Views on The Big Q – Quality of Design
Tanmay Vora
Quality has moved beyond the simplistic definitions like “conformance to customer requirements”. If quality of your product/service merely meets/conforms to customer requirements, it is not remarkable, but a basic expectation. That is because everyone else has mastered the art of ‘meeting’ customer’s requirements.
“Total Quality” is much more than just implementing processes or doing rigorous testing. It is also about building a quality oriented culture, focusing on your organization’s technical competence, differentiating yourself by design of your products/services, building trust and leading with values.
I read interesting and enlightening views about quality recently.
Seth Godin recently wrote a post that defines quality as:
It turns out that there are at least two useful ways to describe quality, and the conflict between them leads to the confusion…
Quality of design: Thoughtfulness and processes that lead to user delight, that make it likely that someone will seek out a product, pay extra for it or tell a friend.
Quality of manufacture: Removing any variation in tolerances that a user will notice or care about.
Apple rules through quality of design. They build products that people crave to buy. They create a buzz and excitement because they build quality into the product. When that is done, marketing becomes a bit more easier. Quality of design is rarely achieved by simply adhering to processes. As Steve Jobs said,
“The system is that there is no system. That doesn’t mean we don’t have process. Apple is a very disciplined company, and we have great processes. But that’s not what it’s about. Process makes you more efficient.
“But innovation comes from people meeting up in the hallways or calling each other at 10:30 at night with a new idea, or because they realized something that shoots holes in how we’ve been thinking about a problem. It’s ad hoc meetings of six people called by someone who thinks he has figured out the coolest new thing ever and who wants to know what other people think of his idea.
“And it comes from saying no to 1,000 things to make sure we don’t get on the wrong track or try to do too much. We’re always thinking about new markets we could enter, but it’s only by saying no that you can concentrate on the things that are really important.
I then saw the video interview of Dr. J. J. Irani at ASQ website. Dr. Irani spearheaded quality initiative at Tata Group as a Director to transform Tata’s quality focus.
In his interview, Dr. Irani explained quality as “q” and “Q”. Small q is the quality of product (quality of manufacture in Godin’s terms) and big Q is quality of everything including trust, design, social responsibility and values.
Bottomline: To survive and thrive in a very competitive landscape, companies need to focus on the Big Q – or quality of design. Quality of manufacture is important to control defects, but remarkability can only be built into the design. These are emerging views on quality, and the ones we cannot afford to ignore.
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