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Follow UsBANGALORE: Tuesday onwards, software professionals in the Indian Silicon
Valley are being bombarded with the tenets of quality by the teachers of various
schools of learning. The Quality Assurance Institute (India) is organisation the
SEPG Conference in India 2000. The five-day event will include three days of
pre-conference tutorials, which will cover some of the most important aspects of
quality, namely Deming’s philosophy, Experience Factory and Balance Scorecard.
Mr Richard Zultner of Zultner & Co., who was a student of Dr W. Edwards
Deming, on Tuesday introduced the participants to the philosophy of Dr Deming,
the "man who taught Japan quality".
On the issue of improvement, Mr Zultner said, improvement and learning were
two sides of a coin. "Organisations that do not pay attention to learning
will be limited in improvement. A management’s job is to lead its people to
improve. You do not have quality if you do not have improvement, business
improvement."
Mr Zultner pointed out that the enemy of improvement was variation. Variation
is fundamental to quality, be it with metrics, process improvement or
measurement, said Mr Zultner. "No two product that rolls out of a factory
are similar," he said, adding that variation was inherent. "The
foundation of quality is the ability to deal with variation."
Mr Zultner also stressed on the importance of psychology as an engine for
change. "It is possible that the managment might not know. But, it must
learn. Often, you see a statement on quality being put up on the corridors of a
company and signed by all the employees. This is almost the guarantee of a
clueless management."
The Deming Prize for Quality instituted by the Japanese Union of Science and
Engineering does not require any specific method to be followed by the
organisation. "You got to have a method and you should have been
successful. The way you put the method into action will depend on your situation
and objective," Mr Zultner said.
According to Mr Zultner, the three most important aspects of quality are:
1. Statistical Process Control. What should an organisation do to solve
problems? Everybody in the organisation should be able to solve problems.
However, there should be a common approach to it. We can then accelerate the
process.
2. Assuring Customer satisfaction is Quality Function Developement (QFD).
3. Thirdly, there has to be a competitive strategy in place to take the
organisation to higher place, which is the Policy Deployment.
Mr Zultner advised that knowledge in the organisation should be captured,
especially in software organisations, where mobility is high. He also warned
that part of the improvement must go in improving the work life of people in the
organisation.
He told the software professionals that they should not expect their
customers to tell them the specifications. "It is not their job to tell you
the specifics. You have the expertise in training, tools and specifics. You have
to satisfy them. Also, specifics is the means to an end, not an end by
itself," he said.