Quality

Today i'm going to share my thought about term "quality". As most of my friends know that it is related to my job, so i thought i should share something with you guys.
Lets start with the term Quality...
What is quality:
The term 'quality' is often used in a vague, blurred way. If someone talks about 'working on quality', they may simply mean activities designed to improve the organisation and its services.
Quality is essentially about learning what you are doing well and doing it better. It also means finding out what you may need to change to make sure you meet the needs of your service users.

Quality is about:
@ knowing what you want to do and how you want to do it
@ learning from what you do
@ using what you learn to develop your organisation and its services
@ seeking to achieve continuous improvement
@ satisfying your stakeholders - those different people and groups with an interest in your organisation.

The domain of the quality professional has changed. From its humble beginnings in manufacturing, it is now expected, along with other infrastructure professions, such as IT, HR and finance, to contribute at the organisational level. Unlike those other professions, quality expertise can be hard to define, perhaps because there are many views of what business-level quality means.
At its simplest level, quality answers two questions: ‘What is wanted?’ and ‘How do we do it?’ Accordingly, quality’s stomping ground has always been the area of processes. From the bread and butter of ISO 9000, to the heady heights of TQM, quality professionals specify, measure, improve and re-engineer processes to ensure that people get what they want.

So what is wrong?
If requirements are wrong, then failure is guaranteed. Focus is the domain of QA where, without a specification, quality cannot be measured and thus controlled. You cannot have zero defects if you do not have a standard against which to measure defectiveness.
This reflects the early days, where quality was clearly about product. Quality Control, and later Quality Assurance, was our domain - we didn’t care about customers; the research and design department was responsible for designing the job and sales and marketing for selling it. But those halcyon days of definitive specifications and jobs for life are long gone.
I takes a step further down the value chain, to the use of the product or service (at which point customers had forced their way into the frame), i still presupposes that we can fully understand how the product will be used, which is a great challenge (and not always possible). You know, Some things are ‘unknown and unknowable’.
ISO 8402 recognises this uncertainty with its ‘implied need’. It uses the word ‘entity’ as opposed to the ‘product or service’ definition of its earlier (1986) version, indicating a broadening uncertainty. Nonetheless, it suffers again from a simplistic, single-minded focus - all we need to do is to figure out what is wanted and then deliver it.
The quality models are a step further into broader business. Here, although processes are important, quality is much more about people: customers are there, but so too are stakeholders - employees, partners, suppliers, shareholders and society. Perhaps wisely, the models avoid nailing down a specific definition of quality, leaving us without a definition that encompasses a broader business view.
ISO9000:2000 steps in this direction also, talking about ‘customer and other interested parties’, but leaves the definition of quality at a rather generalised ‘degree to which a set of inherent characteristics fulfils requirements’.

I hope that these words will help you to understand the term "Quality"

Luv,
~SA