"How's our Quality?"

One of the risks in a mature Quality system is that there are a lot of details to master. So when you've mastered all the details, you think you know what's going on. But sometimes when all those trees crowd together you can lose sight of the forest.

I remember once, years ago, I worked for a company that had a very mature system. It seemed like they had metrics defined for everything but the coffee pot. When I first started there I had to learn the whole system pretty quickly, and my boss focused on the fine-grain details. Then suddenly we reorganized: instead of reporting to a functional expert located far away, now I reported to the General Manager in my own location.

For my first meeting with him, I brought along all the charts and metrics that my former boss had always wanted to review, but the GM waved them away. Instead, he asked me, "So how is our Quality?"

I fumbled for a minute and started to explain, "We measure that in a lot of ways. Now this chart, for instance, shows that ...."

The GM cut me off. "How's our Quality?"

I couldn't tell what he wanted to know.

"Look, I know that the guy you used to work for asked for all these dozens of metrics. He used to present his charts to me and I couldn't make head nor tail of them. I just want to know how we are doing."

Whatever answer I gave didn't satisfy him. So when I got back to my desk I pulled out all the metrics and tried to look at them from a high level. I realized that they fell naturally into three buckets:

• metrics related to our product performance and customer satisfaction;
• metrics related to how well we complied with the formal procedures mandated by Headquarters;
• and metrics that tracked internal administrative activities—these weren't as important as the other two, but I had inherited them as part of the system so I still calculated them.

The other thing I realized was that the performance inside each bucket was pretty consistent. When I saw that, I knew how I was going to report the results to our GM.

Next week was my next meeting with him. And sure enough, he started by asking, "How's our Quality?"

This time I had an answer. "Our product quality is great, and our customers are very happy. Those metrics are all green. Our process adherence is lousy. Those metrics are all deep red. And our internal functions are kind of wishy-washy, not great but not terrible. You can call those yellow, if you like."

The GM grinned. "Thank you. That's what I was looking for. Also it's pretty much what I expected. Now go fix the ones that aren't already green."  

"Aye aye, sir." 

We communicated a lot more easily after that. And I learned, never lose sight of the big picture. Ultimately all those details are there only to support and flesh out that big picture. But if you can't see the big picture, you don't know where to start work.