Quality-Centered Planning

Quality never just happens by itself, but is always the result of systematic, thoughtful, and careful planning. For organizations to successfully produce sustainable quality results and remain nimble in responding to customer needs, it is vital to have an understanding of quality-centered strategic planning and a thorough knowledge of tactical planning that will result in a holistic approach to quality – encompassing assessment, quality control, problem solving, quality improvement, and innovation.

Strategic Planning for Quality

While Philip Crosby provided many insights into quality management, his most powerful contribution may have been his ability to effectively communicate with business leaders, teaching that an emphasis on quality is a paramount strategic decision.(1) Crosby was able to show that building a business strategy that emphasizes schedules and/or costs ahead of quality was fraught with peril because without first achieving a firm foundation in quality, it is usually impossible to meet schedules or achieve lower costs. The concept of the cost of poor quality put forward by Crosby is a foundational strategic concept.

 The emphasis on quality as a strategic imperative rests on the understanding that all organizations are systems, operating with interconnected sub-systems that covary. As Buckminster Fuller noted, all systems are subject to entropy and are in a natural state of falling apart, requiring constant attention to keeping things organized through the collection and organization of knowledge.(2)  An organizational strategy that emphasizes quality is anti-entropic, bringing about order in systems that are naturally prone to become disorderly.

The quality practitioners who developed the criteria for the Malcolm Baldrige National Quality Award clearly perceived an emphasis on quality to be a strategic issue for an organization.(3) Strategic Quality Planning was included as one of the cornerstones of an effective approach to performance excellence to be embraced by senior leadership who understand the necessity of focusing on quality as the key ingredient for an organization’s success.

The inclusion of Leadership and Strategic Quality Planning among the first three criteria in the Baldrige program reflected the observations not only of Philip Crosby, but of Dr. W. Edwards Deming and Dr. Joseph Juran. Deming saw an understanding and commitment to quality as one of the most important things a leader could do for an organization – a fundamental strategy.  In particular, Deming insisted that leaders understand the importance of asking the right questions to determine what customers needed, as well as developing an understanding of the impact of variation in the repeatable processes on which manufacturing is based.

“It is not enough that top management commit themselves for life to quality and productivity. They must know what it is they are committed to – that is, what they must do.”  (4)

Likewise, Juran perceived quality to be an essential driving force in the strategy of any successful organization.  In Juran On Leadership for Quality, he noted, “ Merely adding new methods or tools to the traditional approach is not enough. The new basic approach is centered around the concept of enlarging the strategic business plan to include quality goals.” (5) Like Crosby, Juran was highly effective in communicating with chief executives about quality as a strategic sine qua non, in addition to his role as an expert in the theory and practical methods of quality.

These perceptions of the major contributors to the quality field are reinforced by contemporary research involving 60 multinational companies, which reported that maintaining senior leaderships strategic emphasis on quality remains a key component essential to creating a “culture of quality” necessary for success in a global marketplace.(6)

There are many approaches to developing strategic plans depending on the mission, size, scope, and power relationships within an organization. Some quality practitioners embrace the “bright needle”(Hoshin) approach which is an effective method for focusing in on very specific strategic objectives that will work well in some organizational settings.(7) The point of this segment of this web site is not to summarize the considerable literature on strategic planning methodologies, nor to endorse a specific approach to strategic planning, but to encourage quality practitioners to exert their influence to ensure that quality is a core value embraced by leadership and that the organization’s strategic plan is quality-centered.

So, on the strategic level, a commitment to quality must be embraced by the senior leadership of an organization. That, of course, may be a tall order for many quality professionals who either do not have access to the senior leadership, or whose voice may be drowned out by others advocating an emphasis on cost and/or schedule as a more crucial strategic commitment.

Over time, however, quality practitioners do have the opportunity to have their voices heard and opinions embraced. This generally happens when things go wrong. Failed missile launches, for example, propelled the emphasis on quality at Martin Marietta when Crosby was there. Almost going out of business due to superior quality in Japanese automobiles was a wake-up call for the automotive industry. Having major national studies reveal the myriad problems with adverse and sentinel events in health care stimulated a new emphasis on quality in the health care sector. Massive fraud among for-profit educational institutions has provided a wake-up call in the education sector. And who knows, having video clips of paying customers being violently dragged off of airplanes or threatened by airlines staff may even influence airline industry CEOs to embrace quality as a key organizational strategy.

