So, Who’s Against Quality?

 

It’s easy to laugh at nineteenth century pharmaceutical promoters, also known as snake oil salesmen, who would go to elaborate lengths to convince potential customers of the efficacy of whatever compound or solution they were selling in healing various and sundry ailments. How silly of them to misrepresent their wares so! And how naïve the people who actually spent hard-earned cash to acquire such dubious products! Certainly, people today would never be prone to fall for such tomfoolery, no siree! 

Let’s flash forward to the 21st Century, and the realm of project management which encompasses a plethora of management science hypotheses and theories, many of which are recognized as generally-accepted ways of doing business, with little (or no) empirical evidence to support their validity. Yes, yes, I know that in the business world, it’s virtually impossible to isolate the variables needed to support or overturn any given management science theory. And you know who else knows this? The project management science equivalent of the snake oil salesmen.

I (metaphorically) beat up on the accountants a lot, but that might not be fair – not because their ideas are valid beyond the asset management realm, but because they are not technically part of the PM universe. I also pick on the risk managers a lot, but they’re such easy targets that that might also be considered unfair (is there an equivalent of the “mercy rule” from High School Football for the universe of bloggers? Once an opponent is clearly subdued, are we business writers supposed to ease up on them?).

All of which brings me to the quality guys. I mean, seriously, who could possibly be against quality, as a concept?  Surely these naysayers must be confined to those short-sighted, careless and cheap people who are just out to make the proverbial “quick buck” (a “buck” is one United States Dollar, and not a male deer, for my overseas readers) and hasten out of town before their consumers realize they’ve been had, right?

Well, let’s all take a deep breath, and look at this. What are the quality guys actually selling us? Much of modern-day quality management centers on the performance of specific analysis techniques to help determine the causal factors of the perceived quality issue. This analysis often entails changing the attitudes of the people who actually create the products or services made available to the consumer, and performing an assessment of which processes or personnel are most responsible for any delta between desired scope delivery, and what is actually being delivered.

Okay, so now we’ve left the production room floor, and entered into business analysis territory. How is business analysis performed? With information, of course. What information? Well, one popular technique used by the quality guys is the Ishikawa Diagram, also known as the fishbone diagram. It’s a line intersected by slanted lines above and below it, and on these lines are listed the causal factors that lead to a given perceived problem. In the example listed on Wikipedia 1 , the categories of these causal factors are:
•    Equipment
•    Process 
•    People
•    Materials
•    Environment
•    Management
Most Ishikawa Diagrams will have at least one intersecting line devoted to each category. As I have noted in previous blogs, at the time the Titanic sank, the lookouts had no binoculars, because they were locked in Second Officer David Blair’s locker, and Blair wasn’t on board for the voyage, having disembarked at Southampton without telling anybody where they were 2 . So, this one causal factor falls into which Ishikawa Diagram category, exactly?
•    Equipment, since we’re talking about binoculars.
•    Process, since there should have been a process that required Blair to at least communicate the location of the binoculars.
•    People, since Blair wasn’t aboard.
•    Materials, since the binoculars were locked away behind a panel of wood, which could have (presumably) been demolished by one of the many metal axes on board.
•    Environment, because, of course, the Titanic hit an iceberg.
•    Management, because, well, all of the above.
Could it be, then, that a key commonly-used quality management technique has, in fact, invoked categories of causality that are so blurry that something as simple and straight-forward as some binoculars being locked away can’t fit specifically into one of those categories? And if the categories are thus blurred, doesn’t that at least imply that, in some circumstances, little or no usable information can be gleaned from them on a consistent basis? 

And, to ask just one more uncomfortable rhetorical question, could it be that a few of those organizations that claimed to be suddenly cured after having engaged quality techniques were either not really cured, or were misattributing the cause (ironically) of their improvement?

  1 Retrieved from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ishikawa_diagram#/media/File:Ishikawa_Fishbone_Diagram.svg on September 19, 2015, 20:25 MDT.
  2 Retrieved from http://nmni.com/titanic/Myth-Memory/Myth/No-binoculars-for-the-lookouts-on-Titanic.aspx on September 19, 2015, 20:21 MDT.