At reIMAGINE 2015 our theme is You, reIMAGINED. To reimagine yourself you need to seek improvement in yourself so you can contribute to business success. This blog talks to this.
Pam
What is a better mousetrap?
Meaningful business success always comes down to one thing: improvement.
Improvement means building a better mousetrap. Of course the question is, what makes the mousetrap better? More mice caught over time? Mice caught with less energy? Mice caught more sustainably?
Quality professionals in an organization are frequently relegated to back of the room status. Their contributions are seen as necessary, but costly, as “takers away” not “adders to” the profit side of a business equation. Yet, they truly are one of the few groups in a company with formal training and focus on the process of improvement. They know what makes the mousetrap better and why.
So why don’t we use quality professionals more?
Often the IT department is tasked with finding a solution to help an organization achieve a cost reduction or data management efficiency… an improvement. But the IT department is just the research team. For a solution to become a better mousetrap, to be embraced and to be successful it must engage the users. The quality department is the best team to explain why it is important to ALL the users.
The individuals in your quality department are willing to support and advocate improvement efforts because they share these characteristics and training:
They have formally engaged customers to better identify details of the products and services that they really need.
They understand the need for the discipline of iterative approaches for analyzing big data to solve problems that were once considered unsolvable.
They demonstrate adaptive skills based on networked structures rather than the old pyramid shaped decision making.
The relevance of quality in understanding and explaining “it is a better mousetrap”, and in leading adoption of efficient solutions to support such efforts, in our mind creates the greatest opportunity for achieving the goals of the improvement state.
Quality improvement processes lead to the best mousetraps and the greatest successes of an organization. Ask your quality department how! Or read more about quality improvement here: http://www.qualityessentialssuite.com/business-success-comes-through-improvements