For quality professionals who are laboring in organizations that do not seem to have fully (or even remotely) embraced quality as a key strategy and area for strategic planning, there are three paths to pursue. The first path is to do the best job possible in planning and implementing quality methods so that there is evidence of excellence in the organization, even if it is only in pockets. At the right moment, evidence of success based upon a focus on quality can become quite compelling – the needed answer when an emphasis on cost and schedule fails.

The second path is to continue to advocate. Advocacy starts with listening – understanding whose opinion the leadership values. For many years, the American Society for Quality has worked to develop case studies and evidence of the efficacy of quality-centered strategies in organizations. Practitioners would do well to become familiar with these and use them to build their case for quality in their organizations.

Third, continue to network and confer so that you do not lose your own commitment. Embracing quality is a process of discovery that creates a significant change in how one understands systems. Practitioners can get worn down over time if they do not create the opportunity for renewal and growth, hence the need to be engaged in a professional society and be involved locally with an ASQ section or nationally in an ASQ division, or in the quality organization in your nation.

Quality practitioners should be prepared to advise their leadership on how to think about their organization’s strategy if it embraces quality as a driving force. From the perspective of the Baldrige Criteria, strategic quality planning focuses on how the organization considers customer requirements, the competitive environment, risks, and the organization’s capabilities.  An effective quality-centered strategic plan, for instance, will embrace all of the criteria of the Baldrige framework. Table One provides one description for the elements of a quality-centered strategic plan. (8)

While all of the elements in this description are important, the need to encourage reflective thinking is imperative to achieve a quality-centered strategic plan. Only through systematic reflection can an organization determine whether its mission, vision, and values are being achieved. Only through systematic reflection can an organization determine the effectiveness of its tactics for achieving quality and for continuous quality improvement. And while there are many approaches to promote reflective thinking, the method most readily at hand for quality practitioners will be the rigorous reflection that is stimulated through the use of the Malcolm Baldrige criteria.

Tactical Planning for Quality

As Joseph Juran noted, organizations that embrace quality as a strategy go on to develop company-wide plans for the control of quality and for systematic improvement of quality. (9) Juran advocated a quality planning roadmap that identifies specific tactical actions, shown in Table Two.

This overall planning roadmap is then made granular, in Juran’s approach, by developing process-specific plans for the control of quality, which involves selecting units of measurement, developing means to evaluate actual performance, evaluating the performance, interpreting the difference between actual performance and goals, and taking actions on these differences. Juran described this series of steps as “the regulatory process by which we control anything.”(10)

Masaaki Imai outlined another quality planning model developed at Toyota, shown in Table Three. Imai emphasized the cross-functional nature of planning for quality by identifying the organizational units that need to be included in each planning step.(11)

There are many additional sources to consider in developing tactical plans for quality. For another perspective regarding the breadth of issues that may need to be addressed in tactical planning, it may be useful to examine the American Society for Mechanical Engineers’ Nuclear Quality Assurance – 1 standard, upon which most modern approaches to quality auditing have been based. ASME’s look at areas requiring management of quality builds on a century of experience in building pressurized steam vessels, which was one of the first major national challenges in terms of developing methods to avoid catastrophic failures as steamship boilers were prone to explode. As Table Four illustrates, the ASME NQA – 1 standard helps us realize that quality is achieved through a great deal of planning regarding how work will be performed.(12)

Still other frameworks have been used to provide structure to planning for detailed quality at the tactical level. The Japanese 5S system, for example, focuses on planning how to arrange and control work areas in the best manner to optimize performance by examining the workplace organization, process simplification, cleanliness, standardization of work processes, and self-discipline.(13)

Shigeo Shingo’s Poka-Yoke System likewise focuses on planning for quality by achieving quality control that seeks zero defects. Shingo emphasized planning systems for source inspection, planning automated approaches to inspection, planning for the use of sensing devices to detect errors, and the design of work processes with steps built in to make it impossible to make an error.(14)

More recently, John Casey has recently advocated an approach based on focusing first and foremost on identifying what must be done right and not seeking to identify and control everything that might go wrong with a work flow.(15)

Yoji Akao provided the concept of the house of quality – a matrix for translating customer requirements into tactical quality requirements.(16) This method, known widely as Quality Function Deployment, provides a concrete method to link customer requirements to engineering characteristics that must be addressed in creating a tactical plan for achieving a quality product.

