BUSINESS MANAGEMENT MASTER CLASS SERIES

Business Process (Quality) Master Class

Mention the words "quality" or "process" and most of us have an immediate (negative)

unconscious response. Too often "quality" is associated with someone else (quality dept

/ managers / external auditors / ...); vast quantities of paper; control freaks; needless

overheads; time wasting; inflexibility; and stifled creativity.

Regrettably these perceptions are all too often justified because of the way in which

quality / business process has been approached. If you think that business process and

quality are different concepts, that is probably part of the problem.

How not to do it

Perhaps unsurprisingly it is far easier to get it wrong than it is to get it right. If you do get

it wrong don’t worry about it – most organisations get it wrong at one stage or another

and moreover they often repeat exactly the same mistakes, for the same reasons,

following the same evolutionary path. Take the history of Acme Ltd for example…

For Acme Ltd the concept of Quality was reluctantly taken on board as an unfortunate

consequence of doing business in a competitive market place. The options were limited:

stay as a bit-player or buy a piece of paper from a Certification body and become a

major-player. Common sense dictated that they should buy a certificate and do the

minimum necessary to convince a certification body that they deserved the honour. In

practical terms this meant hiring external consultants, customising a set of off the shelf

documents, calling them a Quality system and handing over a few cheques.

Before Intranet technology became popular at Acme one of the problematic features of

their Quality system was paper. Every manager was given a tome-like procedures

manual that rapidly migrated to a bottom draw to gather fluff. A distant manager

(assigned responsibility for “Quality” only because public flogging was frowned upon)

sent paper based updates every year or so and these formed new sedimentary layers in

the same draw. Intranet technology removed the need for paper, made implementing

updates easier but did little to change perceptions. No one used the procedures and

they certainly did not use their Quality system to identify better ways of doing business.

© Neuro Innovation 2004

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11/10/2005