Why Quality Is Important

These two volumes are about understanding—why—and application—how—with the aim of providing guidance and introduction to both. Quality is the consistent achievement of the user’s expectations of a product or service. The achievement needs to be “The right thing, right first time, every time, in time.” Beginning with manufacturing and services, it also includes professional, personal, and spiritual dimensions. Variation does not sit happily with consistency and skill in handling risk and opportunity requires competence in the use of statistics, probability, and uncertainty; and needs to complement the critically essential soft dimensions of quality and the overarching and underpinning primacy of personal relationships. There are no clear boundaries to the applicability of quality and the related processes and procedures expressed in management systems, and this is why it matters so much to show “how it applies in diverse business and social environments.” Increasingly, the acceptability of boundaries that are drawn depends on their effect on the user and the achievement of quality, and the latest standards on quality management are explicit on this key point. Quality is everyone’s business, and there is no single professional discipline that can properly express this. Insights, knowledge, experience, best practice, tools, and techniques need to be shared across all kinds of organizational and professional boundaries, and there is no departmental boundary that can stand apart from the organization-wide commitment to quality achievement.