In an article on February 16 we discussed Striving for quality performance. We said that many enterprises emphasize quality in their business processes. This has been particularly true since we reengineered our business processes specifically to help us manage performance quality.

Does “performance quality” make sense to you? When you buy something, are you concerned about “performance quality”? Even for a service, what is more important — the performance quality in delivering the service or the quality of the result of the service? The result of the service is your input result that you add value to.

In the article, we said we need a way to understand quality consistently across the whole enterprise, to understand the impact of bad quality, and to isolate problems producing bad quality.

As we see with our business processes, quality happens along the process. But how do we manage performance quality? Many set up performance checkpoints, but what are they really managing at these checkpoints? The fact is the only place we can formally manage quality of reengineered business processes is the quality of the output result from the process.

This is because quality is an attribute of results. Quality is not an attribute of performance. Effectiveness is an attribute of performance. Instead of managing performance quality, we need to define the results that are produced in the business process.

Our order fulfillment process includes many results like order received, credit checked, inventory checked, order approved, inventory picked, invoice prepared, delivery organized, order delivered, customer receipt confirmed, etc. The only way to manage quality within the process is to manage the quality of these results. Any one low-quality result could lead to an unfulfilled order output result. If we only manage the output result quality and performance quality in the process, are we really doing what we should be doing?

The only way to understand quality consistently across the whole enterprise is to manage the quality of results across the enterprise. The only way to understand the impact of bad quality is to manage quality along the chain of results. The only way isolate problems producing bad quality is to manage the effectiveness of the performance producing the result.

So, stop striving for performance quality, strive for quality results.

Filed under: Conventional Management Methods • Performance Management • Quality Management • Result Management

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