The Next Leap in Productivity: What Top Managers Really Need to Know about Information Technology

4.24. Improve Quality by Improving Productivity

Remember, if you want to improve quality, you need to focus on productivity. You need to determine how to automate and thus remove repetitive and mundane tasks so that people can work smarter as well as faster. People perform mundane, repetitive tasks poorly but excel at creative ones. In fact, most of the mistakes people make are with repetitive tasks. By automating such tasks, you improve quality.

Managers often push quality initiatives without really considering how they affect productivity. They take for granted that quality increases productivity, but that is usually not the case.

If you want to introduce a quality initiative into the organization, you need to figure out how to do it in a way that does not disrupt the normal workflow. Otherwise, there is little chance of its resulting in a sustainable quality process. That is why initiatives like the Capability Maturity Model (CMM) and International Organization for Standardization (ISO) 9000 often fail: they create too much extra work and, as a result, they are rejected.

If you implement ADP, you actually get very high levels of CMM and ISO just by implementing commonsense procedures. It is very similar to normal manufacturing. People focus on increasing productivity, use automation to get more out of people on the production line, and thus improve quality.