Let me start by telling you, I’m a giant nerd for technical processes and making things work properly. It’s largely intuitive. I can usually figure out where things are going wrong and why fairly quickly with the right information, and get great satisfaction from troubleshooting and improving workflows and quality systems. However, not everyone does, and this usually causes a series of smaller problems or failures that, on their own, are not significant. But if they occur in sequence, or at the same time (and they inevitably do), they compound and add up to major problems.
Quality assurance (QA) can trip up the most prominent organisations; it isn’t uncommon, and we’ve seen the worst of them in the news. Some well-known examples include Deepwater Horizon and Challenger disasters, Three Mile lsland, and the 2008 Global Financial Crisis. They were all issues in quality, every single one. They were monumental due to the size and complexity of the systems involved, as well as the time it took for the failures to filter through and compound to the point of critical failure. It is no different for small and medium businesses. It may be worse because problems compound more rapidly, and often, there are fewer human and financial resources to weather the issue. It can be catastrophic.
Quality assurance, directly and indirectly, underpins all critical metrics in operational management, regardless of the organisation’s size or the industry. No. I’m not joking!
- Reducing reworks, non-compliance and material costs
- Reducing staff workload, overtime and employee turnover
- Improving productivity and efficiency
- Increasing profitability and growth
- Increasing task engagement, job satisfaction, staff retention and loyalty
Effective QA has been a fundamental truth I have learned during my nearly 30 years of technical service development and optimisation, human resources, and quality management. It’s the first skill I look for in employees, as it should be for you. I’ve used these three (3) simple hacks extensively over the years and I’m sharing them with you in this blog post:
HACK No.1: ‘Eat your frogs first!’ as the old saying goes.
- Put the quality in at the front end! Set up your processes to perform any checks or verifications at the very beginning of a process. This one change significantly reduces the error rate downstream.
- Yes, this may require revising your documentation and retraining people. However, the payoff is that this is usually the easiest way to prevent errors later because people find the annoying or boring work is done once, at the beginning, rather than throughout the process, where it is easier to ignore and forget.
HACK No. 2: The Quality Loop! Get to know it and recognise it instantly.
- This simple technique makes auditing, designing, or troubleshooting any problem, system or process within your organisation much easier if you understand this fundamental concept, even if it is not in your area of expertise! Look at the image below.
Every action that occurs has three elements that form a cornerstone of the QA process: traceability.
- A physical entity (person, equipment, vehicle, building)
- A record of the action occurring associated with the physical entity
- A repository for the record to be stored, maintained and retrieved, without loss or corruption.
No matter where you enter the loop or in which direction you travel around it, if you can move between all three and return to your starting point, you have closed the quality loop, which ensures you have achieved traceability. Understanding and utilising this during an audit, troubleshooting problems or designing processes and systems from the beginning becomes more straightforward, regardless of the complexity or size.
Hack No. 3: Zoom Out to Zoom In
Understand that systems interconnect with other systems in a three-dimensional matrix rather than a linear process.
- A single action or system may feed into multiple different systems, and if you understand and can see how the matrix is formed within your organisation, troubleshooting and predicting issues is much easier.
- It’s easy to get lost in the minutia where most of your activity is concentrated and not see it in a broader context. So, take a step back and look at the bigger picture. Observe the information flow and follow the path to isolate and predict potential problems.
At the Foundation
Of course, all this is for naught if you have actors and actions that are undermining your efforts. So, ask the question: What do you see when examining your engagement with quality assurance and the quality culture of your organisation and its people?
- A well-oiled, efficient machine that undergoes its scheduled revisions, maintenance and overhauls, and problems are quickly identified and robust corrective actions taken?
- A machine that runs relatively smoothly with minor occasional small hiccups, requires some downtime, and causes occasional minor interruptions to operations?
- Or a clunking, smoking monstrosity causing critical failures, taking up vital time and energy, just to keep it turning over?
We are all guilty of occasionally avoiding that annoying, outstanding QA task. In my nearly 30 years of professional experience, I have witnessed some absolutely spectacular examples of avoidance tactics. I have also been astounded by the lengths, thankfully rare, conscientious recidivist offenders will go to avoid engagement and compliance on ‘principle’, but that’s for another time.
An excellent quality culture is critical for any organisation, and you can gain a sense of this by observing the level of activity leading to an external audit. The less attention paid to QA, the more frenetic the activity is before an audit. Sound familiar? But it doesn’t need to be this way, and I hope the hacks above demonstrate that it is much simpler than most people think.
QA becomes much more straightforward with some basic knowledge and some thoughtful design of processes and systems. Good design alone will significantly reduce the rate of human error, which is the root cause of most quality failures. I enjoy building systems and troubleshooting quality issues. I liken it to solving a large jigsaw puzzle: maybe that’s just me. Sorry. Introductions: we haven’t met. Major Nerd, reporting for duty!
If you ask most people, quality assurance (QA) is probably the least favourite part of their job, seen as complicated, burdensome, or unnecessary. There is often little training provided and potentially a lack of knowledge and confidence in how to do it within an organisation, so people will procrastinate or pay cursory attention to it without fully understanding how much of the business’s success depends on it. While it gets more challenging with scale, the critical points of control and leverage of QA don’t change, which you can utilise if you know where to look. And now you do!
Something worth remembering: we’ve all heard the phrase, ‘If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.’ However, this phrase should never be a guiding principle in your approach to quality assurance. Even the best-designed or seemingly perfect systems will succumb to natural entropy and tend to chaos and decay, and time is the only precondition it requires for it to occur. Add the human element, and it is just a guarantee that it will occur sooner rather than later. Entropy, with interest! Counterintuitively, the most stable and resilient systems have just enough planned ‘chaos’ introduced to counteract this natural entropy and keep them dynamic and functional! This is achieved by performing those audits you’ve been avoiding and paying attention to the little niggles they unearth, finding their root causes, and fixing them. Properly. The first time. This is the planned chaos.
Finally, ensure everyone is on board before attempting to turn your organisation’s quality culture upside down. Otherwise, those lurking, recidivist offenders may begin a targeted campaign to thwart your efforts, becoming the ‘Robin Hood’ folk heroes of the lunchroom, thwarting the QA injustice, and you, in the process. So, my advice is to take time to plan, communicate often, and when faced with significant objections, pick your battles wisely. However, when done right, and having done it myself within several organisations, it is some of the most satisfying and simultaneously frustrating work fun you can have. Especially when people realise it’s easier than they thought. But then again, I have always loved a challenge. Major nerd signing off!