Situation: Quality is a CEO’s #1 objective for his company. As the company has grown and processes have become more complex with more people involved, consistent quality is becoming an issue. The CEO wants to refocus and reestablish a quality culture to support future growth. What have others done to increase the quality of their product or service? How do you maintain a culture focused on quality?

Advice from the CEOs:

• Trust is a company’s most important commodity. This trumps financial exposure. In case described, the client trusts the company to produce and deliver a quality service upon which they can rely.
• Go all of the way back into system design – or how any particular product system is set up.
  • Assemble a diverse group to review both the company’s deliverables and the system inputs.
  • Brainstorm everything that can break.
  • Prioritize the list based on potential exposure to the company.
  • Do a deep-dive analysis of the top 5 or 10 exposure areas.
  • Reprioritize after the deep dive has been completed.
  • Fix all issues identified in order of exposure.
  • Repeat the exercise periodically to assure that quality is maintained.
• Empower and reward anyone who develops improvements in quality control.
• Shield the company from any exposure over which it has no control. This can be accomplished through language in the company’s service agreements, and through language covering service deliverables.
• Once the company has shielded itself from an exposure, set up flags in the monitoring systems that will alert the company of events or situations that will impact clients. This allows the company to inform clients of situations that may impact them without making recommendations as to how the client should handle the situation.

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