Quality assurance

Finish what you have started

What is the distinguishing character of the most successful people? They finish what they have started.

Good business plans are only good if they are fully implemented. Many businesses started with great ideas only to see these businesses fail, they had a plan, they started to work on the plan, but they didn’t follow through.

When the management fails to emphasize the importance of following through, employees will not follow through on their job performance.

In the past few months, I had several incidents where I didn’t get excellent customer service support. In one of my international flights with a world class airlines, I had to change my destination after I checked in my luggage, only to find out later that my bags didn’t not arrive with me on the same flight. I have talked to the airlines customer agent and explained to him in full details about my intentions to change my flight routes and he re-assured me over and over that my checked in luggage will be with me on the same flight, but later on I found out that this agent didn’t not do his job thoroughly and he didn’t not rely the message to the ramp agent to pull the luggage from one flight and load into another.

In another incident, I had a tech support issue so I called the tech support line, only to talk with half trained technicians who kept giving me different answers for the same issue, a very simple problem that kept going on week after week which eventually took less than one minute to fix.

If these customer support representatives were told in their training that once they take an ownership of an issue, they must follow it through until it has been resolved, they would have paid better attention to the customer who is waiting on the other side of the line and they could have save their companies time and money.

Finish what you have started and follow through with your commitments and you will see how success will follow.

Stick to your company’s policy

One of the most important parts of successful management is knowing that your employees respect your company’s policy. The Management would get a great deal of respect and support from the staff members if it sticks to the company policy in a time of crisis.

I have worked at companies where the management would make frequent changes to the company’s policy; employees wouldn’t know what to expect if they violated the company’s policy.

Not having a clear policy and sticking to it will lead to:

1- Degrading job performance since employees will have no clear policy to guide them, they will not know how to re-act in certain situations.
2- Confused clients, not having clear policy in matter such as (invoicing, returns, due dates, etc.) will confuse the clients and it will lead to a poor relations with them
3- Legal complications since not having clear policy on various issues can be used against the company in a case of employee-management dispute
4- Bad publicity for the company, since not having clear policy will make the management and the company look as if they don’t know what they are doing

In my current job, I am facing this issue daily, our company still doesn’t have a clear policy regarding its various dealings, I am working on writing a clear and concise policy.

Not having clear policy is costing our company, on the few issues that I was able to come up with clear policy, performance and customer satisfaction really improved.

One of the fundamental parts of running a good business is to have a clear vision and a good company policy that support the vision.

Do you turn off your computer at night?

As in IT consultant, I am sure you were asked this question many times “Should I turn my computer off at night or when I am not suing it or should I leave it on?”

I think the world is divided on this issue, some tech would tell you to turn if off and other would say, including myself, if you are a heavy computer user, never turn it off.

Turning the computer on and off each time would wear out its components, just like a car, if you turn it off each time you stop at the red light, you would harm the engine and other components.

But now, there is the issue of reducing energy use and green IT, is it better to turn off the computer when is not in use, or is it better to put it on standby mood or sleep mood? What would consume less energy? And if we have hundreds of computers, how much energy we would save verses how much tear and wear these computers would suffer for each start up procedure?

I don’t know the right answer, but I leave my laptop on most of the time, I still believe that power on procedure or start up takes a lot of energy to complete.

Pay to get the best employees

One of the greatest challenges that face small businesses and sometimes even the larger corporate world is unskilled or under qualified labor force.

I have worked and visited few countries in the past 12 months from the US to India to Saudi Arabia to Qatar. As a young graduate, I started my career with a small company in TX, USA, most of the labor force of that company consisted of young graduates with very limited experience. The company strategy was, as most small businesses do, is to hire young workers or workers with limited experience to cut costs. The end results were disastrous, the company was not able to carry on with its obligations, many deliverables didn’t meet client expectations and most projects ran over budget and the end result was “a bankrupted company.”

