and Dr. Deming became bitter after all those years of it--the issue of its weighty value in risk management is still not being received.

It's not helpful that Tort Reform initiatives work to remove the risk, so companies can get away with less financial damage form poor quality. Hey, if you can't fix the problem, then make the consequences go away...that will help business. Sigh.

But I think the news is not getting out very fast outside of middle-to-big manufacturing, that risk management via improving quality is a truly effective way of improving profits. When I read the occasional Business Week article about how so-and-so is making great strides by improving their quality, I feel like saying "Congratulations for noticing the obvious!" and wonder why, after all this time, we are still looked at quizically when we speak our continuous improvement and preventionist talk. Last week's article about KB Homes is a recent example.

Perhaps it is only when the light shines on them and they actually do the math, that they realize what poor quality is costing them. A classic, never ending Catch-22 is thus churning throughout U.S. commerce. I think most business leaders simply don't recognize that the risk of substantial, costly failure exists.

Economists will say that the market will take care of the weaklings that never figure out how, or why to become more competetive. But while business schools continue to fixate on structural subjects without weaving in the core theories of Quality--sound, fact-based decisions and their follow through--we will continue to receive the blank looks.

And at the same time, quality professionals who remain mired in the technical details of highly developed techniques that sharply limit them within business sectors and job descriptions will suffer the same market weakness.

I'll agree that accounting is one of the only careers that transfer between sectors, but I would have said the same thing about HR and you didn't.

Maybe the reason why the banking and medical industries don't recognize outsider quality folks is that they are so heavily regulated and feel the regulations render them strictly specialist. I'll venture to say Education is the same, demanding that one have an education background to be in their Quality position--if they have one.

They're wrong, of course. I wrote a documentation package for a postsecondary technical school to get accredited through NEASC...the accreditation standard read quite a lot like Baldrige. I felt right at home. Since then I have offered to help my own school district with our high school's accreditation project and didn't even receive a spark of recognition.

I guess I also still have to work on communicating what I have to offer to those who are not making widgets.

[Wes Bucey]

I have a slightly different slant on Jodi's opening gambit. She wrote:

Originally Posted by qualitygoddess

To summarize from the book, Quality and Power in the Supply Chain, What Industry Does for the Sake of Quality (Butterworth and Heinmann, 2000):

Since quality professionals have been working so hard the past 20 years to get "quality" out of their departments, and into the company "at large", these same quality professionals will most likely find themselves out of a job within 5 years. The quality profession will no longer exist as a separate entity, but will have been absorbed and shared througout the organization. These people had better find something else to do, a.k.a, re-invent themselves.

In my opinion, the folks who have worked so hard to get Quality out of the department and into the company at large are doing, and will continue to do, quite well. (I count myself one of them.) As I have frequently "spouted," I always believed Quality was an organization-wide task and I railed against the "compartmentalization" mentality which condemned Quality folks to be specialized staff and ineligible for line officer status. Those Quality folk who believed as I do structured their approach to the suits and other powers that be in their organizations so the Quality tools made sense from a business viewpoint.

Instead of being perceived as "policemen," we positioned ourselves as the "go to" guys who used problem solving and DOE and other Quality tools to find ways to improve the company, NOT play "gotcha" with operations folk or suppliers. We made sure we were in on Contract Review and Customer Conferences. Our engineers and operations folk wanted our input because we made the information and techniques of Quality accessible and usable by everyone to increase the efficiency of the entire supply chain from initial idea to finished product accepted at the customer's production line.

We didn't cling to titles, never said "That's not my job!" and, most importantly, always treated customers, suppliers, and fellow employees as partners, not adversaries.

The only one who will find himself out of a job is one who FEARS change and stubbornly clings to outmoded concepts of being an isolated professional.

The one who succeeds and even excels will be an integrated and involved generalist who doesn't care whether his department is called "Quality" or "Operations" or "Foo Foo Pool" and doesn't care if his job title is "Quality Engineer" or "Supply Chain Strategist" or "Guy in Charge of Preventing Glitches" as long as he works for a forward-looking, profitable organization.

[Andy Nutt]

Originally Posted by qualitygoddess

Since quality professionals have been working so hard the past 20 years to get "quality" out of their departments, and into the company "at large", these same quality professionals will most likely find themselves out of a job within 5 years. The quality profession will no longer exist as a separate entity, but will have been absorbed and shared througout the organization. These people had better find something else to do, a.k.a, re-invent themselves.

I echo Wes's sentiment, with some additional thoughts based on my experience:
- In reference to the implied question, "have quality professionals worked themselves out of a job?," I tell the group I work with every day that as a quality engineer I'm always trying to work myself out of a job. But in truth I think there is always work available when trying to improve or change the system.
- Challenges facing quality professionals include learning more about information systems, and being able to work well with IS departments, as most system changes today involve modifying computer systems and databases.

[qualitygoddess]

Originally Posted by Randy

You're trying to plow the same ground twice Jodi. This subject has been beat up on in quite a few other threads (I'm one of the beaters)...Before we answer your question tell us something...other than your 18 years of work, your college work and passing a Lead Auditor course what do you bring to the table to help provide the answer?

Do you have a diversified background in manufacturing and service industries? Have you got experience in both the private and government sector? What about direct management experience, budgeting, human resources, occupational safety, engineering and so on? Can you talk to CEO's, CFO's and other members of senior management and maybe even the owners themselves in such a way that they actually listen, or are your conversations devoid of the information they truly want to hear? Do you know the language of business and can you speak it?

When you speak to your undergrads can you provide them with an understanding of how one goes about selling themselves as a viable member of the team and not as an afterthought of the business process?

.

Since Randy asked, I'll answer. Yes, I have been in the boardrooms and done the work you speak of. I know how to talk to all of those senior management people, because I have done it. I was also one of those senior management people for some time. I have convinced the "non-believers" at a few companies to "do quality" and then shown them the positive results. I also know E, H&S, and have put a system or two in place. I have not worked for the government, but I have worked with the regulatory agencies. Most of my career has been in electronics and chemical coatings, although I am now giving software services a try.

I simply brought up the topic to see what people would say. My students like to hear from other quality professionals besides me. If you would like to add anything to the discussion, I will read it.