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Although business leaders and managers of the organization play the
key role in company-level quality management (QM) realization, quality
professionals should also find opportunities of their own in this
connection. Critical questions for all quality experts include the
following: What evidence is there that the quality professionals have
taken seriously their challenge of QM? Have they stuck to considering
their professional topics only amongst themselves at the levels of
concepts, principles (i.e. philosophical), and tools? In itself, this
is important too, but in order to bring about development, real endeavors
are also needed. How could quality professionals grow in their modes
of thinking and acting so that new development global and societal
conditions (e.g. e-business) can also be taken into account as challenges
in organizations' quality approach and to do that in an innovative
way. How do quality experts understand the real needs of company leadership?
Nowadays quality experts' work requires wide multidisciplinary competencies
including:
- Management practices of the own company, Modern business practices
in general
- Management and leadership methodology, recognized QM methodology,
Methods of organizational learning, Customer satisfaction methodology
(including Kano methodology and CRM), Change management, Knowledge
management means, Environmental management practices, ICT management,
Information security, Risk management, Work philosophy
- Hoshin Kanri, Quality awards models, ISO 9000 standards, Benchmarking,
Supply or partnership management
- Balanced strategy scorecard, Business process management and reengineering,
Quality costing and activity based costing, Time based management
- Innovation methodology, Dependability methods, Documentation methods,
Statistical methods
Thus proficiency of a quality expert includes two supplementary disciplines:
- Understanding the development of business fundamentals and emphases
- Facilitation of modern quality management and quality assurance
principles and tools
Effective dialogue and cooperation is a necessity between business
leaders and quality experts. Business leaders know the right things
and experts know the best means to do things right. Business leaders
are generalists and strongly individuals with strong organizational
positions. Experts are specialists and deeply knowing individuals
with low position-based authority. Company's future competitiveness
is based on knowledge activated for quantitative and qualitative growth
of the business. Investor's decisions are based on expectations on
the company's growth and future-certainty. Company's market capitalization
and e.g. position in recruitment market are greatly originated in
company's intellectual capital.
Communication between quality experts and business leaders for quality
integration implies that the experts are able to get business people
committed to professional quality principles and methodology. This
corresponds "selling" them expert knowledge. Also the benefits
of the quality approach should be argumented to the business leaders
and decision makers in a clear and interesting way. In fact, systematic
selling methodology can be applied in this task. Very applicable is
so called funnel-methodology
originally developed by Jorma Kylander.
Quality professionals should continually maintain and develop their
professional knowledge and abilities. For that purpose it is important
to have a recognized company-internal expert network (e.g. BEST -
Business Excellence Support Team) and also to keep contacts with external
expert-colleagues world-widely. In fact, in modern organizations there
are no more any particular fixed quality departments or organizations
but expert services are arranged through a virtual organization solution.
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Juhani Anttila
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