Business Managers as Quality Champion

The business goal to run a real-time high-quality digital organization is to create synergy by harmonizing all functions to achieve digital synchronization of the entire organization.

Organizational excellence is achieved by delivering qualified products or services and continuously improving business performance. Quality Management is not one department’s work, as a degree of quality is in everything people do and experience. Quality is not just the specific task of one single business department or function as well, it is one of the business management disciplines which needs to be taken in a systematic way. Quality management is like change management, needs to be embedded in the corporate culture. Functional managers need to become quality champions for quality control and quality assurance, and they are the quality masters to run the high quality and high-performance digital business.

Transparency enforces quality: What is required for functional management quality check is to clarify the purpose and engage all the people involved working together as a team to excel in the delivery of quality products or services with accelerated speed. It is really important for teams as every member is always aware of how the whole process is going on, what results have already been achieved. Plus, it's always easier to decide who really deserves being rewarded afterward and that's the main incentive to improve quality. Transparency is also important at many levels to run a high-quality business, including frontline workers with each other, and their supervisors, managers and supervisors, directors and managers, directors and shareholders. The highly effective quality management is dependent upon a common vision, a common message, feedback loops, and trust. The transparency is to transform quality management into the system approach, not through command-control hierarchy only. You could supervise with control every move. It has to be implemented systematically and communicated democratically. Trust for transparent performance is only possible if the cultural grain, dictated formally or informally, by the leaders at the top support an open and trusting work environment to enforce quality and improve business results.

Motivation to inspire “quality is everyone’s business” and”continuous improvement” culture: A continuous improvement culture isn’t built in a day, it takes strategy and practices. Rewarding people for taking responsibility and recognizing their worth is key to improve quality for the long term. Most people like to receive the financial reward but also trusting them to take work forward without micromanagement liberates the spirit of the team, show respect for all parties. Goals that are measurable, quantifiable and objective (instead of subjective) help to improve the quality and performance management process as well. In order to become more transparent, the quality assessment process, as well as its linkage to rewards, should be simple and clear. business value achieved by quality management has to be driven, indicated and understood at all levels of the organization. This is accomplished by establishing strong interdependent relationships, the shared vision, optimized processes, frictionless business culture, and a set of business practices. It's much easier when continuous improvement is part of having a common and operational way to define and apply a language of work so that together you can improve things on your own and with others.

Resource management and end-to-end quality monitoring: High-mature digital organizations can identify ways of realizing the end-to-end monitoring of key performance indicators, develop effective digital principles, processes, and the best/next practices for improving business quality. The re-framed business processes help to bridge silo, and the optimal sets of business capabilities to delight customers and improve quality. Organizations have limited resources, many businesses took a big bite of resource to keep the lights on, only left very little for doing business optimization, innovating, or digitalization. Thus, resource management becomes a bottleneck for running a high quality and a high-performance business. An effective resource allocation scenario helps to take advantage of resources, optimize cost, set priority, keep the process transparent, and manage a well-rounded digital portfolio effectively and efficiently. Quality management is not an isolated practice, or one group’s work only, it’s an interdisciplinary management discipline. To create synergy, optimize quality, unlock performance and unleash digital potential, businesses need to fine-tune their business structure and organizational system concentrated on the cultural system, moral system, social system, material system, functional system, and the holistic digital ecosystem, in achieving the next level of quality, performance, and business maturity.

The business goal to run a real-time high-quality digital organization is to create synergy by harmonizing all functions to achieve digital synchronization of the entire organization. It’s important to strike the right balance of collaboration and competition to create business synergy for making the digital paradigm shift. The functional business managers are gatekeepers of quality control and they are quality masters who understand what drives cost and what drives value. They have both vision and passion, capability and capacity to help their businesses enter into the new world of quality excellence.

Posted in: Future of Leadership,Quality,Talent Master