Quality Management
Quality management is the discipline of setting a standard, measuring against it, and closing the gap systematically, using approaches like TQM, Six Sigma or Lean, rather than relying on individual effort to catch defects.
Five arrows loop in a circle, each one a stage of the cycle feeding into the next.
Reach for this when…
- Defects or complaints keep recurring despite people trying harder.
- Quality depends on which person is on shift.
- You're scaling and can no longer eyeball every output yourself.
How to run it
- Define the quality standard in concrete, checkable terms.
- Measure current performance against that standard.
- Find the root cause of the gap, not just the symptom.
- Change the process, not just the output.
- Build in a check that catches drift early next time.
A worked example
Situation. Abdullah Al-Otaibi ran a small furniture workshop in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, where returns for warped panels kept eating margin, and everyone blamed the latest batch of wood.
Applied. He tracked defects for a month and found the real cause was inconsistent drying time, not the timber. He standardised the drying process and added a moisture check before assembly.
Result. Returns dropped by most of what they'd been losing, and he could finally quote a delivery date with confidence.
The catch
Quality systems can calcify into paperwork that measures compliance rather than quality, and heavy process can choke the improvisation a small team relies on. It also says nothing about whether you're building the right thing, only whether you're building it consistently.
A consistent process producing the wrong product is quality management working exactly as designed, and still failing the business.
Origin: Deming; Juran; Crosby (TQM foundations); DMAIC itself formalised by Bill Smith and Mikel Harry at Motorola for Six Sigma