Truly I started this blog with great reluctance. It was only after a meeting with some of my colleagues who kept saying "We can always depend on you to keep us grounded in good quality. You make a great defense of quality in everything you write--you need to get all these ideas down in a blog." that with a huge sigh I agreed.
Mentioning quality assurance or control of any kind these days normally just produces glazed eyes, which is sad because fundamentally good quality adds to the quality of life and poor or negative quality does the opposite.
My view is probably a little bit different, with regard to this subject, as I grew up in two worlds--Europe and Africa. Shuttling between the two for most of my life, I saw how in Africa we had to do a lot with very few resources, and in Europe it seemed to be the opposite. In our contracts and work in Africa we had to practice basic quality of everything as a survival technique, but in Europe it seemed that you could do anything you wanted to as long as the documentation was in order. In the US we are sadly emulating the Europeans.
Another thing that became obvious to us in Africa is that when we tried to emulate the European dictate of doing this or that procedure of anything (let alone that each European nation had its own slant on what was best) disaster and failure became our companions. Quality for us in mother Africa meant a human endeavor to do our best that sometimes was documented and sometimes was not, but all involved knew which direction our mental compass was firmly focused on.
Early on, trying to dig deep into this morass of advice from the western world, these lists of "do this but don't do that," I came across the work of W. Edwards Deming. With the able assistance of many of his colleagues, Deming laid out very clearly the rule sets of how, when, and why Quality of any form should be applied--and most importantly how you could measure the success of its application.
Of Deming's "14 Points for Management," 8. Drive out fear and 12. Remove barriers to pride of workmanship resonated at all levels to the wonderful teams that I worked with, no matter the perceived European standards of education and literacy they did or didn't meet. It was fairly stunning in the early 80s to be recruited to the US to teach this same methodology (which "The Boss" would proudly sing was "Born in the USA") on huge sophisticated projects to an American audience who had apparently forgotten the basics.
That has been my rewarding life's work ever since.
