Quality Overreach

 

As February enters into its final week, so, too, does my blog enter into its last opportunity to gratuitously disagree with my other ProjectManagement.com columnists and bloggers about the whole quality management thing. But it’s this very realization,  that I’m coming up against a limit to my contrarianism (well, about this topic, anyway) that helps highlight my overall objection to the quality management guys: they don’t know when to quit!

Consider this definition of quality management from Investopedia:

The act of overseeing all activities and tasks needed to maintain a desired level of excellence.[i]

For those who are not themselves quality consultants and did not blanch upon reading the three-word term “overseeing all activities,” go back and read it again, please. The added “…needed to maintain a desired level of excellence” is somewhat perfunctory.  Seriously, what aspect of the management world isn’t part of “maintaining a desired level of excellence”? This definition of quality management, all by itself, has outed the quality aficionados as either (a) being unable or unwilling to state the epistemological limits of their discipline, or (b) really intending to take over the management science world.  In these two respects, the QC guys are eerily similar to one of my other favorite management science overreaching targets, the risk managers. Also like the risk managers, the QC guys rely heavily on statistical analysis to support their conclusions and recommendations. However, unlike the risk management-types, the quality gurus not only attempt to capture the impacts of their recommended changes, they often insist on it – which brings me to another disagreement I have with them. It’s really impossible to completely quantify the overall economic impact of altering the quality of a given product or service. Again as with the risk managers, there are simply too many factors to capture, much less evaluate.

But let’s return to the overreaching part. Suppose you, dear reader, hire me as a quality control consultant for, say, your yacht company. My first day there, I notice that the machine that your company is using to mold ship parts is set slightly below the recommended temperature for the type of plastic resin being supplied. I ask you about it, and you tell me that, due to the price of energy in California, your accountant (“Melvin”) performed an analysis that showed that a lowering of the molding furnaces by 10 degrees Fahrenheit would save $21,258.52 per month. However, a cursory reading of the supplier’s material data sheet indicates that, if the molding machine is not kept above the recommended temperatures, the resulting parts will experience a cohesion degradation of 24%, and that, when the $21,258.52 per month “savings” are spread out over the number of vessels being constructed, it ends up being a mere 1.2% savings per ship. Because I’m aware Melvin was opposed to your hiring a quality consultant in the first place, I’ll put the question to you this way: Are you sure you want to sacrifice hull integrity by 24% for the savings of 1.2% of the cost?

When you reply with the obvious answer, I continue: Why did you hire Melvin in the first place?” Surprised at my audacity, you politely invite me to confine my analysis to matters of quality. My response: the very definition of quality management is to oversee all activities needed to maintain a desired level of excellence, and your company’s ships have suffered from a significant drop in quality because somebody hired Melvin here. Clearly, your human resource activities fall within my purview. Also, I have some questions about how you raise your kids…

Okay, that last bit is clearly out of bounds. But that’s my point – so was the challenging of the decision to hire Melvin, even though, based on the definition quality management, the challenge was perfectly within the quality management consultant’s purview. Without a clearly articulable upper limit on which decisions may be challenged or overturned under the guise of what’s “needed to maintain a desired level of excellence,” overreach is virtually guaranteed.

It’s analogous to ProjectManagement.com bloggers telling their readers how to raise their kids.