Liem Ferryanto has offered advice for capturing the voice of the customer and translating it into critical-to-quality characteristics by developing clear operational definitions and accurate descriptions of customer needs that impact physical variables.(17)

Over the years, many other standards and management systems for controlling quality have been developed by quality professions for their specific areas of manufacturing, just as they are now also being developed in other sectors, such as health care. Quality professionals working in these settings develop tactical plans to meet all of the requirements set forth in these standards. The American Society for Quality is organized, in part, around technical divisions whose members engage in shaping these standards and where guidance for developing tactical plans to meet these requirements are discussed. In essence, the Society is an invisible army of passionate experts, working behind the scenes to establish standards, debate emerging issues, and educate organizations on how to embrace quality at both the strategic and tactical levels.

An untold number of people work in the quality field, carrying out the wide range of functions that keep quality in control in every organization.  Most do not identify themselves as working in the area of quality and may simply execute tasks without understanding the underlying importance of their work in controlling quality.  Many are like the young Philip Crosby when he was working as a junior technician testing fire control systems for B-47s, wondering why the work was being done in the first place. (18) They do not develop the plans for how to control quality, but follow the procedures that have been developed by the quality professionals. Helping the workforce understand the importance and nobility of these actions was an area of vital interest to Crosby, Deming and Juran and should be an important value for all quality practitioners.

Planning for Quality Improvement  

Just as quality outcomes do not occur without careful and thorough planning of work processes, processes and outcomes do not improve by themselves without planning for improvement. Organized efforts to improve quality go back at least as far as the National War Labor Board and the Whitley Councils initiated during the First World War. (19) After the world wars, efforts were launched to ensure that advances in quality methods in the United States were not lost by the establishment of the American Society for Quality Control.  Similarly, the Japanese Union of Scientists and Engineers began working with Dr. Deming to introduce methods of understanding and controlling variation in repeatable processes and with Dr. Joseph Juran to significantly advance the idea of establishing a systematic approach to creating teams that would methodically examine processes to make breakthroughs in quality improvement, which the Japanese embraced as Quality Circles.(20)  The key was to move beyond the random discovery of opportunities for quality improvement and to move into a planned and systematic approach. The concept of planning for quality improvement is now embedded in international quality standards and in the Baldrige criteria.

However, when it comes to how to plan for quality improvement, there is a great deal of room for variation in approaches and many competing methods and frameworks that have been shared by different practitioners. Dr. Juran framed an approach that calls for a diagnostic journey and a remedial journey to achieve systematic breakthroughs in performance. (21) Philip Crosby taught a multiple step method outlined in Table Five that provides guidance for organization-wide quality improvement at the Quality College in Winter Park, FL.(22) It is clear that a great deal of planning must go into establishing this multi-step approach to planning for improvement.

Many corporations subsequently developed their own in-house models for systematic improvement as part of the Total Quality Management movement in the 1980s, and some have become semi-institutionalized, such as Six Sigma, with its DMAIC steps. The point here is not to endorse one specific methodology or combination of tools over another, but to endorse the development of a plan for embracing and systematically using a methodology to drive quality improvement because it will not happen on its own. Quality improvement is like tube socks, one size does not fit all, but every organization needs to find and fully implement the methodology that best works for it.

Planning for Innovation

Thomas Friedman has celebrated the combination of “innovation-generating machines” we have in the world today – universities, public and private research labs, national laboratories, and companies. (23) Likewise, Friedman celebrates the bonds created among researchers and intellectuals working together on important issues all around the world. On the organizational level, each business, factory, hospital, and school needs to become an innovation-generating machine.

Leaders can stimulate planning for innovation in several ways. First, advocate on-going continuous assessment that identifies opportunities for innovation. Second, apply the skills used in organizing quality improvement projects to organizing innovation projects. Serve as a facilitator and teacher of innovative methods such as synectics, mind maps, lateral thinking, and TRIZ. It is also important to provide insights regarding the use of methods such as Force Field Analysis to help overcome the resistance to change when the time comes to implement innovative ideas and technology.

