It's less about the 'culture' or 'leadership' of the business and more (IMHO) about the relative behaviours of the people in those organizations.
Rarely do quality people involve themselves in planning, to help Production (and often Engineering) departments avoid problems. Indeed, 'Quality' is often reactive and arrives after the battle is over! If you add to this their use of "techno-geek" terminology, whether it be 'ISO' - based or something similar, it's easy to see that such behaviours don't help the Production peoples' cause.
For example, if we read through the many threads about internal auditing, here at the Cove, we are constantly reminded that a lack of planning leads to poor support and acceptance of the audit program. This situation is analogous to other quality tool/methods implementation, whether it's incoming inspections, calibration controls or similar. Furthermore, the selection of quality tools is often inappropriate or not well understood by the quality folks, hence the avoidance by Production.
Quality folks should be ambassadors and work with their counterparts in planning to use the most appropriate tools for any given situation. Justification of a quality technique should be plausible not 'do this, it's good for you' approach.
Sure, Production people often 'bend the rules' and will make their 'numbers' before 'quality', but the two objectives shouldn't be mutually exclusive.
Rarely do quality people involve themselves in planning, to help Production (and often Engineering) departments avoid problems. Indeed, 'Quality' is often reactive and arrives after the battle is over! If you add to this their use of "techno-geek" terminology, whether it be 'ISO' - based or something similar, it's easy to see that such behaviours don't help the Production peoples' cause.
For example, if we read through the many threads about internal auditing, here at the Cove, we are constantly reminded that a lack of planning leads to poor support and acceptance of the audit program. This situation is analogous to other quality tool/methods implementation, whether it's incoming inspections, calibration controls or similar. Furthermore, the selection of quality tools is often inappropriate or not well understood by the quality folks, hence the avoidance by Production.
Quality folks should be ambassadors and work with their counterparts in planning to use the most appropriate tools for any given situation. Justification of a quality technique should be plausible not 'do this, it's good for you' approach.
Sure, Production people often 'bend the rules' and will make their 'numbers' before 'quality', but the two objectives shouldn't be mutually exclusive.
You hit on a significant aspect of the enmity between production and quality, though, and that's the resentment that's felt by both sides not understanding what their coworkers actually do for a living. The best quality people I've encountered invariably have some experience in production, and understand that sometimes the best production workers are tied to the daily/weekly/monthly numbers and are mostly helpless in making things better.
In the end, the best approach is to let people know that you're there to help them, and that you're all in the same boat. This won't prevent the boat from sinking if management doesn't do its bit to keep it afloat, though.


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