Special Guest Feature

The Unchanged Face of the Quality Manager
February 2002
By: Douglas R. Rosensteel, CPCM

Introduction

In the past decade or so, there has been a significant change in the theories regarding the role of the Quality Manager. The responsibilities, knowledge, and visibility requirements of the position have grown dramatically in the most forward-thinking companies. However, this change has been slow to catch on in many organizations. This paper attempts to define a vision for the new role of the Quality Manager, while at the same time presenting data to support the assertion that things are not changing as quickly as might be desirable.

The New Quality Manager

The focus of the Quality Manager in the 21st century is quite a bit different than it has been for the last fifty years. The job used to be inspection-based, with a focus on sorting good product from bad, answering customer complaints, and developing corrective actions. The problem here is obvious, and the thinking on this topic has fortunately come a long way in the past decade or two.

The Quality function of the 21st century requires a completely different focus - that of providing the management team with guidance to lead the company into the future. The Quality Manager is now viewed in some organizations as a business manager, and holds the duties of a business manager. Specific responsibilities include assisting the management team in four areas:

- The creation of company-wide vision, philosophy, macro-systems, models and metrics.

- The development of a system that enables continually improved performance of employees at all levels.

- Providing programs for training and education of all employees.

- Providing guidance to teams responsible for improving systems.

Notice that sorting good product from bad, answering customer complaints, developing corrective actions and procedure-writing are not listed here. These responsibilities lie with the source of the complaint, corrective action, or procedure, which is not, and has never been, in the Quality Department. But old habits die hard.

Peter Drucker, in his 1963 Harvard Business Review article "Managing for Business Effectiveness", said the first duty of the business manager is "to strive for the best possible economic results from the resources currently employed." The manager's job, in Drucker's words, is "to direct resources toward opportunities for economically significant results." He goes on to point out that we continue to confuse the concepts of effectiveness and efficiency. There is a significant difference between doing the right things and doing things right. Drucker says, "There is surely nothing quite so useless as doing with great efficiency that which should not be done at all." He makes a very valid point - if we are not working on things that contribute to significant results, why are we working on them? The Quality community has made yet another catchphrase - doing the right things right. That is, doing with great efficiency that which ought to be done. We're generally pretty good at that, however, we still seem to have trouble deciding which things we should not be doing at all.

One reason is our intense focus on doing something. It is a rare organization that expects its people to sit around and do nothing but think. The problem with our focus on doing something is that we begin to cloud the difference between activity and results to the point that they become one and the same. Magically, if you are doing something, you must be producing significant results. However, anyone who has ever been involved in an activity that actually produced significant results knows that the results would never have been achieved had there not been time to sit around and do nothing but think. They also know that during times when they were not able to produce significant results, it was because they were overloaded and did not have time to sit around and do nothing but think.

A very important management principle explained in Drucker's 1963 article states that in a social situation a very small number of events - 10% to 20% at most - account for roughly 90% of all results, whereas the great majority of events account for 10% or less of the results and only serve to increase costs. Roughly translated into English, that means we waste a lot of time on activity that not only does not contribute to the bottom line, it inflates our costs. Roughly translated into practice, that means "keep people busy whether it is effective or not, keep equipment running whether it is a bottleneck or not, keep sales coming in whether they are profitable or not."

Let's look at the basis for the claim that a small number of events produce the majority of the results. A handful of customers out of many thousands produce the bulk of the orders; a handful of products out of hundreds of items in the line produce the bulk of the volume; a few salesman out of several hundred produce two-thirds or more of all new business; a handful of the plant's production runs produce most of the tonnage; a few scientists produce all of the important R&D innovations. Most grievances come from a few employees; most absenteeism can be narrowed down to specific individuals; most accidents occur in certain groups; truly poor (or great) performance is the realm of a few easily identifiable people. In the Quality field, a few of the many hundreds of changes produce truly significant, lasting results.

But we tend to ignore these facts in practice. In practice, the best salespeople are placed on the hardest accounts instead of focusing their talent on good accounts where they could generate extraordinary sales volumes. The most highly skilled workers get the toughest work, even though concentrating their skills on trouble free jobs would allow them to produce significantly more than the average worker. And the most talented people are assigned to tough customer problems which, if solved, mean very little additional revenue for the company. Many Quality Managers still find themselves dispositioning product, writing corrective actions for customers, and completing documentation when their true talent lies in their ability to see the organization from a different perspective and make create significant change for improvement.

Survey Said...

Even in the Quality Profession, where we have become extremely competent at doing the right things right, many organizations have not allowed the Quality Manager to decide how the department can best contribute to the organization as a whole. Let's look at an example of "doing with great efficiency that which should not be done at all." An independent assessment during the last half of 2000 of the actual work of the Quality function shows that the job of the Quality Manager has not really changed much over the last few decades. Organizations in the chemical, plastics, tooling, die casting, and printing industries were included in the assessment. All companies assessed had stated Quality function responsibilities similar to those listed in the bullets above. However, the most time-consuming activities as described by the heads of the Quality function for each company were:

- ISO 9000 documentation preparation and management
- Disposition of manufactured product
- Writing Product Deviations for nonconformances
- Writing Corrective Action Reports
- Conducting training in inspection and statistical methods
- Managing the Inspection function
- Writing procedures
- Researching Customer data for problem-solving
- Answering Customer Complaints

Déjà vu? Although we try to talk a different game in the 21st century, we seem to be still playing by the same old rules. No, you can not simply stop inspecting, answering customer complaints, and developing corrective actions. There will always be some form of inspection, customers will always complain, and corrective actions will always be necessary. But when an entire organizational function is created and maintained around those activities, all of which incur costs, many of which actually are the responsibility of other departments, and contribute next to nothing to the bottom line, it becomes a very expensive way to do business. Of course the Quality function is not alone in this arena. Nearly every position in nearly every company suffers from working on things that add next to nothing to the bottom line, yet add significantly to internal costs of doing business.

Conclusion

You are overloaded, stressed out, working on too many things and not completing any of them to your satisfaction before having to start on a new one. Ten percent of your activity contributes to ninety percent of your results. Ninety percent of your activity produces very little in the way of tangible results. So how do you get out of this mess? Ask yourself, "what features of my job 'strive for the best possible economic results from the resources currently employed', and what features do not?"

Identify the 10% of your activities that produce 90% of your results. Put more emphasis on those activities. Of the remaining and result-less 90% of your activities, decide what you should delegate to the proper level, what you must keep for legal or other reasons, and what you can just plain stop doing. Be careful not to confuse results with tasks when analyzing your work activities. Conducting training is a task. Improving productivity is a result. Doing the former without achieving the latter is just putting in time. In today's environment, employers should be paying for results, not for putting in time.

The Quality Manager of the 21st century simply cannot afford to allow himself to be forced into the paradigms of the 1950s anymore. So sit back, examine your current responsibilities, and do what you do best - redesign your own processes to produce the significant, lasting results that only you can produce.

(c) 2001 BHD Technologies Inc All rights reserved

Douglas R. Rosensteel, President of BHD Technologies, Inc. is an organizational consultant with extensive experience as a practitioner. He is certified through the National Bureau of Certified Consultants, and carries the appellation Certified Professional Consultant to Management (CPCM.)