Quality isn't made at the end - it must start at the beginning.

Authored by:

William J. Lawrence, Jr.

 Everyone wants to have good outcomes. To have satisfied customers, less stress, difficulty, and effort on the way to that good outcome.

But reality is that there are so many moving parts in the Audio Visual/Unified Communications/whatever-you-do-Industry that the odds are stacked against that happening without a solid plan—or even with one.

Even the best professionals, the highest-performing teams, and the most organized organizations are subject to a constant torrent of distractions, difficulties, challenges, and surprises. Sounds just awful.

It is there that I disagree. Consistently navigating and overcoming those obstacles to deliver predictable quality outcomes is what defines greatness. That test of an organization, or a team's "mettle".

Herein lies the need for an end-to-end Quality Assurance Plan.

So often we see (or experience) the desperation of trying to "commission in" quality control at the conclusion of a project. A noble effort, yes! But often one that can never succeed on its own merit because of the scope and magnitude of most projects.

Why is this?

Because Quality Assurance was not applied at the very inception of the process or was not applied throughout the life cycle of the project.

Quality Assurance is not a single "action". Not something that can be effectively used as a "get-well" plan in the final hours. It must be woven throughout the very fabric of the entire process and the Team. A critical miscalculation in the scoping effort can ripple through to become an unrecoverable defect discovered in commissioning if there are no assurance checks to catch it early. A slipped decimal place, unconsidered environmental factor, unasked questions, or reasonable (yet incorrect) assumption carried through undetected may render the outcome unresolvable without major financial, confidence, and time losses. Resulting in scrambled resources, expedited shipping, missed delivery dates, and ripples into other projects/clients while the all-hands-on-deck rescue occurs.

There’s a common pushback against using a beginning-to-end Quality Assurance process, that it "takes too much time." 

A proper QA process is neither onerous nor time-consuming; it consistently saves time.

I always respond with the same comment and question:

It only takes the time required to do it right, at the right time.

How fast do you need to fail to make your customer happy?