What made me write about this subject is my current experience. Right now I am working in the Area between Saudi Arabia, Dubai and Qatar, this area known locally by “The Arabian Gulf.” Because of the rising oil prices, governments here are spending billions of dollars in all areas of developments, which is great, but most projects depends heavily on cheap labor brought in from South Asia. As I live in this area, I see why the development over the past 20-30 years has been slow although billions of dollars were spent on thousands of projects, the main reason for that is the total dependency on cheap labor, most projects were not executed properly because of lake of experience, many projects were done over and over.

The management tip here is “don’t really on cheap labor; it will cost you down the road.”

Smart management not cheap management

As business managers, we all care about reducing costs and maximizing profit, we look for ways to acquire assets at the lowest possible cost. One of my clients who I do consulting work for have the habit of buying used supplies including computers. He gives me a lot of work trying to fix his network that runs on old used computers. I asked him many times why he keeps buying old computers while by spending few hundreds extra dollars he can get himself new computers? He said “I run an insurance company and most of the time my staff uses the computers only to fill forms online, I don’t need new computers with extra features that I will never use.”

I understand his reasoning, but I also understand that old machines will keep breaking and his maintenance bill will keep going up.

This client has many offices that I do network and computer maintenance work for, so one day I told him “lets start buying new computers for one of your offices and see how this will reduce your maintenance cost”, he agreed and we got new computers for that particular office, and the results amazed him, his maintenance and network support calls for that office went to almost zero, and he was able to recover the cost of the new computers from the saving he made by not losing work hours due to network down time and not having to pay for network troubleshooting.

At my current consulting job, we have the same problem, some off brand computers that breaks every few days and not reliable web hosting company for our e-mail services. Now again, I am starting to clean up this company and show the management how they can save by investing in good equipment and reliable services, even if the cost is bit high, but it will pay-off later.

Teaching quality management in schools

As I continue with my traveling, I keep asking myself the same question over and over “why people can not use simple quality management skills to improve their lives?” I am not talking here about quality management at corporate level, no I am talking about quality management in everyday life, how people can use simple life management skills to relief their sufferings.

Why people cannot understand that by respecting traffic laws, they will get to their destinations faster and with less energy used. Driving in some cities in the developing world is a nightmare, a daily struggle for the commuters. No one respect traffic laws, no police or the police force is not sufficient to enforce traffic laws. As I commute daily in some of these cities I ask myself “why they cannot see what I can see? why they cant see the obvious?”

Struggling with traffic is only one of the difficulties people in major cities in the developing world face in their daily lives. Watching how people live in this part of the world, led me to make one conclusion, spending millions of dollars or even billions of dollars in projects to improve the lives of the people in the developing world will lead to limited results.

While in most of the developed countries, school age children learn the first basic skills in quality management, “to form lines, to respect traffic laws, to keep their school and neighborhood clean, to eat healthy food etc.”, I have never noticed these types of skills being taught at schools in developing countries, or at least even if these skills are taught to the children, they have no place to practice them nor they are encouraged by the outside world to practice these skills.

So the governments and people in general need to understand that to improve their quality of life, quality management skills must be start at early ages with school children and than it must be reinforced by the society at large. Spending billions of dollars in building better infrastructures must be accompanied by developing quality skills in school children.

Quality Management…..a hot filed in India

Before my current visit to India, I have read, as most of us, about the rapid growth of India. The mood here, for both government and people, is happy and optimistic. Development is taking place in every corner and people have more money to spend.
This is a great time for any consultant/firm looking for global opportunities to enter the Indian market.

I saw many opportunities within the service sectors that can be taken by even small firms:

1- Professional cleaning and sanitary services: in most places and cities that I visited in India, there is a huge problem with cleaning. Building and street cleaning is a major issue in India. The initial investment to start such a business is really small; the business blue print can be based on US cleaning services.
2- Independent technical support service: as the middle class grows in India, so does its purchasing power. The demand for computers and other electronic devices will be strong for years to come and with it will come the demand for quality customer and technical services. A vast and populous country such as India will offer limitless opportunities for all sizes of businesses, from small independent consultants to big service firms.
3- Educational consulting: again with the rapid growth of the middle class in India, the demand by parents to get their children the best education is at its peak in India. Most parents and perspective students are really not aware of education opportunities available to them.
These are few business opportunities I have noticed almost immediately while visiting India.