The Lifesaving Rules for Quality
Occupational Safety professionals in industries like construction, manufacturing, oil & gas, and mining use the term “Life Saving Rules” to outline the measures people should take to protect their safety at work. The rules are non-negotiable and typically focus on high-risk activities or situations where a single mistake could have severe or fatal consequences. Because of the risks involved Life Saving Rules are taken seriously, as they should be.
How can we encourage our people to take seriously the situations where mistakes have other consequences? Consequences associated with the other letters making up the SQCDP initialism? (Safety, Quality, Cost, Delivery, and People), (or QCDSM, or other variations!)
Life Saving Rules for Quality could be used to specify these. Why rules for quality? Why not rules for cost, or delivery for example? Because quality is the best way to reduce cost, improve delivery and satisfy customers.
The Life Saving Rules for Quality could include…
- Understand and champion the interests of customers and stakeholders.
- Apply the concept of prevention. It typically costs ten times more to correct a problem than prevent it, and one thousand more if the problem escapes to a customer. Use your risk radar – Failure Mode and Effects Analysis (FMEA) is arguably the most powerful tool in the quality toolkit. Proactively identifying and mitigating for risk at the outset of a product or process design is an effective way to achieve Zero Defects.
- Work collaboratively to design quality into your products and services multifunctional team working is essential. Structured approaches to design such as Advanced Product Quality Planning (APQP) can be effective to facilitate this.
- Be “radically transparent” – always share information about failures. FAIL = First Attempt In Learning.
- Always define quality in measurable terms. If we accept the definition that quality is about meeting requirements, we need to understand exactly what the requirements are in order to establish how well they are being met.
- Understand your context, but don’t be constrained by or satisfied with “how we’ve always done it.”
- Define the “current best way” and have everyone follow it (until a better way emerges). Standardisation is one of the best ways to make sure operational processes are reliable and consistent.
- Understand the relationship between quality costs and the bottom line. Studies have shown that the cost of non-quality is typically 5 – 30% of gross sales.
- Assume the best in people.
- Make sure your processes are robust.
- Seek to make advocates of all stakeholders – sell it well so people understand the benefits and their own WIIFM. (What’s In It For Me?)
