From Traditional Quality to Value Enabler - A Paradigm Shift

Service Knowledge Base held a session on Traditional Quality to Value Enabler on 29th April. Featured speaker was Parvathy Satish, Mavenir Systems Group Director

The speaker began the session by taking attendees through the evolution of quality from Quality Control to Internal Auditing to ISO Certification, and from Continuous Improvement to Delivery Lead, Operational Excellence to Program Management and Operations

After that, Core Quality was explored, including top-down, leadership mandates, setting up objectives, compliance & effectiveness, management reviews, and audits & certifications.

As Business Priorities Change, maintaining and continuous investing becomes a challenge. It becomes Second Nature to work better, quality is an afterthought

What is the best way for Quality to renew this? Managing Change through the Quality Team, moving beyond ISO Certification and Compliance to help others succeed is one way. Start small and involve all stakeholders. Manage Change Management Initiatives as projects, measure metrics. Scale once benefits are visible and buy-in is achieved

Speaker shared examples of what Quality can do to enable value? Facilitating SWOT Analysis for Business & Technology Teams, Setting Priorities & Objectives based on Customer Feedback and Improving Employee Productivity by setting time and agenda for meetings. It may be assigned by senior management or self-assigned

This is best achieved by Quality due to its eye for improvement, knowledge of what is happening in the organization, and role as the organisation's eyes and ears

To accomplish this, quality personnel need to be able to adapt, have learnability & be open to trying anything different, ready to learn on "GO" & deliver. Quality should understand how business models work

What is the best way to transition to this? You can begin by asking for the role, asking how you can add value, establishing rapport with new stakeholders, and identifying people willing to take risks

You should upskill/reskill during the transition process, give yourself time to learn a new way of working, its tools, and domain, think your work enables the organisation, take stock, and finally give yourself a pat on the back. Allow things time to get in shape without fretting, taking pressure or being too hard on yourself

The importance of quality goes beyond sponsorships. Quality involves business, finance & people, making the right choices at the right time, ROI, margins, the ability to build competencies, the number of iterations a release needs, the number of customer deployments or returns, and the transparency of the organization in terms of data and information management. Speaker highlighted these as key takeaways from value enabled thinking

In closing, the speaker highlighted new areas where quality can add value, such as cybersecurity, regulatory compliance, sustainability reporting, and intelligent analytics.