Post by Ed Rocha

Quality Letter #44 – I Don’t Like Quality Assurance Greetings to my colleagues that are a little annoyed when seeing a department name that creates false expectations. Quality be with you! I don’t know about you, but I always cringe when I see an Organization Chart with the “Quality Assurance” department (I don’t mind the objective of assuring Quality, my problem is with the department name). I have two reasons for my dislike of that title: -Isn’t it pretentious to assume that a small group of people in a windowless office are to be tasked with the mission of assuring quality for the Company? - If a Company really believes quality is a department’s responsibility, it can be an indication of how Quality is perceived. - If a department that often represents maybe 2% of the organization could “assure quality” it would be a much simpler world, not the one where I live. - I would much rather see “Quality Engineering”, or “Quality Systems”, or simply “Quality”. In the real-world Quality is a Risk Management business: - It is Risk Management when you are selecting the control methods, as nobody has unlimited budgets and need to assess the priorities to decide the techniques to be used. - It is Risk Management when someone comes with a deviation for a dimension that is 1µm out of specification. - It is Risk Management when the process needs to use a different machine than the one that was originally validated. … My predecessor in one of my previous jobs was a black & white Quality guy: “if it is out it is rejected”. - While this may sound the most Quality oriented behavior, in reality it is not. - The Organization would still make the judgment call. May it be the Plant Manager, Engineering, or the Production Leader that gets tired of involving Quality, just to hear a “no”. I would rather be involved in the decision, making and possibly identify ways of minimizing the risk (see “Quality Letter #34 – The Delivery Connection”), than to be left out completely. Risk Management is key!