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July 29, 2005

Understanding the Value of Quality

Why do we care about quality?

Another way to go at this is to point out that quality is important only if someone cares.

That makes the opening question, "Who cares about quality?"

As a business issue, we go right to the stakeholders to start working this out. A producing organization provides a product, and it does so to a lesser or greater degree of quality. But what does quality mean to the stakeholders of the production and the product?

In every stakeholder's case, quality is a characteristic that satisfies what the stakeholder needs the most. In the following diagram, we quickly catalog what this means. In general, value is a distinction that the perceiver holds in highest priority. Quality is an enabler of value. That allows us to understand quality as the "success factors" of value, making quality definable and even measurable.

Probably the most overlooked aspect of the above is not that there are, according to the role involved, different elements of perceived value that "quality" should support. Rather, the neglect is of the fact that often a single party has multiple roles simultaneously. When multiple roles are active concurrently, it is far more likely that the party will express needs that are some blend of numerous success factors but a somewhat random blend. If quality is to be managed to support value, this blend will need to be sorted out so that the proper set of responsibilities and constraints can be identified with (and assigned to address) each factor.

Posted by Malcolm Ryder at July 29, 2005 8:47 PM

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