Design Quality
Design for quality is an essential adjunct to market research.Product, process and service designs are solutions to customer specifications, expressed preferences and desired intentions to delight. Taste, smell, feel, see and digest the difference in quality of a school cheese sandwich compared to a Tesco cheese sandwich, between a motorway meal and an Albert Roux meal. These can be all be defined in a design specification. The specification is essential in
- drawing up a contract for supply and
- ensuring that the goods are of merchantable quality in a contract of sale.
The customer who fails to draw up a clear design specification in a production contract for a marketing promotion video or construction of a new business software application is pursuing a dangerous and potentially very costly strategy. In drawing up the contract, the architect needs to understand the design specification,
- what type of contract is it - sales, manufacturing, consulting?
- who are the parties?
- what national/regional regulations must be satisfied
- what is the detailed specification of the product or service
- what are the contract volume and delivery dates?
- what inspection and testing standards are expected
- if there are stages of completion, what are the deliverables at each stage, what are staged prices and what conditions must obtain for a payment to be withheld or a penalty to be applied?
- what variations/changes in the life-time of product/service delivery will incur extra charges?
- what are the critical success factors for quality of inputs, processes, outputs and quality assurance/control?
Knowledge is essential for good design - knowledge of
- the inputs (available resources: financial, material, human, mechanical and logistical)
- the processes available and experience with these
- characteristics of the outputs (customer preferences and requirements from customer/market research)
- systems of process control
The producer/supplier and the client/customer/buyer need to work through and agree every element of the specification and interface of the relationship. A simple example of an interface is whether or not and how a customer may return goods. More complex examples are client inspections of work in progress and regular weekly meetings to discuss problems and their resolution.
It can be difficult to ensure unequivocal, shared understanding of the functionality and final appearance of some products/services. They may be entirely new e.g. a new aircraft or house or advertising package. This it is not until the final product is completely built and tested (commissioning) that everything will be known about the product. This is why prototyping (mock-ups and models) and trials are essential. These front-load the development costs but this preparatory and conmmissioning work will usually reap dividends in terms of later customer dissatisfaction and avoidance of re-working costs.
With the client fully participating in requirements definition and the evaluation of models/prototypes, the conceptual understandings, constraints and parameters which govern quality performance outcomes can be defined.
- Doing things Right First Time
- Doing the Right Things Wrong
- Doing the Wrong Things Right
Does the final product/service customer received and experienced by the customer (customer perception vs. contract clauses and conformance to requirements) meet the design specification? Does the customer's "total" experience delight? If not, which parameters were not met? If the customer experiences poor quality (the deliverable), this cannot be recouped. (B) and (C) above reflect a "inspect out " approach to quality. (A) is the "zero defects or process oriented" approach. For systematic quality assurance, conformance checks must be built in to achieve delivery - according to plan.
BOLA is maintained and developed by Chris Jarvis