5 Valuable Life Lessons to Learn from Quality Management
From the outside, quality management is often seen as a jargon-ridden field, focused on technical measures of quality. Some people may have a basic idea that it involves the quality control of the products they use while others may think of it as how well a business is run.
Quality management is not just about the product or business procedures. It’s about both. Quality management is about the product AND how it is produced.
It is also about continuous improvement – from the products that the customer buys through to the way employees are managed. Quality management is closely tied to the entire culture of a business.
Quality management has a strong link to many important life lessons as well, showing just how vital this concept really is.
Lesson #1: It’s about the journey, not the destination
The end goal is to produce products of the highest quality, but good quality strategies can look beyond that to see the bigger picture as well.
Focusing on processes rather than only the overall result is key to achieving this goal, which is a vital aspect of the ISO 9001 quality standard.
To be compliant and meet international standards, companies need to prove that they have all the procedures and processes in place for continuous improvement.
A really simple summary of how this applies in life? For achieving meaningful goals, it’s the “day to day” efforts, and all the little routine habits, that matter. Ultimately, they determine quality of life.
Lesson #2: It really is about teamwork
These days, clichés like “there’s no ‘I’ in team” are associated with shallow corporate exercises. However, success in pretty much any line of business truly is about teamwork.
There are many different responsibilities within the system of quality improvement, across many areas of a company.
This alone makes it a team investment. For each tactic, plan, process and procedure to be implemented, you need everyone to be on the same page.
Outside of business, it’s powerful to align your efforts properly with those of other people. This includes people you know personally and sometimes those you don’t. Collaborating well with others makes it possible to achieve a lot more. Often, it bears rewards in terms of personal satisfaction and happiness, too.
Automated tools that allow collaboration, permissions and scheduling make sure that teams can work together simply – something that is highly important when quality and improvement are concerned.
Lesson #3: Work smarter, not harder
Meeting quality goals is often about doing things in a smarter, simpler way rather than trying to reinvent the wheel.
When you focus on continuous improvement through feedback, it becomes a lot easier to determine how well processes are working throughout a business.
One of the main reasons that many companies use automated quality software for this is that it makes everything simpler and quicker. For example, integrated tools enable you to manage documents, audits and CAPA from one central dashboard.
Both in and outside of business, it makes sense to be efficient. Get work done in ways that are fast and clever. Then spend saved time and effort on other priorities and new pursuits.
Lesson #4: You’re only as strong as your weakest link
An example. You can have a killer team, an excellent product and strong customer service – but that’s not enough if you have a weak supply chain.
Processes that manage the supply chain can go a long way towards ensuring that your quality goals don’t suffer because of sub-standard suppliers.
And if you have great suppliers but consistently struggle with product non-conformances and customer complaints, that’s going to compromise business success too.
Quality management is an amazingly holistic field of knowledge. It focuses on all the main components and business systems that work together to determine success.
Effective quality management software makes it easier to monitor and control these diverse systems (from document management to customer complaints to risk management) and to integrate them into a single management system.
Once you have identified and resolved your weakest links, progress is more accessible.
Of course, this applies in life, too. Find what’s really out of balance, work on fixing that, and everything will go better.
Lesson #5: Follow-through is everything
This applies to just about everything in life. For the quality process, following through is downright vital.
Whether you have detected a gap in competency or noticed a problem in your processes, tracking, resolving, and closing everything is the only way to prevent repeats.
With follow-throughs, you won’t have to worry about anything getting missed along the way. This is why COMPLIANT is vital to your quality management system.