What is Quality for you?

A few years ago during my interview for an executive position, I was asked this simple question: What is Quality for you? None of the standard answers, “conformance to requirements”, “delivering as per the committed scope”, “taking care of both functional and non-functional requirements”, “verification & validation”, “meeting needs & expectations”, “zero bug delivery”, etc.impressed the interviewer. I was able to go through to the next round by giving a few practical examples but was not happy with my response. I kept thinking about the same to find the right answer that I can be convinced with. Generally, the thought of quality reminds us of testing – QA, quality control (QC) etc. But it cannot be just that. Ever experienced QA team getting blamed for quality?

Having worked for more than 20 years in the IT industry and experienced the entire ecosystem at different levels and in different environments, I realized that Quality has multiple dimensions and is not easy to define. It depends on what you are looking at and to whom (at what level) you are talking to. Here I tried to fit the quality in three dimensions – Customers, Business, and Employees. It gets complicated as we start thinking about nature of business (products, services), domain/industry vertical (Ex: healthcare, finance, e-commerce, oil & gas), technology (Programming languages, Cloud, ERP, Database) etc. So, a detailed answer needs more elaboration and is outside the scope of this article. I am happy to help if anyone would like to spend the time & effort to write that book:-). As they say, “A picture is worth a thousand words”, I would like to take the help of the below image to portray my high-level concept and explain. This is by no means a complete picture or a definition of quality.

Hope the above image is self-explanatory and you now clearly understand why we say “Quality is everyone’s responsibility” – in fact for each department and every employee. Each component shown in the above image is the byproduct of quality, or enables it, and can be seen as quality. For example, “Happy & Satisfied Customers” represent quality, “Profitable & Growing Business” is an indication of quality, and “Motivated & Engaged Employees” reflects quality – this is what quality is for me. When any of these 3 outcomes are not achieved, quality does not have any meaning or value. Many of them are tightly coupled as well which means it is not an individual effort. Here are some of the inter-dependencies you can think of (again, not a complete list):

1) HR policies at the company level will influence & impact employee productivity, and retention. Ensure quality in your HR policies.

2) Coding standards and practices followed at the team level will impact delivery and customer satisfaction. Ensure quality in coding standards and practices you follow.

3) Quality of marketing leads will impact sales closure and revenues. Ensure quality in your marketing engagements.

4) Project or Release planning will impact delivery quality, marketing plan, and sales plan. Ensure you have a solid plan to start with.

5) Innovations will impact your market share, revenue growth, and employee retention. Ensure quality in the type of innovations you choose to implement.

6) Ethics, values and collaboration are key for success throughout the organization. Ensure quality in those and lead by example.

Quality is inevitable to any business and it is “anything that works for you” – in your favour and helps you grow/move ahead/succeed. Quality doesn’t come cheap and it’s a journey. While participating in ISO &CMMi audits in the past, I heard “If you think compliance is expensive, try non-compliance”. I believe a similar analogy can be applied to quality to say, “If you think that high quality is expensive, try poor/low quality”.  There are many quality enablers that help you to achieve and influence quality. It is a continuous improvement process. Here are some of the quality enablers in each of the three dimensions (not in any particular order). Just think, if each of the process or practice is helping you to meet its goals and achieve the best quality. If not, you need to focus on improving that area. I am sure you can think of many more and will be able to fit in the diagram above.

Company/Business: Legal practices, HR policies, Long term vision & strategy, Open communication, Quality surveys, Recruitment & Retention, Vendor management, Partner management, Customer expectations management, Rewards & Recognition, Results-oriented (Mentioning this as I have seen companies focusing on measuring quality, based on the hours spent by employees, instead of outcome/results), Decision making, Work environment, Employee engagement etc.

Employees: Requirements quality, Quality analysis, Architecture quality, Design quality, Code quality, Estimates Quality, Planning, Quality of coding standards & practices you follow, test case quality, UI/UX quality, Root cause analysis, Tools & Technologies, Development methodology, Automation, DevOps, SRE etc.

Customers: Reference able customers, Cross-sell & up-sell opportunities, Customer lifetime value, Alignment to your business, Customer/Product support etc.

Quality needs to be everywhere and in everything you do. Quality is not easy to define and there is no silver bullet to achieve the same. If you are looking for a one-word answer for “What is quality?” then it should be “everything”. You read it right – “Quality is everything” – it should be in everything that you do. Once you change your perspective, mindset and strive to achieve quality in everything you do, you will achieve success for sure. Quality can be attributed to your personal life and family life as well, not just for your professional life. For example, don’t you aim for quality life, quality relations, quality society, quality environment, quality roads, quality bike, quality house, quality education and so on? Just think about it. That is why quality is everything. Hope this was intriguing.

Let me know your views and what is Quality for you? Keep rocking.

Note: The content of this article is a reflection of my views, opinions and experience. I owe the credits to some of the standard quotes I have used, but I made up others. Any resemblance to your knowledge and/or experience is a mere coincidence and is not intentional.

About me

Anand Vemulapati is a seasoned IT professional with over 20 years of progressive cross-functional experience in Software Development, QA, Consulting, Product Management, Project Management, Support, Delivery, Process definition & implementation, Transformation initiatives, Software development methodologies in IT products and services organizations across several technologies. He has over 5 years of experience working in the USA, managed and worked with globally distributed teams, international customers and clients driving enterprise-level products and projects in organizations of different shapes, sizes and forms. Anand is a continuous learner, has a rare combination of business, leadership, functional, process and technical skills with many internationally recognized credentials to his name – Multiple AWS certifications, Pragmatic Marketing Certified, PMP, CSM, DevOps, ITIL, Six Sigma etc.