Why Planning Fails

It is probably inevitable that our best efforts for developing quality-centered strategic plans and tactical plans to achieve quality goals will sometimes fail. This article, after all, starts with the recognition of the entropic nature of all systems to eventually fail. However, Arnold Toynbee made the case in his massive Study of History that the challenge for each age is to see how individuals answer the entropic challenges of their time and stave off collapse. The quality professional is indeed the anti-entropic actor at work in each organization, called upon to take actions to sustain the life of the organization. However, there are some common factors in the failure of organizations to effectively plan at the strategic level and the tactical level for quality.

At the strategic level, senior leadership is sometimes unable to overcome the relentless and ever present demands of the quarterly bottom line. Short-term management and meeting shipping dates can overrule long-term quality considerations until poor quality brings the entire organization down.

At times, it is hubris that overwhelms the organization by lulling the leadership into the belief that they know what is best for the customer, so the customer’s input is neither sought nor considered until the organization joins the ranks of other buggy whip manufacturers.

And, if the leadership does not embrace methods that promote critical reflection, such as the use of the Baldrige criteria, then the very need for planning may be dismissed.  Why plan, after all, if everything is perceived to be already great?

On the tactical level, planning fails when the organization lacks the technical knowledge to design the work processes due to a lack of understanding of the underlying science, engineering, principles of measurement and variation, or quality management.

Tactical planning fails when customer needs are not fully understood and translated into design criteria and into concrete actions.  Likewise, even when effective tactical planning leads to a process that should provide excellent results, things fail when the plan is not implemented. Great quality plans go unimplemented when people do not understand the reason for the actions built into the system and/or simply decide not to follow through, sometimes to save time or money.

The irony of the quality profession is that we want to plan to do it right the first time, as Crosby advocated, but we also realize that failure can happen, so we go to great lengths to anticipate, understand, and prevent errors, defects, and failures.  To do this, we must ensure that our organization’s strategic plans are quality-centered and that our tactical plans are thorough and thoughtful.

(1) Philip B. Crosby. Quality Is Free. New American Library: New York, 1979.

(2) R. Buckminster Fuller. Operating Manual for Spaceship Earth. Pocket Books: New York, 1970.

(3) Mark Graham Brown. Baldrige Award Winning Quality. Quality Resources Press: New York, 1996.

(4) W. Edwards Deming. Out of the Crisis. Boston: MIT Press, 1986.

(5) Joseph Juran. Juran on Leadership for Quality. Free Press: New York, 1989.

(6) Ashwin Srinivasan and Bryan Kurey. “Creating a Culture of Quality.” Harvard Business Review. August, 2014.

(7) Kubiak, T.M. The Certified Six Sigma Black Belt Handbook. ASQ Quality Press: Milwaukee, 2012.

(8) John R. Dew. Quality Centered Strategic Planning. Quality Resources Press: New York, 1997.

(9) Joseph Juran. “Company Wide Planning for Quality” in Juran’s Quality Control Handbook. McGraw-Hill: New York, 1988.

(10) Ibid.

(11) Masaaki Imai. Kaizen. Random House: New York, 1986.

(12) American Society for Mechanical Engineers. Nuclear Quality Assurance – 1.

(13) Jim Peterson and Roland Smith. The 5S Pocket Guide. Quality Resources Press: New York, 1998.

(14) Shigeo Shingo. Zero Quality Control. Productivity Press: Portland, OR, 1986.

(15) John Casey. “A New Way of Thinking” Quality Progress, April 2017.

(16) Akao, Yoji. QFD: Quality Function Deployment. Productivity Press: Portland, OR.

(17) Liem Ferryanto. “Brewing Up Quality.” Quality Progress, December, 2015.

(18) Crosby.

(19) Jett Lauck. Political and Industrial Democracy, 1176 – 1926. Funk & Wagnalls: New York, 1926.

(20) Kaoru Ishikawa. Guide to Quality Control. Asian Productivity Association: Tokyo, 1974.

(21) Joseph Juran. Managerial Breakthrough. McGraw-Hill: New York, 1964.

(22) Crosby and Associates. Quality Improvement Process Management College, Winter Park, FL, 1987. 

(23)Thomas L. Friedman. The World Is Flat. Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2005.