Defining Quality

What is Quality?

If you want to implement a management system that's supposed to achieve Quality, it's fair to ask what you think you are achieving. Knowing the destination will influence how you choose to get there.

Unfortunately this is not exactly an easy question. Many authorities in the field have tried their hand at it, and each one has a different answer.  

Philip B. Crosby: Quality is conformance to requirements.*

Joseph M. Juran: Quality is fitness for use.*

W. Edwards Deming: Good quality means a predictable degree of uniformity and dependability with a quality standard suited to the customer.*

American Society for Quality (ASQ): Quality denotes an excellence in goods and services, especially to the degree they conform to requirements and satisfy customers.*

ISO 9000:2015, def. 3.6.2: "degree to which a set of inherent characteristics (3.10.1) of an object (3.6.1) fulfils requirements (3.6.4)."

This is fine, and there may be good reasons to argue for one or another in an academic setting. Unfortunately they are all too narrow for practical use in a real-life Quality Management System. Pragmatically, a QMS influences every aspect of the organization. These definitions either refer to requirements (which don't always exist, or at least not explicitly), or refer to products and neglect services (although ISO 9000:2015, def. 6.6.1 does helpfully explain that an "object" can include a service), or at any rate limit themselves to the context of satisfying paying customers while ignoring the rest of an organization's interested parties.

Fortunately, I can give you a definition which is simpler than any of these, which includes them all as special cases, and which is broad enough to match the applicability of a fully-realized QMS:

Quality means getting what you want.

Look at the definitions above, and I think you'll agree we are all talking about the same thing. "Conformance to requirements"? But a requirement is just something that somebody wants. If a product conforms to requirements, the person asking for it gets what he wants. "Fitness for use"? Again, fitness is defined by what we are trying to get – by what we want. And so on.

Moreover, this definition can be used pragmatically and off-the-cuff, whenever you need it. It cuts through the fog. Whether you are talking with your manager or your auditor or a technician on the line, if there's a question about the relevance of this or that element of the system just ask, "Are we getting what we want? Do we need this element in order to make sure we continue to get what we want?" If yes, the element belongs in your QMS and the argument is over. If no, not. It really is that simple.    

* These four definitions can be found in many places, but in this instance I took them from the opening pages of Quality and Reliability in Engineering, by Tirupathi R. Chandrupatla, Cambridge University Press, 2009, ISBN 978-0-521-51522-1, reproduced at this link here.