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BACKGROUND
Whatever kind of organization you work in, whether public or private sector, production or service, and at whatever level you manage, you may find managing quality to be part of your responsibilities.
Quality as an idea is not new but its application to management strategies first in industry and then in the public sector, has taken place mainly over the last 50 years. The voluntary and not for profit sector has in turn become involved in quality, largely because of the requirements of local authority contracts.
For many UK organizations, quality is not a nebulous concept or aspiration. It takes the - to some - seductive form of quality marks, associated frameworks and underpinning standards such as ISO 9000, Business Excellence, Investors in People and more recently Six Sigma. Motives for signing up to these systems do vary, but the desire or requirement to be widely recognized as a provider of independently validated products and services tends to be near the top of the list in most operations. Even those organizations which have not adopted a formal or accredited quality system will probably be aware of their influence in the marketplace.
In this section we will look at the historical context of the development of quality systems as they are applied in a range of sectors, and at some of the principal tenets of quality systems, such as customer/supplier relationships.
10-1-1 Defining Quality
'Quality is an unusually slippery context, easy to
visualize but exasperatingly difficult to define.' Garvin (1988)
Part of this difficulty stems from the fact that quality is 'in the eye of the beholder': it means different things to different people. On the one hand it is often used to mean a product or service which is out of the ordinary like Rolls Royce, while on the other it might be used to signify something which is quite ordinary, like a torch battery, but always the same, i.e. it consistently meets a tight specification.
In the professions such as law or health and social care services, quality might be associated with professionalism. We would recognize it because a particular professional such as a doctor makes a correct diagnosis, communicates that information sensitively to the patient and provides effective treatment promptly. Whereas with a small firm such as a manufacturer or publisher, quality may reside chiefly in its ability to respond quickly to customer requirements. In this sense, quality is as much about internal as external perceptions, and the extent to which an organization is able to deliver a high quality product or service will depend to a large extent on the match between internal and external perceptions.
Generally then, quality in this context is about divining and meeting customer requirements, and this is a fundamental tenet of quality systems. The concepts of variation and conforming to specifications or meeting standards are part of this idea. A quality product or service does what it is supposed to do and in a total quality system the product or service is said to 'consistently meet customer requirements' or 'delight the customer'.
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