Quality management is probably one of the most often written about subjects in business. There are hundreds of books and thousands of blog posts with advice on how to improve quality. Some organizations opt to adopt comprehensive process management methodologies like Six Sigma, Total Quality Management, Toyota Production System, or Lean manufacturing.

These approaches all have their place and can be incredibly valuable in the right situation, but you don’t have to go all-in on one of them to improve the quality of your business outputs. There are some easy to implement things you can do to reduce waste and improve results.

We’d like to recommend a few.

What is Quality?

Before we get into the techniques we love most; it is important to be clear about what quality means. People often think that quality relates only to the final product that is delivered to the customer.

If a company produces widgets, for example, a widget that meets customer approval is seen as a quality win. But what if all widgets delivered to customers are perfect, but 5% required rework on the production line? That’s a quality problem. What if the customer has a question about the widget, but she can’t get through to a support person? Another quality problem. What if the workers who made the widget don’t get their paycheck on time? You can bet they think there’s a quality problem.

The point is that every process within an organization is subject to variations in quality. When you look at how you manage quality at yours, it pays to think very broadly about it.

Ok, now on to the things you can do right away to start making process improvements.

Standard Work

Standard work is simply the documentation of the current best practices for performing any task or process. This is a simple idea, but it is extremely common to have multiple workers doing the same job in different enough ways to result in variation. Standard work removes that variation and ensures that the process is performed the same way every time. From there, improvements can be implemented in a systematic approach to move the process closer to a perfect outcome with no waste.

The people who operate the process should be involved in crafting the Standard. Once complete, the documentation should be available in the workspace whenever it is needed. This step forms the basis of quality management and is a prerequisite to improvement.

The 5 Whys

Too often, when a problem arises, there is a tendency to jump to solutions or blame people. An excellent way to think about quality management is to realize that almost all failures are failures or process. Sure, people make mistakes, but it’s rarely malicious. More often, it is a problem with training, lack of resources, poor workspace organization, or error-prone process design. To find out which, the 5 Whys can be used.

The 5 Whys technique is precisely what it says. When a process defect occurs, you ask “why” until the root cause is uncovered. This usually takes about five iterations. For example, a marketing team may have this conversation:

Our latest blog post isn’t getting any traffic.

Why isn’t the blog post getting any traffic?

It is ranking #40 on Google and isn’t being found by searchers.

Why is it ranking so poorly on Google?

It hasn’t been optimized for search engines.

Why hasn’t it been optimized for search engines?

It was written by the CTO and not reviewed by marketing.

Why was it not reviewed by marketing?

There is no process that requires marketing review before publication.

Why is there no process that requires review?

The content management software doesn’t support it.

In this case, the quality of the content was not the cause of the disappointing results. We could blame the CTO for not optimizing the post, but the real problem is that the process makes that type of error possible. We can choose to live with this risk or invest in a solution that would eliminate it. The 5 Whys I powerful because it forces you to challenge assumptions.

Control Charts

What we love about control charts is that they help managers differentiate between normal process variation and variation that requires attention.

A process control chart is a graph used to visualize how a process performs over time. Data points are mapped in time order in a table with a central line for the average (or median), an upper line for the upper control limit, and a lower line for the lower control limit. Process control charts help managers avoid overreacting to every unimportant up and downswing. They also alienate problems caused by only looking at average results, instead of the variations of results. This post goes into more detail about how they are used.

All of these quality management techniques can be of value to organizations of every size and level of complexity. Quality management software can be used to help administer them on a day to day basis and make them even more useful. If you are committed to improving the quality of your process, they are the perfect place to start.