The Right System for Your Business

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What is the Right Quality System?

The right Quality Management System is the one that helps you handle the quality issues that arise in your particular business. Each business has its own, unique needs; no one system will suit all.

By contrast, an unsuitable system can do harm. It may:

act as a brake on development,
get in the way of doing what is right for your customers, and
demotivate staff and management.

These notes give a few hints on designing your Quality System so that it works for you, and does not get in the way. A consultant, with experience of many types of organisation, can give further advice.

How the Type of Business Affects the Quality System

Custom and Customised Software Products

Here, the Quality System needs to focus on your interactions with the customer.

These occur throughout the project. At the start, you write the specification and agree it with the customer. During the project, the customer may ask for changes, and you may produce interim releases for evaluation. At the end, you commission the product and the customer accepts it. After the end of the project, you provide support and maintenance to the customer.

The Quality System needs to provide a framework for these. For example, you will have a standard for product specifications, to make sure that the right things go in and that the extent of your commitment is defined.

Packaged Software Products

Here, internal controls take the place of the actual customer. Product ideas come from inside the company. Market needs come via the marketing or sales department.

The Quality System needs to ensure that these controls work. Interested parties must be able to review and comment on the product as it evolves. You will need procedures for in-house testing and validation, and for field beta testing.

Software Components

Here, software is ancillary to the main business.

Example: A company makes electronic devices. These include control software, which provides the user interface and analyses the data that the devices capture. The software is developed at the same time as the hardware, and the interface between them changes constantly.

The Quality System should focus on the way hardware and software teams work together. You must rigorously control hardware and software configurations. The plan should provide handover points. You will need several stages of testing.

Software-related Services

Here, the service is often performed at the point of delivery, rather than in-house.

Example: A company installs, trouble-shoots and supports computer networks. Its engineers spend most of their time on customer sites.

The quality of service depends on the attitudes, knowledge and skills of the people who do the work. So, the Quality System has to cover training, supervision and control. Planning is important, especially for a standard service such as a training course.

How the Type of Organisation Affects the Quality System

Large Organisation

A large company may have a problem in ensuring that all its people work to the same standards and can communicate.

Example: A company has offices in several countries. It employs a few hundred engineers, who come from various cultural backgrounds and may speak different languages. They communicate by telephone, e-mail etc, which can cause mix-ups.

The Quality System is likely to be quite formal. It may need to provide common standards for such detailed things as code layout, so that people can understand one another's work. It will be heavily documented.

To cope with this, the company may have specialist groups for quality assurance, quality control, measurement etc. But it is big enough to afford them.

Small Company

A small organisation cannot afford the kind of Quality System that a large company would use - but does not need to.

Example: A company has half a dozen engineers working in the same office. All of them know what everyone else is doing, and discuss their technical problems with one another.

The paperwork, rules and procedures of the large organisation would stop this company dead in its tracks. There would not be time to write and maintain such a system, and it would stifle the innovative spirit.

Such a company would use a very lightweight quality system. This could rely on the fact that the engineers are highly skilled, know one another's methods and talk to one another.

Organisation with Existing Practices

Your people will have developed many good practices for themselves. These may be unwritten, incomplete, perhaps with some flaws, but nevertheless they work, and are methods that staff are comfortable with and feel they own.

Example: A software group has an ad-hoc configuration management system, which uses home-made tools and a set of working conventions.

There is no point in replacing this by a bought-in system, perhaps having more features, unless such a system will provide clear benefits that justify the cost and upheaval.

Getting people to use the Quality System, and getting it to work properly, is the hardest part of setting it up; make the job easier by building on existing practice wherever possible.

Is There a Short Cut?

Designing the system that is exactly right for your business will take time and effort, from people who understand the business and know how it works. This means engineers and managers, whose time is scarce.

Companies sometimes try to short-cut this, by bringing in a ready-made system from elsewhere.

This is a false economy. As we have seen, someone else's system is most unlikely to be right for your business. At best, the quality manuals will sit on the shelf gathering dust. At worst, the system may do actual harm.

The Benefits

The right Quality System will:

focus attention on those aspects of Quality that make a difference to the business, through better products and services and fewer failures;
be relevant, credible and understandable to staff, so that they will accept it and follow it;
save time by making routine tasks into procedures, some of which you may be able to automate;
leave scope for initiative, to the degree that the professional skills of your people warrant; and
be easy to alter when required - as you own it and understand it, you can adapt it to suit your needs whenever they change.